The Strange Death of Journalism with Batya Ungar-Sargon [S4 Ep.10]

Hip-hop is always called out to any qualities in America, but even within it, nothing's ever been equal. This season, Lauda the Narayat Podcast is tackling sexism, homophobia, and all the unwritten rules that hold the entire culture back. Listen to the Lauda the Narayat Podcast from NPR Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever felt that your life has no meaning? Do you wake up in the morning dreading the day ahead? Do you feel lost? I'm Tanner Campbell, host of the podcast, Practical Stoicism. Every Saturday morning, I explore the ancient texts of Stoicism, and derive from them practical takeaways that anyone can implement to live a more contented and fulfilling life. Search your podcast-listening app of choice for Practical Stoicism, and join me each week to explore Stoicism practically and discover how it can help you live better. ♪♪♪♪ ♪♪♪♪ ♪♪♪♪ ♪♪♪♪ ♪♪♪♪ ♪♪♪♪ ♪♪♪♪ The track you just heard is an excerpt from my brand new album, Amor Sati. You may remember the music video as I put out last year, blasphemy, straight A's, and forward. This new album features all three of those singles plus seven brand new songs. Now, I put my all into this project and it's a real representation of my passion for music. So, if you want to listen to the whole thing, click in the description, or search cold X-man on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you listen to music. Now, back to the podcast. ♪♪♪ Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Batya Angar Sargon. Batya is a deputy opinion news editor at Newsweek and a columnist at Compact magazine. Before that, she was the opinion editor of The Ford. In this episode, we talk about tribalism and individualism. We talk about how journalism and media became woke. We talk about the shift from journalism being a working class profession to a profession for elites and the consequences of that shift. We talk about gender ideology, and at the end, Batya turns the tables on me and asks me several interesting and probing questions about myself and about my audience. So, without further ado, Batya Angar Sargon. ♪♪♪ Okay, Batya. Thanks so much for coming on my show. Thank you so much for having me. So, we're going to talk about your book, Bad News, and your analysis of the current state of journalism, how journalism has changed from a working class profession that understood the poor in the working class to an elite profession that looks down on the working class, that adopts a relatively niche ideology that I would call wokeness. We're going to get into all of that, but before we do, I'm curious, I don't know much about your background. How did you come to care about this issue of journalism and its capture by elites and what was your path to get to that topic? Well, I don't know that I cared deeply about that topic when I first started writing about it. I initially wanted to write a different book. I had been doing a lot of reporting from the South during the Trump years and as like a leftist and a liberal and good standing, I had been very surprised by what I found, which was just Americans were just a lot less divided than the media had led me to believe. And I wanted to write a book about that called A More Perfect Union about how Americans are much more united than we are divided over at least the great values that this nation was founded on. And I couldn't sell it. I wrote the proposal and I shopped it around, and I was told again and again by editors that there was simply no market for a book about American unity. And finally, a very kind editor sat me down and said to me, you keep telling me that we're less divided than I think. Why don't I know that then? Why do I think we're so divided? Maybe you should write that book. And I think that's the book I ended up writing, which is why we have such a flawed view of America, at least in our sort of little corner of the world, that is so unrepresentative of where this country is really at. I think that's really what bad news really was. Yeah, the dirty secret of publishing is that it's difficult to sell a book that is not divisive, right? Because what grabs attention, especially in the modern age, is anything that pisses off at least one side, right? And so organizations that try to unite people, I think of something like Braver Angels, my friend John Wood Jr., who's a great guy, works at Braver Angels and tries to unite people left and right, and does put on great events. But it seems unfortunately there is a ceiling on how popular such a project can get, because people, the market is hungry for the divisive. That's why Fox News and MSNBC do so well, and those will get into it, but those incentives, that huge beam of light of profit, pulling media organizations to one side or the other, pulling people and brands to one side or the other, has caused media to get more polarized. Okay, so let me ask you something about that though. Yeah. You are a famously calm, equanimious sort of person. So I think this is a really good question for you, especially. Like I get why divisiveness is sexy. Like I get why hating and like a certain kind of rage directed at other people. Like there's like a jouissance in that. You know, there's like something about that that's like I get why, especially people who have been wronged or feel that they've been wronged, right? So on the right, I would say a lot of that rage was kind of, you know, it baked into the Trump base, right, from the working class. And then of course baked into the elites who felt that their control over this country was threatened by this rising working class that sort of voted for Trump and had him rest power from them, which they thought was theirs. Like I can see at a human level, like that there's just a certain frison that comes from, you know, that kind of thinking, you know, as an editor writing headlines for pieces that I want people to click on because they're very good, I'll often think like, okay, how truly do I want to go with this headline? Like what is your take on how to create that kind of like sex appeal around common ground and unity and unification? Like it's a real problem, right? I'm sure your friend thinks about this all the time. Like what is your opinion on that? That is a very tough thing to do. I wish I could give you a good answer. I mean, for one thing, I would say the perception of me as a preternaturally calm person is mistaken. Oh really? Let's talk about that for a minute. Well, I think I present that way more than I actually am. I think it's just a matter of how much I convey with my face and with my tone, like how much of my inner emotions bleeds through into outer behavior. And I think ever since I was a kid, it's been like maybe less than normal. Do you remember a time where you made a decision? No, I've always been described as like a calm kid ever since I was conscious, like two years old. But you've always felt like a wealth of fiery emotion that you know or not. But is it a conscious effort to not let those out? No, no, I think it's just... It would never occur to you that that belongs in the public. No, I don't know. It's I think there is such a thing as more expressive and less expressive people by nature, right? So I think that I've learned through feedback of so many people telling me, oh you're so calm all the time. And then I compare that to my inner life and I'm like, what are you talking about? I was like, I had like road rage walking here because people were walking slow in front of me. I had like literal road rage and I wanted to punch somebody. But I think it just doesn't, it's probably genetic or so. I don't even know, it just doesn't translate. Well, your parents, was your mom and your, is your dad like, are they like that too? No, they're both very expressive. Do you have siblings? Yes. Are they like you are like your parents? My, my, yeah, my older, no, no, they're not like me. I don't think, I mean, maybe one is somewhat more like me. Are you the middle child? No, I'm the youngest. Oh. Do you believe the birth order stuff? Oh yeah, I'm one of six. Yeah. And it's like every single piece of it is accurate for every single one of my siblings. Is that right? So which one are you? I'm the second oldest, but I grew up in a very religious household and the oldest is a boy. So usually the oldest girl in the kind of community I grew up in ends up sort of raising the younger kids. Right. Developing that sort of ENFJ personality that's now like inescapable and plagues me. So that means you are more mature, more caretaking, more worrying about others. It means you're sort of oriented to tribe harmony, which is like the worst personality trait for a journalist because our job is to stir things up, tell the truth even when it's unpopular. I'm glad we're talking about this because one of the things I was worried about Coleman is that I was going to end up like spending the interview trying to make you angry just to test the comments I thought this is end up saying things that I'm not even sure I believe just to get a rise out of me. Yes. But now that I know that it's a textile, I won't. The world gets a rise out of me every day. It's just I don't show it much. Do you meditate a lot? I have. I've been on a lot of meditation retreats in my life. I haven't meditated daily and quite a while though. Yeah, but also you said from a young age, you remember being this way. It's so interesting. Yeah. Something else I wanted to ask you was something I think about a lot is this question of like racial belonging, racial pride. I think about a lot in the context of being Jewish. I think about it a lot in the context of talking to black friends about this question because I think for me that's such an interesting question for the kind. Part of this crucial black anti-wolk intelligentsia, the role that you guys are playing, I think really you saved us from the excesses of 2020, like just really not single-handedly, but the 10, 15, 20 of you in the public sphere. First of all, I'm curious if you agree with me. I feel very certain about that. But so to me, this question of okay, so what's first of all obvious and fascinating about this group is how different you all are in your views on many other things. This question of like, can you say we need to claim Dr. King's vision of a post racial society, an equal society, and a unified American society and still claim some kind of racial pride? Say no, but I still am proud to belong to this race. I'm still glad I'm part of this race. This race does have values or this culture has values that I'm proud of that I belong to. And I was wondering where you are on that, if you feel proud to be black, if you feel common cause with other young black men, or if you see yourself in that sort of more post racial way. Yeah, that's a good question. I think race pride is a consequence often of race victimization, usually groups that are told and treated violently and told that they're inferior or ugly, often develop a counter narrative where actually black is beautiful, black power, I'm black and I'm proud. All of those slogans that we're familiar with come out of that it's a reaction to oppression basically. And I'm curious what you think the history of Jewish victimization and oppression has done in terms of that narrative in the Jewish community. So that all makes sense to me. My attitude since I was a kid was that I took these slogans such for granted. I had no insecurity about being black. I was always, I never thought black people were stupid because I was always the smartest, almost always the smartest kid in my class and my classes were probably 70% white. So my experience growing up was often being the smartest person in the class and being black. That's awesome. I felt I never felt that black was ugly. I never wished to look different. I always thought that I like looked good in my black skin. I had a good self esteem as a kid. And so when I heard people say these slogans black is beautiful, et cetera, it all felt unnecessary and it all felt like protesting too much. And that's not the case for all black people. So I think, but whenever I hear people say that I feel they are overcompensating for some feelings of insecurity, which have a historical context and so forth. Ultimately, the goal should be to not need to say those things because you take them such for granted that you can be beautiful and black, you can be smart and black, et cetera, that black people have contributed much of value to not just America but the world to take those things such for granted that such that they don't need to be said is in my view the goal. And that's the reason why I don't say them and I don't resonate with them. As far as post racial Martin Luther King ethic, I mean Martin Luther King said, let us look forward to the day where no one says black power, where no one says white power, but where we all talk about God's power, right? And the power of the whole human race. That to me is the proper goal of our discussions and the way we bring up the next generation. That should be the North Star that guides our debates on this issue. And then the question is how we get there, which people may disagree on, but some wouldn't even concede that that is actually the proper goal. Some would say that that's a naive goal, that we will be siloed into races psychologically until the end of time and it's pointless to try and achieve a kind of transracial human ethic. I don't think that that's the case. I think and many parents can attest to this. Parents that grew up in diverse towns, kids naturally are not very race conscious at all unless they're taught to be. They tend to easily and effortlessly form deep friendships with people across races. People marry and form families with people across races all the time. If the most intimate of all relationships is possible across race, I hold out hope that our society can push more and more in that direction. I beautifully put. Thank you. I'm curious what are your thoughts on that question? Because the Jewish community has a lot of ethnic group consciousness as well. Yeah, it's true. Although the more religious you get, the less it's based in ethnic continuity, I would say. And it's more based in the practice. So the extreme case for this is, so I'm quite religious, but there are Hasidic, Satmar, Jews who wouldn't consider me, they consider me barely Jewish, right? Because I'm not as observant as they are. I do think that there is a contradiction between saying, oh, I should feel proud of or ashamed of what some random Jewish person is doing and saying, no, we're one nation under God and that is extremely important. I personally feel I belong to two nations, like the Jewish nation and the nation of America. And I don't really see a contradiction there, but I think racial pride is questionable because, first of all, I think we all instinctively understand, you know, white racial pride is bad, right? But so if you're going to deny it to one group, it's wrong to then say, but this other group can have a good say exactly like you said, but they've been denied the right to feel that same pride for so long, but you don't right the wrong by replicating it. So I do feel like ambivalent about about, I feel very proud of, I don't know if maybe proud is the wrong word. I feel very attached to being a Jew, but I think when I start to interrogate, is it right to feel ethnic pride? Is it right to feel racial pride? I mean, it may be the only thing that binds you to another person of the same race is that made up concept that we all understand is like playing has the potential to play, has played and is increasingly playing a divisive role, destructive role, role that takes us away from being able to see ourselves as all created equally before God. So it's definitely something that I think about a lot. Zoraneel Hurston in her memoir. And it pains me that Zoraneel Hurston is so often taught, but like this part of her isn't taught. She has a whole section against race pride, making that exact argument, right? If you're going to feel, feel proud of your race, whether you are black, white, Jewish, Hispanic, et cetera, the flip side of the coin is you should feel shame, right? When when someone of your race does something stupid or harmful in the world, that should reflect badly on you. And I'm not sure that I want to take that on at all. I have to say in that context, I mean, something that somebody got in trouble for saying in Jewish context is this country has always been just so non-anti-Semitic, like to its bones, you know? And the best example of this from recent years was, you know, Bernie Madoff, right? If that had happened in Europe, there would have been a pogroms. I mean, there would have been a spike of just anti-Semitic hatred because this very obviously Jewish person committed this horrific heinous financial crime that impacted so many people, right? And like embodying this like stereotype, right? That would have immediately signaled to, you know, this continent that's steeped in Jewish blood, like an opportunity to once again, you know, for people who are not not just on the margin of sight, but that sentiment, which sort of seeps more mainstream. And there was none of that here. I mean, none that I saw, none that I was aware of. You mean in your lifetime? In America, because some was there like pre-World War II? No, yes. There was quite a bit of anti-Semitism here. For sure. I mean, the rise of anti-Semitism started during the Gilded Age because there was a class of elites, a class of elites, and a class of elites often produces, you know, racial tension, anti-Semitism for sure. I mean, restricted clubs, et cetera. And an after-war too, yeah. Yes. But I mean, even that it's, first of all, you cannot compare it to the way this country has treated black America and you just can't. I mean, there's no comparison whatsoever. I don't know any Jew who tries to make that comparison. Even today, when anti-Semitism is rising on the far left and the far right, it's still so marginal. I mean, you would never have a movement that actively embraced it consciously, right? The funny thing about anti-Semitism right now is that both sides claim the other side is anti-Semitic, right? And deny it's on their own side, right? There's never a sense of like, this is something actually we should embrace because it gets the populace riled up or whatever. You know, it's just so not in the bloodstream of this country. And I think a lot of Jews feel very grateful about that. And it does actually, and I think very guilty for that good fortune, especially looking at the distinction between how Americans, especially, you know, second half of the 20th century, were treated and black Americans were treated. Yeah. Does the American people like to be the best-classed on food? The latest news on online dating is on online business. So I do want to pivot to some of the topics of your book. And this is something that is perpetually in the conversation on Twitter. And it's a huge topic of conversation in the national discourse and has been for the past, let's say, I would say eight years or so since, even since before Trump was elected, which is the, what is sometimes called media bias. Although that's not quite the way you frame it in your book that, I don't think that phrase appears very much in your book. But many times it's just people wonder when they read the New York Times why it seems to have such a left-wing bias. And it's had a liberal bias for a long time. And it didn't bother so many people in 2005 or even 2010, at least not that I can recall. But somewhere starting around, you located around 2011 in your book. I've seen others locate it more starting around 2013. There started to be an increasing orthodoxy, woke orthodoxy at a newspaper like the New York Times, which then bled into MSNBC, CNN, etc. Where you would just see the number of mentions of something like racism and white supremacy and systemic oppression go up by a factor of like 10 per unit time or more, right? A massive increase in concern with these kinds of topics. So I guess one place to start is what happened there. What happened starting around the early 2010s that, in my view, probably peaked in about 2020 or 2011. That transformed news that had a slight liberal bias into news that was drenched in woke terminology. Right. So it was two factors. So journalists had always been more liberal than the American population at large. Just the kind of person who goes into the industry. Yeah, why is that exactly? Well, it's somebody who wants to fight for the little guy, right? Like that was always the character trait of who became a journalist. Journalism used to be a working class trade. So it was sort of like being a cop or being, you know, working in a factory, right? It was a high working class trade. Journalists lived in working class neighborhoods. They made working class wages. And so they saw themselves as answerable to their neighbors, to other working class Americans. So, you know, like the typical person who would become a journalist would be like the kid who sat in the back of the classroom, like cracking wise about the teacher, who was always getting kicked out of class, like super anti-authoritarian. And maybe was so anti-authoritarian, like that they couldn't go to the factory, you know, because they weren't good at taking orders. They couldn't become a cop because they hated our authorities. They become a journalist. They go to Washington and they meet famous people and politicians and they'd give them a hard time, just like they gave their teacher a hard time, you know? And they'd give them a hard time on behalf of their fellow working class Americans, because that's who they saw themselves as answerable to. They would go home to their communities and go to church with these people. And you know, they saw themselves as outside of power looking in and demanding justice. That was the sort of the character of a journalist from much of the, you know, certainly, you know, the 19th century when American journalism really got off the ground as a populist revolution. And then, you know, up in through the middle of the last century, what changed was college, you know, which is the defining line on in so many questions, socioeconomic questions in America, just dividing people who are upwardly mobile from people who are downwardly mobile. So you know, it sort of started slowly, but it really took off with JFK, who was this kind of upwardly mobile, educated. It was a new kind of elite. And when he married Jackie Oh, he united this kind of new meritocratic, intellectual elite with the kind of old school elite, right? And created this new glamour around meritocracy, right? Now, he had worked on the Harvard Crimson when he was at Harvard, which was the paper, but he would never have dreamed of becoming a journalist because in the 50s, it was still considered a low status job. And he was, he had to say it's much higher. But what happened shortly after that was the whole Watergate scandal and the Watergate scandal made journalism look really glamorous, not just the scandal itself, but the way it was immortalized in film. It made it seem like if you were kind of plucky, smart, Alec, right, you could bring down the most unpopular and most powerful person on the planet. It just made it seem really sexy and really glamorous and really high status. So higher class elites started to go into journalism and which meant that people who were hiring journalists could then demand an even higher education and even higher status elites, right? And those people, of course, demanded higher salaries. While all that was happening, both parties had sort of committed to the knowledge industry, right? So as this revolution, the status shift is happening in the journalism industry itself in the 70s and 80s and the 90s, you started to see the rise of globalization, the kind of offshoring of good working class jobs. And that would have been like the main story for a journalism class that was working class, right? If their neighbors were all suddenly losing their jobs, you know, these jobs they thought they were going to have forever that gave them, you know, working class Americans a solidly middle class life. If they had been in those communities to see that happen, that it wouldn't have happened. But they were no longer in those communities because we were undergoing a great sorting where people in the knowledge industry were upwardly mobile, just like journalists more generally. So they were sort of coalescing into these much smaller, more elite, more expensive neighborhoods. Our neighborhoods now in America, our cities are more segregated by class than they are even by race, although most places, there's a huge overlap between those two things. So all of this is happening. There's this huge status revolution happening, you know, 1930, only one in three journalists had a college degree today. It's probably closer to 98%. The majority have a graduate degree, but you could do a graduate degree doesn't make you better interviewing people or telling them truth. It probably makes you worse at it, actually. So 98% of journalists have a college degree. So it was 92%, like five years ago. By now I'm sure it's probably not. I mean, I can't remember the last time I met a journalist. I think it's still the case that fewer Americans in general have a college degree than don't. It's about 36% have a college degree. Right. And another 10% have some college, but not a degree. So, and I'll just briefly say, so that this whole status revolution among who the journalists are, they were always more liberal. But when they were working for, and this is, you know, from the industry point of view, when they were working for mass publication outlets who made their money off of how many readers they could get across the country, their bosses would rein them in because it didn't pay to have your journalist writing about the news in a way that just only 50% of Americans could read it, right? Most towns were one paper towns. And if you could let your journalist follow their natural leftist intuitions and report the news from a leftist point of view, but then you'd only get 50% of the potential readers. If they reported the news straight, and you had a bat balanced editorial page, you could get everybody, right? So there was this pressure from the industry to report the news straight and to have that kind of objectivity, at least in the second part of the century. And that changed with digital media because with digital media, what most outlets are doing now is they're not going for that mass audience, that broad audience. They've identified a certain niche that they want. So it now pays from the industry point of view to let the journalists follow their natural intuitions. Now, if those journalists were still working class, those intuitions would take them to report the news from a working class point of view, but they're not. They're part of the elites, the kids you went to Columbia with, like that woke mentality is a product of an elite college education. It operates the same way that an accent in England does. It operates to tell everybody else that you had this rarefied elite education. The thing is, is that that's who the New York Times wants as its readers as well, right? So it's now hiring those journals who know how to talk to their neighbors now, who are corporate lawyers and psychoanalysts, right? People who have that same education. And so the industry is now built on trying to nail that rich niche audience rather than get the mass audience. And so the industry has, like the bosses at the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, the heads have said to their journalists, follow that woke avenue because the people who love that stuff are the people we want. That's who we want. So we can tell our advertisers, we have those rich leftist elites who live in Park Slope, who live in these nice neighborhoods. So it was a status revolution among journalists that met an industry that was niche-ifying in terms of whose ad dollars they wanted. And that's how you got wokeness. Yeah, that's a really interesting story. There's a lot to unpack in that. One is the transition from local news to national news. Yeah. I'm even, I guess, barely old enough to remember a time when I felt like my town's local newspaper was pretty relevant and got the newspaper every day physically as a kid. And I would get the Montclair newspaper and the New York Times and sometimes the Wall Street Journal, I guess. But it was like, people really paid attention to the local paper. The local's paper still kind of existed, although was already probably in decline by the late 90s and early 2000s. One potential explanation is, is it the case that journalists used to start out at local papers and be expected to have that local paper experience for a few years before jumping to a national paper like the New York Times or something like that. And that experience of doing the dirty work of just like reporting on kind of apolitical stories in a town context where you're not going to get a bunch of clicks or a bunch of praise or whatever. You're not going to blow up on Twitter over your coverage of the story, but you might get yelled at by your editor if it's unbalanced. That there is no longer really a pipeline of journalists that have that gritty experience and training and kind of like patterning to report a certain way. Is that a part of the story? Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah. So it used to be you would come up through the local news, right? You'd be in a neighborhood that maybe you grew up in, right? Or somewhere close by and your boss would be somebody who didn't have a college degree, right? And then, you know, at some point, eventually, you know, you would get to a larger regional paper and then maybe the New York Times would notice you. Now, if you look at who the New York Times is hiring, they're hiring from Vox, right? They're poaching from, you know, these kind of, you know, outlets that are created for, you know, upwardly mobile, upper middle class millennials. Since people that have basically gone from college to... Exactly. They've never been in non-woke waters. Maybe college to a journalism school. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And also, yeah, the role of digital news in this seems big as well. I mean, I've...you know that old movie slash...is it a play to the producers? Yeah. So, there's this moment in that movie where one of the main characters...and I have no idea why I remember this. It's so funny what you remember. There's a moment where he says, you can actually...you can make more with a flop than with a hit, right? And for some reason, they do the math. Like, they can make more with a bad play or bad musical than with a good one. And I think about that line a lot when I read articles today. Like, I read the article that is so bad and the headline is like so offensively bad. So you listed a bunch in the first chapter of your book, which are like during 2021, you basically could...you could literally say anything about no matter how mean, but if you said it about white women, it was totally funny. Great. So true. And people pretended that this wasn't misogyny by another...by other means. But you could just say like the worst, most misogynist shit. So true. As long as you put white in front of women, everyone was just on board like...including white women paradoxically. And there are just like a million headlines like these, which I'm not even sure would be written today because of things have calmed down a bit. But then I think about what is the model of digital news as opposed to print news? Like, if it was 1995 and I wasn't on the internet and I got my physical newspaper all day and I saw an article that was like, white women are the worst, right? Like New York Times headline. I would be like, that seems really strange. And then I read the opinion and it's just like gobbledygook of postmodern language. I would begin to consider unsubscribing from that newspaper, especially if that sort of thing showed up a lot. That would not be good for their business model. And today, because ad revenue is a portion of a lot of these newspapers, merely to read the article is to partly finance what you're reading. So like, it doesn't actually matter. Obviously, the New York Times still makes, I think, most of its money through subscription. I wonder if you know the breakdown. Yeah. So they're making about 10 million a year now, I believe, last time I checked from their subscriber base, which they're very excited about. And I mean, that's why everything is so woke. I mean, because you're saying like, oh, they're right, like, you know, white women, you know, I think the headline from the book was when black people are in pain, white women join book clubs, like that kind of thing, right? Just just pure, disgusting, ridiculous, but like they know their audience. Their audience, like that headline was created for, you know, the Upper West Side, right? Like that's, they know who their audience is. So there's 10 million Americans who want to read that kind of thing. I don't know how many more there are, right? I mean, and we know that 6% of Americans are present. So they have 10 million subscribers. Yes, they still do have some ad revenue. I think it's between 10 and 30% is ad revenue, but they're trying to, they figured out how to rely less on ad revenue, which is just on the internet, it never caught up to ad revenue and print. It just never was able to catch up to that. So they've switched to the subscriber membership base, which is, yeah. Right. So I guess that sort of invalidates my point, but I wonder whether ad revenue has made this at all worse just because, you know, they don't care whether you click on this article because you like it or you hate it, right? Well, so companies are very, I mean, as Elon Musk is figuring out right now, they're very sensitive. They don't want their product appearing in an ad right under, for example, a swastika, you know, turns out. And I think that if the model was still based on ads, I think a lot of this, a lot of the woke excesses maybe wouldn't have, wouldn't have been as bad. Yeah. I mean, they, so the advertisers want to know that your subscriber base is rich, but for like most of like, you know, this is at least second half of the 20th century, the New York Times subscriber base was already, you know, well to do over educated, over credentialed elites who made, you know, much more than the average American. But what was in vogue then for that type of person was a balanced report. Like they didn't want to read a newspaper that they knew only 9% of its readership were Republicans. That's true today of the New York Times. That would have been embarrassing to its readership 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago to go to the squash club and not be able to talk about the news with your squash partner who was maybe a Republican, right? We've now, you know, the New York Times sort of abandoned that model and said, look, we're going to lean into this subscriber base. And it's just so funny. They just, you know, this week, there's a new mass letter being signed by all these celebrities. I'll talk to you about it. I think we're talking about the same open letter about the New York Times' cover of trans issues. Yeah. So it's so funny. Yeah. Well, so it's just, I thought it was so amazing because the last time this happened was in 2020 over the Tom Cotton Notbed, right? During the racial moral panic, they published an op-ed by Tom Cotton that reflected the views of 60% of Americans and 40% of black Americans that if the local police could not quell rioters and looters, they, you know, the Trump should send in the National Guard during the George Floyd riots. He was actually, Tom Cotton's op-ed was actually more moderate than 60% of Americans and 40% of black Americans who were like, no, no, no, it's time to send them in full stuff. His editor had him add in a little bit of qualification, saying, you know, look, if they can't quell it. Actually, I don't know if the editor added that or if it's in the book, whether they added that or if he had that in the initial one. And then there was this, you know, this huge moral outrage started by a group of non-journalists but support staff at the New York Times who were in, you know, sort of digital news roles. And then of course, all of the white staff, you know, the high profile started, they all started tweeting the same thing, which was, you know, running this op-ed puts black New York Times journalists at risk, which like nobody thought was true at the time, right? But they, but if you didn't tweet it, there was just immense social pressure to join on in this. There was immense social shaming naming. James Bennett, the op-ed editor, head of the section, lost his job. There were struggle sessions. I mean, just the climate was just like insane. And then there was a huge letter signed by 6,000, I think people, you know, demanding justice on behalf, you know, for the crime of having, I mean, it's op-ed. Two years later, they've moved on, you know, they've moved on from black issues to trans issues. There's a new letter out now, decrying the Times's coverage of basically what's called gender affirming care by the left and what's called child mutilation by the right. The New York Times has taken over the last few months a surprisingly balanced view on these issues, giving detransitioners a voice, giving voice to the many, many doctors who believe that this is deeply harmful for children, that children cannot consent to being infertile and never having an orgasm, like for the rest of their lives. They don't know what they're consenting to, their brains are not formed down. So as a result yesterday, there was this new letter, an open letter signed by all of the usual suspects from, you know, the New York Times and from Hollywood, et cetera, decrying this coverage. And I think it's so interesting that they moved on from racial issues to the trans issue. It's, I think that the reason that the moral panic over 2020 is over is because it became so clear how little buy-in to the woke worldview, there is from the black community. They are just so clear how distant the views of these over-credentialed elites are from the vast majority. I'm talking 80, 85% of black Americans. I mean, pull out the poll. I think that's clear to them. I mean, I've been making this point for three years now and I tend to make it to the kinds of people that are receptive to hearing it. But my sense is that, you know, when I was saying in 2020 that defund the police was extremely unpopular in the black community and all you had to do was look at a Gallup poll to see that. Gallup poll's done during 2020, right? During the height of... Or just like talk to, you know, walk into any barbershop, talk to any black cop, like... Yeah. Yeah. To me, I haven't noticed that that point is more widely known today than it was a few years ago. Maybe it is, but I haven't really seen that. I think it's become more clear. I mean, I get called racist less when I pointed out now than in 2020. And I will say also, there's a coming showdown between the black agenda and the trans agenda because black Americans are not bought into this. There's a new poll out of Pew showing that 66% of black Americans do not believe that you can be transgender. They believe that your gender is assigned at birth full stop. 66% which is higher than the number of Americans overall, which is just 60% who think your gender is assigned at birth full stop. So they totally reject two-thirds of black Americans, totally reject the view that you can be trans. Two-thirds of them, black Americans call themselves moderate or conservative. And I think it is absolutely unforgivable that the Republican party has not made more inroads with the black community given these views. But the Democrats, they're making a huge mistake in going all in on, you know, this kind of maximalist version of what it means to be trans and to have dignity as a trans person. And, you know, I'll just make one more point about polling. So 64% of Americans believe that transgender Americans should be treated with dignity and protected from discrimination and housing in the workforce. But if you ask them, should a trans girl be allowed, trans woman be allowed to compete on a girl's sports team, that support for that drops to below 20%. That's where Americans are. Everyone should be treated with dignity. Don't tell me that my eyes aren't seeing, don't tell me not to believe my own eyes, right? And I think the black community is very good at having that moral compass, you know, saying like, look, I'm not going to believe myself just because you're telling me to. And so it's very interesting to see this shift at the times or at the outrage at the times, right, from what it was in 2020 to now, you know, this outrage that you're even allowing in the views of 60% of Americans and 66% of black Americans, like you are not allowed to allow to print that in the New York Times or we in Hollywood are going to be outraged on behalf of this marginalized community. It's they're just just hemorrhaging credibility with all of this. Everybody who signs that letter is on board with the silencing of the skepticism of the average American, like how dare you? Like from your position of privilege in Hollywood, how dare you try to silence the views of 60% of Americans and 66% of black Americans? I mean, it's like, yeah, so the audacity was interesting about the letter to me. I mean, one thing that was interesting about it is they basically complained about two things. One, they complained about the amount that the New York Times has been covering the trans issue recently. Saying something like they've devoted 15,000 words to the issue of gender affirming care. As if this is a this is just on its face evidence of some kind of weird obsession that the New York Times has with this issue. And then their second complaint was all the coverage has been far right, right? And Jesse single is a Nazi, essentially. The first critique strikes me as so strange because newspapers often cover niche issues, you know, a lot, like dedicating 15,000 words to something that is only 1% of the population. That's not strange at all. That's been, you know, we cover issues in proportion, not just to how many people they affect, but in proportion to the controversy surrounding them. And it's a simple fact that, you know, whether to give, say, puberty blockers to a 12 year old that is asking for them and under what circumstances to give those puberty blockers and what are the long term consequences of that, that is an extremely live issue for people, even if it's only a few percent of teens that are going through this, the stakes are high because, you know, either one side believes that you are basically denying someone their civil rights. And it's basically Jim Crow 2.0, but on the gender issue. And another side thinks that you are medically intervening on children in a way that has long term consequences that we actually don't understand, right? And that are probably harmful. And that, like, Abigail Shrier and others have pointed out that there's a social contagion going on where maybe even the majority, especially of young women, of teenage women who believe that they have rapid onset gender dysphoria as opposed to the more stable kind of gender dysphoria that usually onsets younger in childhood, that a lot of that is a social contagion effect and it's not likely to remain with you your whole life and it's likely to desist on its own so that going on puberty blockers puts you on a path towards medical and surgical interventions, even that, like you said, can lead to infertility, lack of ability to have an orgasm and all the rest. And to do that to a child, even if they're asking for it, that's a very controversial decision. So I think it's a really strange argument to say you shouldn't talk, you should just talk about this issue less and also you should talk about it the way I want you to talk about it. Because I guarantee if the New York Times were parroting the far, far left trans activist talking points on this issue, they'd have no problem with the amount that it was covered, right? So it was a very strange letter and my prediction, though, is that because it's not 2020, I'm not sure, I think the Times may have a better ability to hold the line against the people complaining than they did in 2020. I'm curious if you agree with that. Yeah, definitely because all good people should still be bothered by what we did to black people. That's not dead and over. So when somebody can marshal that to win an argument, good people will say, how do I know I'm right about this? And if they don't have black friends to tell them, this is nonsense, how they're going to know that? And they probably don't have black friends because of how segregated this country still is from a class point of view. So you could see how, I think what they did was wrong and craven, but I could see how there was, of course, understand why it was so hard to resist. Also, if you're, say, a journalist in the New York Times, the black friends you do have are likely to be saying other journalists at the New York Times. From Harvard and Princeton and Yale and Yale. Race, independent of race, share that elite worldview. And I will say, not from the ADOS community oftentimes, which is another thing. Yeah, no, yeah. That's true. Right? So there's this stolen valor from people who we still, I mean, I know you don't support reparations. I do. We still do, oh, certain people, certain things that we never gave them. There's a, anyway, we don't have to get into that. So they are, it's like a lot of what they talk about when they talk about racism is nonsense, but there are still things that are bad. Like, we have my friend, Charles loves going to laugh. Did you ever say this? Like, Senator Tim Scott, he got a new car one year and claims he was pulled over 17 times. Like, that's not about class. That's about race. And we still do have this, you know, there are still certain things that remain. You can't say that black kids are getting the same educational opportunities as white kids. You just can't. You don't have to blame racism for that. But okay, but how are you fixing it? They're not. Nobody's fixing it. Nobody's invested in fixing that. So there is still like real problems. 70% of the victims of violent crime are black. Like, okay, maybe that's not because of racism, but okay. So what's it because of what are we doing to fix it? Nothing. Like, nobody isn't. So that stuff should weigh on us. And when the only black person, you know, writes a letter and says like, you running this off bed is the same as that. Now sign it, right? I could see why a person would not have the moral fortitude to say, no, I know where the racism is and I know I'm doing everything I can to fight it. And this is nonsense, right? With the trans issue, it's just like, I think that it's so much clearer. First of all, because so many gay people have come out and said this is an attack on being gay, like made persuasive arguments about how any girl now who shows the slightest bit of like tomboyness is slightest bit of masculinity, right? Which is like just a staple of how young girls who end up being gay learn about that, right? Now is being urged to transition to become a man. Like the world that they're envisioning is one in which there are no lesbians, right? Like there's no, and in fact, Iran does this. They transition people because they hate gayness because it's a fundamentalist country, right? Like that's, there's so many persuades and they're people. They would rather you be a straight trans man. Exactly. Exactly. So marry a woman and live, you know, nobody will know who will be the wise. Right. So I think that there is the misogyny of a lot of this is very clear to people. And it's just like the normy view. It's just harder to tell people like, you know, when I say look, I'm looking at the data, I'm talking to black people, I'm immersed in this topic. And I can tell you this is where the racism still is. This is where it's not this is where it's not like, I'm still a white person saying that. And like there's always, there should be a part of you that's like, are you sure? Are you sure? Because we know we have that history. So you better be sure there should be an element of skepticism there, you know? But when you're dealing with children, the are you sure needs to be on the other side of the medical intervention? Right. Like you should be more hesitant to surgically intervene on a 16 year old in a way that's going to permanently foreclose certain typical human opportunities to her, right? Like you should be really sure you're on the right side of that, right? You watch the video with George Floyd. You should be. So I mean, puberty blockers is a perfect case here, right? If we're going to say that this is totally a kosher thing to give to a 14 year old, 15 year old, we should have really, really solid long term meta analyses of several study double blind, the highest standard to say this is totally safe. The bone density issue is minimal. And that's not the case right now. And you see countries in Western Europe, the medical systems were so often told are at the vanguard of the world and the ones to be admired and the ones that make our American system look cave manish. We're seeing precisely those countries hitting the pause button on gender affirming care on puberty blockers in particular, because it seems like the evidence, the policy recommendations of trans advocacy groups have gotten far ahead of the evidence on puberty blockers. And that, and I'm sorry, it's a valid issue for the New York Times to write 15,000 words about I'm happy that the New York Times has presented this issue in a more balanced way. It has come too late, but it is welcomed nonetheless. And I think that I hope people talk about this more frankly. Hey, everyone, I'm Sean and I'm Joe and we are the hosts of the horse show. The show, DICEX mutilates dismember and butcher's all of your favorite and not so favorite cult classics and a horror movies. Join us every week as we pick another movie that we try desperately to find the good end while laughing our way through the bad. And there's a lot of bad. So join us every week on any of your favorite podcasting apps and services or find us at ihatehorr.com or on Instagram at ihatehorr. Adios. Yeah, I think I've been heartened to see that this does seem different than the racial issue. You know, what I was going to say before was, you know, when it comes to like police brutality, right, we know that there has been a racial component to that. So if you want to be Heather McDonald and spend your life finding the evidence that that's being mitigated in certain situations and that's that it's not because of that. Great. The burden of proof is on you, right, which I think I think she has actually done a really good job with, you know, marshalling that evidence, right? When it comes to something that's really new, clearly socially contagious, right, and being pushed only by a tiny fraction of elites, the burden of proof is on them to show that this is net that this is a civil rights issue. And I don't think they've met that burden. And part of the proof of that is if you look at how they treated Ron DeSantis's parental rights and education bill, right, they had to make up a new name for it that lied about it in order to sell it to the American people, right? They had to call it the don't say gay bill, even though literally what the bill says is you can't talk about gender and sex to my six year old, right? Like that's the bill, right? It's like, you got to wait till they're eight to tell them we're having sex with, right? They had to make up this new name because they knew that if they accurately represented what was in the bill, if Americans actually knew what was in it the way that most Floridians do, it would get 60% support from Democrats, right? Which is indeed what it got. So I think that seeing that you need to misrepresent something in order to get people to your side, it's kind of a tell, I think a really powerful one. So in your book, you talk about one thing I found interesting in the way you framed this issue was the New York Times, like many outlets, has found a niche, a niche or a niche audience. That is actually a wider feature of the content landscape, I think, where we used to have a situation where there were how many channels, there were like 13 channels basically, and all of them had to have content that was palatable enough for the whole family to watch. Families were often of mixed politics. I think one major trend just in content and multimedia content over the past 50 years has been the nicheification, the bubbleification of everything, which is to say content has become more and more targeted for smaller and smaller audiences that feel more passionate about the content. I think that's true of Netflix shows, that's true of, I mean, just like how many show, it's probably true of movies as well. How many shows today versus 50 years ago are watched by a large percentage of people? I think it's just a fewer number full stop. Well, my favorite show, The Bachelor, is still watched by many people. Well, yeah, I'm sure it is. But yeah, no proof for this. Yeah. The Bachelor equivalent in 1960 was probably watched by twice as well. There was this great short video on Twitter on a, is it Sunday that Game of Thrones or the house of dragons was playing? Yes. And it was this, it looked like one of these really nice buildings in Manhattan and somebody was standing outside filming and you could see that like every apartment in this like really nice upscale Manhattan building was watching because the, you could hear the credits. Yeah, you could see the credit, like just the blue light like in the exact same, right? It was just when the show was starting and it was like, yeah, I mean, that's what I would argue is like this nicheification is happening along class lines, not along political lines, but there is a superimposition of class and politics because of this college divide to where content created for the college educated is going to be increasingly leftist and increasingly woke like everything that we're seeing on Netflix and a lot of the Amazon Prime stuff. And a lot of those directors by the way, signed this anti New York Times translator, this kind of that the people who like the sort of all of this woke posturing in Hollywood is done on behalf of like that's, you know, they're Democrats, they're leftists, they're liberals, yes, but more important than that, they're upper middle class, they're households that make between, you know, 200 and 500 k a year. Now we know that 65% of households making more than 500 k a year are Democrats now. So there's been this like class stratification, which is what I argue in the book is that wokeness is not about politics and it's not about race and it's not about gender. It's about class. And the sad thing is, you know, used to be like, yeah, okay, you could sit in your house and have your wrong views about these issues. And you know, you made more or less the same as your neighbor who was maybe Republican who had the opposite views. But now because of that class stratification, all of these benefits are accruing to people in the top 20%. I mean, 50% of the GDP so much more money, but also health benefits, they live longer. Their children are up with Lee Mobile. And meanwhile, so much downward mobility in the working class. So there's something like to me truly disgusting about sitting there atop your pile of cash and all of your privilege and then sneering down at your political opponents and calling them racist while you gobble up more and more of the pie. But that's essentially what the New York Times represents. And the way you frame it is that basically their clientele, their client class, upper class, college educated, et cetera, has particular preferences, right? They have all the typical rich people preferences. So you point out that there will be like a Cartier ad on the same page as an article about black activists yelling at a group of white restaurant goers in Beverly Hills or something, right? And those two products are actually for the same person. Because the preferences of the New York Times reader, the prototypical New York Times reader is someone like, I want my normal rich people content. I want like top 10 vacations to go to and they're all super expensive because that's for me. But then I also kind of have this quasi fetish for being like masochistically yelled at by black activists and told how racist I am. So it's all for the same kind of person. And it seems paradoxical, but it actually makes sense once you consider the overall preferences and beliefs of the New York Times sort of client class, right? 100%. Yeah, they're two sides of the same coin, you know, the BLM fetish and the Cartier ad. They're literally two sides of the same magazine and two sides of the same coin because they of course, all of this woke language is just is a protection of the class interests of the educated elites. It is essentially to say that they are the moral arbiters and therefore deserve to rule because of their higher morality, their higher intelligence, their higher talent. You know, we've become a society that is so you and I would probably disagree about this. Like I think in some way, this is built into the idea of a pure meritocracy, the idea that the talented and the smart should rule, which is why I'm a populist. I don't lean on this. Like there should not be that big of a difference even between even if you're truly so much I mean, you're used to being like the smartest kid in every room you're in, right? Well, at least when I between the ages of like zero and twelve. Right, okay. Since then you've met someone who was a. Yeah, no, well, I went to a private school starting at twelve. Okay. And I was still often the smartest kid in class and often got the best grades but not as like easily and reliably as I did when I went to public school. Okay, got it, got it. Yeah. You have to work a little harder. And then I went to Columbia. Right. And I think even in like, you know, I think there's a lot of libertarians, you know, people in the center, they think, no, the problem with America is that it's not a pure meritocracy, you know, that's true. That is terrible. We're not a pure meritocracy, you know, but their answer is like, well, if only we could get a few more people of color into the elites. So it's a little bit more, you know, a little bit less embarrassing, a little bit less obvious though it's not just, you know, from our own work that we got here, right? Because I have a lot of help. I remember he's white. Like, you know, if we could just get the elites to be more diverse, that would solve all of our problems, you know? I think obviously I want a more diverse elite. I obviously want every little budding on Einstein who stuck in the South Side of Chicago to be at Harvard. Like, I want all of that. Obviously you can't. But I also want there to be a less of a gap between the elites and everybody else. And I totally reject this idea that the smart should rule or should tell people what to believe or you're so much of what ruling is. So much of what government is supposed to be about is to reflect what people want. And they have a right to be wrong. And if they want to be wrong about taking a vaccine, they have that right. And it's deplorable to think that because somebody has a higher IQ, they have the right to tell somebody what to think, what to believe, you know? So what attribute do you think is lacking among the ruling class? Clearly not intelligence. What is the attribute that you would want to? Well, I don't think they're, I don't really think they're more intelligent than other people. I can, you know, they probably score higher on IQ. If you could grab one knob and increase it on the ruling class, right, it would not be intelligence, according to what you just said. What would it be? No, I don't want there to be a ruling class. Like I don't, I don't want there to be. There's always a ruling class. There doesn't have to be. So do you, only in like an anarchist society, would there be no ruling class, right? Why? We, you could have government and police and fire departments and, you know, public, public institutions that are not, that don't like, but they don't rule in the way that our ruling class today does. They have functions. And those functions are to represent, you know, democratic institution. I totally believe in democratic institutions. I'm not an anarchist at all, but I think that there's, it should be extremely limited. And that, that's where the media gets into trouble. They think they should have the right to tell people what to think. And that's why Fox News is doing so well. Cause they don't, they don't, they don't try to lecture people or moralize at them. They can do this. I would disagree with that. I mean, a Fox News, Fox News has values and they tell you what they think. They're very connected to what their viewers think. It's a much more populist model. You're not going to sit there, lecturing people about, you know, they're not going to hear lectures out of them about, I mean, some you will, you know, prime time, obviously, you know, there's, you know, people give their, their monologues, but they're very connected to where the median voters, which is how they got so many democratic viewers. They just siphoned them off of CNN when CNN got woke. So all of those viewers moved to Fox. So, you know, Tucker Carlson, for example, it's the number one viewed show, not just among Republicans, but among Democrats, cause working class Democrats, they just don't see themselves reflected in CNN anymore. They can't watch it cause it's got so woke. Right. So your idea is Fox News, I don't know, I wanted to talk about Fox News cause I know you had some thoughts about the way that they wage the culture war, right? In your book, I mean, you had a line about, you know, the culture war basically is not meant to be one. You had something like this where it's, it's basically, it's not meant to be one and it often revolves around issues that can't be solved. And I was curious to ask your, your take on that. You also had, it's connected to parts in your book where, you know, there was this question often asked by liberals more 10 years ago than today, even 20 years ago, which is why do right wing voters vote against their own interests? Don't they know that the Democratic Party is the party of higher taxes on the rich, more rich redistribution of wealth and yet all of these working class right wing voters keep voting for tax cuts for the rich, libertarian policies, free trade agreements that don't benefit them. What's wrong with Kansas, right? And the way that Republicans have gotten those voters is often by being on their side on culture war issues on, you know, don't tear down my statues, don't speak ill of the founding fathers, traditional views of gender, gender roles of homosexuality and, you know, religious intolerance of homosexuality and all the rest. So what do you make of that classic sort of liberal question? Is it a well founded question? Is it an unfair question? And how do you feel Fox News has addressed that question historically and today? Well, so in so Fox is very it's still sort of quite free market. So on economic policy, it's definitely much more weighted towards elites and the rich than it is towards the working class. But I will get booked on Fox News to represent the populist point of view and I do not. During the Trump era, were they was did they take Trump's line on protectionist trade policy? Yes, some no. Maria Bartiromo is a big fan of Trump and those policies, immigration is it a purely economic issue for most working class Americans. So on immigration, yes, they were much more populist in nature. But that's so there's one example of like, so left is like to say, oh, people who don't you support mass immigration or racist. When you poll people, the reason they don't support it is because of the economic impact that it is having on their lives. By the way, black Americans have borne the vast majority of the ills of mass immigration leading to a wage decline of 20 to 40% over the last 40 years. Yeah, and one of the many awkward facts for people on the left is that black Americans often don't support high levels of immigration for that reason. Right. And yet, their civil rights struggle has valor stolen from it to support importing non citizens to this country. And then they're asking black Americans who this country still owes something to to pay taxes to support mass immigration. I mean, it's disgusting, but how they use race to hide over the economic impact of their virtue signaling. Of course, it's the elites who benefit from mass immigration because they're the people employing these people as nannies, as landscapers, they like to go to a nice restaurant, so much cheaper if you can, the whole back of the house is people who are undocumented. So they're really benefiting from it economically. And then they talk about it with this patina of morality, which hurts black Americans. I mean, it's really, really staggering. But so, so fox. So, so on immigration, which is an economic question, Fox is much more populist and has the view takes the view that Bernie Sanders took in 2015, which is that open borders is a Koch brothers proposal. That's right. Then Bernie Sanders, of course, changes mine in 2020. And now he can go and talk about it on MSNBC and CNN because, you know, supports decriminalizing illegal border crossing. So on immigration, it is very much on trade. There's some on either side. Obviously, Tucker Carlson was very much in favor of it. You know, now there's sort of it's, it's funny because now they're so anti-biden that whatever Biden does, you know, they have to, you know, but a bit of on some things, on some limited things Biden has further some of Trump's tariffs. Yeah, Biden has sort of adopted some of Trump's Trump's Trump's. Some of that, yes. He kept the tariffs on stealing. Although Michael Moynihan made a good point that it's not that so much that Biden has taken Trump's line on trade. It's that Trump took the left's line on trade. Yes, that's exactly right. Although when it comes to the green agenda, Biden, he'll abandon everything. So they kept the tariffs on aluminum trade and then he sort of got rid of them when it comes to importing these like wind turbines that are made by slaves in China because obviously the green agenda is more important than anything else. Human rights, you know, workers' rights in America, what have you. So what I was going to say though is that like Fox will have populists like me on to talk about, you know, the working class point of view, the Trumpian point of view on trade on the economy, but you won't get that on the leftist and liberal outlets. So there's much more debate at Fox than there is. They have a show called The Five where they have one liberal, you know, you could say, okay, her job is to lose, you know, but like at least she's there and you don't see that really on the other channels. You'll only get the sort of never Trump point of view, which is essentially exactly the same as like everybody else who's, you know, on those channels. And I would say the never Trump point of view is the same as overall. It's not the same as like the liberal point of views, right? Like the Ross Douthets and David Brooks often have substantial differences from the rest of the opinion columnists at like the times, right? But if you don't, I mean, that's not the thing that divides them from the other columnists is not the dividing line in America today. The most important one. The most important person is college educated. Yes. And that very much maps on to how you feel about Trump or it did until the sentence showed up, right? So if you want to be a person who claims that you're listening to people across the, if you want to be a person who claims you believe in like open debate and free speech, you need to be a person who knows why people love Trump and understand it. Like if, and that's not happening anywhere on the leftist media, anywhere in the liberal mainstream media. So I really, my moment of political awakening was 2016 when Trump won because I, at that point, I think I was a freshman at Columbia and I had heard what Trump said about Mexicans not sending their best, etc. I had heard, you know, his ideas of maybe putting Muslims on a registry or something like that. And it sounded potentially fascist to me, to my elite ears. And I was as concerned as everyone around me in, in that I thought he might be, I thought he might be a fascist. And not only that, I was absolutely blindsided that he won. I was so blindsided, in fact, that me and my friend who was half Mexican, we cooked the Mexican dinner to celebrate in anticipation of his loss on election night. And then we just saw the numbers going the wrong way. Something very big changed for me the moment he won, which is, I went back to the drawing board and I said, clearly, I don't understand something because when you have, like, as a scientist or a rational person more broadly, when you have a model of a system and you make a very strong prediction and it goes the other way, it means your model of the system is wrong. Some variables way off, right? If you drop something at F times and one time it just shoots upwards, you have to change your model of gravity. That's just basic rationality, maybe the most basic principle of rationality. So my model of the country was wrong and it was shattered by Trump's victory by my failure to predict or understand the support for it. And basically, something has to explain that, right? The explanation on offer from all of the kind of magazines I would read at the time, all the kind of podcasts that I would listen to at the time was there was a sudden unexplained spike in racism, right? So that did not pass the smell test because it just, it doesn't make any sense that within four years, right? Since we reelected a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, a black guy, that between 2012 and 2016, there was a sudden unexplained huge uptick in racism such that it would explain Donald Trump's election, right? That made no sense as an explanation. And yet it was the explanation that like the media linked arms and went with. So that was my moment of political awakening because I realized they were not wrong and they were not psychologically placed to actually find the reasons for Trump's appeal. They failed to explain why there were counties that had voted for Obama twice and had voted for Trump. Eight million Americans. We're talking about the same people that were comfortable pulling the lever for Barack Hussein Obama twice. And they went for Trump over Hillary. So that's the phenomenon really to be explained. And so my political awakening was wrapped up with essentially the cluelessness of elites and their inability to do any theory of mind work with how their bubble may inoculate them from understanding the majority of their fellow countrymen. So I consider myself to be as elite as all of the people that you and I have been criticizing. But I think for whatever reason, reason led me to become very curious about how the elite bubble misunderstands the world as a result of being in a social bubble and in a subculture. It's not even necessarily bad to be in a bubble. Everyone's in a bubble of some sort, especially in modern society. But if you're a person that writes about the world, you have to be curious about how the boundaries of your bubble distort what's outside of it. And if you're not constantly correcting for that, taking the elite glasses off, so to speak, you're going to just get things wildly wrong. You're going to mispredict Brexit, Trump. You're going to get things wrong over and over again. And you're not going to develop a deep understanding of the world that you're trying to write about. Yeah, I mean, the worst part is, is like, yeah, people can be forgiven for being in a bubble, but not when your job is literally to be on a campaign trail following people around. And they would sort of the way they covered, I mean, Matt Taibi writes about this so well. Trump would talk about jobs for two hours and make an awful lot of racist joke. And that's all they would cover. They wouldn't talk to any of the people there. And if they did, I mean, for years and years, you couldn't read a New York Times article about Trump voters without, at some point, them calling them racist for being against immigration, which as we just established, the opposite is the case. It's probably more racist to support mass immigration than it is to support limiting it. This comes back to what's the matter with Kansas argument. I hate that argument and I totally reject it. And when you talk to working class Americans and ask them about it, they'll say a number of things. The first is, and this is people who come from Democratic families who went through that shift, around the 90s, 2000s from the Democrats Republicans. They'll say, first of all, my interests are not just what's in my bottom line. Like, if to join this union, I'm going to have to put my pronouns in my bio. That's my interest. That's my belief. Like, you can't buy me off. You can't buy my values off. You know, let's say I'm religious and that's just like totally against my religion. You're going to tell me to engage in collective bargaining. I have to do that. Maybe I'm going to say no to that because maybe having that extra money in my bank account is not worth doing something that I feel is against my values. That's the first thing. They're not neoliberal subjects. You know, I don't see them. The beyond the end all as the paycheck, you know, you saw this with the railroad strikers. They wanted more autonomy. They're well paid, actually. They didn't want more money. They wanted another paid sick leave. They wanted another day that they could choose to use how they wanted. I mean, autonomy is extremely important in the working class. And it's something liberal elites do not understand at all because they've grown up in this very paternalistic worldview. And it's just that paternalism is the opposite of autonomy. They don't get how important it is to working class Americans to define and decide their own lives. That's the first thing they'll say. The second thing they'll tell you is like, what the Democrats have come to represent is there's this great article, actually in The New York Times, Jennifer Medina, shout out, she's the best. She interviewed a lot of Hispanics who were planning to vote Republican and she'd ask them why. And again and again, they would say to her, because the Democrats are the party of the poor and I don't want to be poor. And there is, there is Coleman, a deep tension between an agenda that is working on behalf of the poor, right? The dependent poor who need welfare will never be able to support themselves. And an agenda that's built around autonomy for the working class, for labor, for people who are in that, you know, not the bottom percentile, not even the bottom to, let's say, but the middle used to be that working class Americans had access to a middle class life. That's no longer the case. The thing that will get them there and the thing the Democrats are proposing, there's a huge disconnect between that. I mean, the idea that the Democrats represent the economic interest of the working class is simply false. They don't see it that way. They're better on unions. That's true. And the Republicans really need to do a 180 on that because it's true. The unions are also compromised, right? Like we saw that with the teachers union, right? Over over COVID, how they totally abandoned poor and working class and Black children just completely could not care less about them, right? The unions are very much in the Democrats pocket in a way that harms the most vulnerable. But you need to create an alternative, right? You have to, there has to be something else. Okay, I get it Republicans, you're not into unions because of, okay, whatever. What are you offering working class Americans to give them collective bargaining? There's another problem with unions. Working class Americans don't want an antagonistic relationship with their bosses. This is America. It's a very entrepreneurial country. People feel like they want to be able to excel. And if you have an adversarial relationship with your bosses, which is something unions often impose, that gets in the way for people to be able to say, well, maybe I'm going to be the best and then I'm going to be able to get ahead. And so it's a delicate balance. I still think unions right now are providing the best in terms of collective bargaining to working class Americans. You cannot compare the conditions, the pay, the safety conditions between unionized and non-unionized workers. And that's very important. But I also understand why a lot of working class Americans are not in unions. The union membership is not growing significantly. Six percent of private sector workers are in unions. They're not wrong about what is in their economic interests when they say this is not going to do it for me. And if you want to be a working class party, which the Republican party is now making a lot of noise about, right? It's very clear how the Democrats have ceased to be that you have to have an economic agenda that works for the working class by asking them what they need. And collective bargaining is just always going to be extremely important because they will never have the same kind of power as the corporations. So I think actually what we're seeing now is the Republicans, some in the wake of Trump, recognizing that, realizing that there's that the populist spirit that got them all these votes needs a policy agenda to represent it. And you're seeing energy from people like Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, of course, a little bit tied Cruz to kind of think of what would it look like to have a conservative working class party that works for working Americans. So you can get back on track to that American dream where a man can support his family and. Hey, folks, Coleman here. If you're like me, then scrolling through the day's news headlines can leave you feeling like the world is tipping towards disaster and chaos while somehow simultaneously freezing, flooding, and on fire. It's a lot to take in, but consider this. What if the constant barrage of bad news is disproportionately shaping the way you see the world? What if we're all not paying attention to what's going right? That's why you should check out the podcast, What Could Go Right, which is a brand new acclaimed weekly news podcast from the Progress Network. 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I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention. And then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Yeah. And so this is one other point I wanted. I don't think we really directly covered that I thought was a great point from your book. And it's a point others have made too, which is when you talk about the difference between class politics and race politics. And you think of, you know, what it is that elites, college educated, left leaning elites have to sacrifice for their politics, right? If you're a college educated, left leaning elite, you make good money. You're in the top decile of income. It doesn't really make sense to have class based politics, because you suffer from that, right? If you if your politics are Bernie Sanders, circa 2010, if you have basically Marxist politics, you know, tax the rich redistribute wealth, etc, that is actually painful to you, right? Whereas if your politics are to forget class and simply diversify the elite racially, that actually doesn't necessarily hurt you, right? Like if you if you work in the New York Times and you have to just make the newsroom 30% people of color, but you survive that transition, if your politics become more and more about race rather than class, that's actually a bargain that makes a lot of sense financially, right? It's like, if you're on the board of a company, let's make the board more diverse. Let's get some more women and some more people of color on the board, but we're still all millionaires, right? We're not actually lobbying for an increase in our own taxes or or a wealth, much less a wealth tax. Not to say that any of these are particularly good policies I would support, but the bargain kind of makes sense. Is that how you see the popularity of race based politics among the most, let's say, the ruling class? It's very close to that. I always say it's like, it's like flying first class, like they're very happy to pay for everybody else in coach to fly for free, as long as that curtain comes down and there's no upgrades, right? As long as they're in that special place, right, where they get the special treatment, right, they're happy to subsidize everyone else to fly for free. Like that's kind of the mentality. And I think you're right that switching from class to race definitely absolves them of any kind of redistributive urge. But my thinking has evolved on this is I think that sort of tax the 1% is very consistent with that elite view, which is why you often hear people in the top 20% and the top 10% demanded. They're not really the top 1%. They have so much class resentment. For the top point, the top 0.1% they have so much class resentment against the billionaire and the millionaire class. And so what they want is for that to be redistributed down to them. Working class people, the ones I've interviewed, the, you know, tens and tens, if not hundreds, I've interviewed for my next book, they don't believe in that. Like they see millionaires and billionaires often as jobs creators. So yeah, they want better wages. They want better working conditions. They want housing that they can afford, but they don't necessarily feel that they are owed a portion of the success of some billionaire who made a lot of money by taking risks and investing money, et cetera. The professional class that don't create any jobs, right? That's sort of, they're just sort of live off the fat of the excesses of sometimes billionaires, actually, when they buy their newsrooms or what have you, right? They feel very much this resentment, like how dare they make all this money? Where are the smart ones? Where are the educated, talented ones? We should be getting part of that. Our NGOs should be getting part of that. And then of course, and the poor should get some of it as well, right? So I think that it's, you know, they do have a class based analysis, but you're completely right that there's no idea of widening the pathway that gets you to that elite education. College is getting more and more expensive. So if college was once a vector of upward mobility, it's now the gatekeeper keeping people out. But even worse than that is the jobs that many of us in the ruling class do are like totally meaningless. I mean, if I didn't do my job, like the world would be totally fine. The world would not be fine if every truck driver went on strike, we would all starve. We would literally starve. Yet we sit here reaping the benefits of the knowledge industry and saying, Oh, you're totally replaceable. You shouldn't be given any of these benefits, you know, like it's it's reversed, like the people whose labor that we rely on and frequently will say, Oh, you know, what, you know, the model now that the liberals have for an economy the way they see it is, you know, all production will be done in China, you know, by slaves in China, and we won't have to worry about paying them a living wage. All service industry jobs will be done by, you know, desperate Venezuelans who will import from, you know, failed socialist states, right? We in the top 10%, 15% we will be living, you know, on these, you know, incomes, you know, these households with 250,000 to 500,000 a year, right? Sitting pretty and everyone under us, the 90% will be living on universal basic income and welfare, right? We'll pay them off not to work. That's kind of the way the economy now is, I think, is being perceived by the left. So of course, working class Americans are going to say, no, they don't want universal basic income. They want to be paid off not to work. They want to be paid a living wage so they can support their families and live the American dream. The left is totally given up on the American dream. If you read articles about housing in the New York Times, it's always about why do people need to own their own homes, right? Written by people who own their own homes, right? So it's, it's again, that first class, right? Happy to pay for everybody to live in these high rises that we're going to build for the homeless, you know, as long as there's no upgrades into first class from the like Huy Poloy. So what's the solution? What do you, if you were, if you were Tsar of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, what would your prescriptions be for both of them? There are huge market interests, especially with a tight labor market like ours right now to paying people living wage, to building tons of housing, obviously secure the border. I mean, I should start by that. I don't believe in Tsars. I don't really want that kind of power. But, you know, upward mobility, it's like it's very obvious like the things that lead to upward mobility, marriage, you know, having children in wedlock, not out of wedlock. The thing that I think really is required is a kind of, for government to talk to the owners of corporations in a way that makes it clear to them that we are going to be encouraging, reshoring manufacturing and paying a living wage. New York City will have paid by the end of this year, $650 million to house and feed illegal immigrants. It's not clear to me why we can't take that money and pay to Americans to work service industry jobs in a way where it's a living wage. If we're going to be subsidizing workers, which is essentially what we're doing, Biden has decided we're not going to have a border. It's open borders. I'm sorry, that's the case. The migrants, when they cross, they say this, right? They understand that it has been promised to them that they can come. You know, you don't get 2 million people in a year without essentially opening the border. He's done that because it's essentially, they've essentially subcontracted hiring to the cartels. You know, we have a, that's what's happening. We have a tight labor market, right? You know, people in cities, you know, they need their cheap workers, right? If we're going to be paying for this, like we should be paying American workers. I think Trump's whole America first point of view when it came to foreign policy, when it came to domestic economic policy was like really on the right track. And it was such a, just such a despicable mistake not to, for the left is not to be like, gosh, he's doing everything Bernie Sanders was like dreamed of, you know, in his fever dreams. He couldn't have imagined like a trade war with China who even thought that was possible. And so I think there was a lot of great stuff happening there. The economy really reflected it. And you know, the situation is not as bad as one thinks, you know, homeownership rate in Fort working class Americans is around 50%. So it's not like, it's not disastrous. You know, a few tweaks here and there, and we could really be, you know, cooking on what are those things Christian? Cooking with Greece. Cooking with Greece, you know, like there's, there's, it's not as bad as the left wants us to think, but it's definitely not as good as the right wants us to think so. Yeah. Well, we could probably talk for a lot longer, but I think we're about to run out of studio time here. Are there any last questions you had wanted to ask me? Because you, you would go, I didn't, I didn't get to any of them. We have a couple minutes. Okay. I wanted to ask you, what is something that you think your followers are wrong about? Something I think my followers are wrong about. Like something that, you know, people come to you and they're like, but there's something that you feel like you don't understand why the people who are kind of in your camp. Believe that. Yeah, like what they're getting wrong. I don't know. That's a tough question because like if I say everything I think on this podcast, so naturally I would repel people that are super wrong in my view, right? But you're not like, you're hard to put in a box. Yeah. Well, okay, let me ask you this. Like, are you a class trader? Oh, in a way, I'm, I may be because I'm an elite that is frequently critical of elites. And are your parent, were your parents elites as well? It's a good question. They may have, well, my mom grew up in the South Bronx extremely poor, but was the first in her family to go to college. Never struck me as having elite sensibilities, really. My dad grew up a black middle class in the Midwest. And they both ended up getting several degrees. So you could say they're inducted into the elite, but not born neither was born into it. You talked about being in on a recent podcast about being scared when you were in college at Columbia to admit that you didn't hold these views and that you would secretly listen to podcasts and then secretly have conversations with your friends. I was so surprised by that, like that there was a period when you were a normie, like the rest of us like scared of, how did you overcome that and start to, had you overcome that fear? I didn't. I just felt it and spoke anyway in the times that I chose to. Was that great Audrey Lorde quote I think about? Like you can learn to, you can learn to speak when you're scared, like you can learn to work when you're tired. Wow. You know, it's like, I'm not, I don't transcend fear by any means. I still feel it. Really? Yeah, sure. I feel social fear if I know I have an opinion that's unpopular in the room. Like what, for example, any one of my opinions on racial inequality about not everything is racism, anything that, you know, anything that I know can get me marked as a bad person. I feel that social fear just like the rest of the rest of everyone. Yeah. What could you learn on the topic of race that would change your mind about your views? Is that hypothetical? I think as a hypothetical, I would say evidence really solid evidence using sound methodologies of massively higher levels of racial discrimination against black people than I believe exists across like multiple. And I do believe some exist in the housing market and policing. I've seen rigorous evidence of that, but it is not nearly enough to be the primary driver or even close to the primary driver of the racial disparities that we see in my view. But what would change my mind is, you know, to see an order of magnitude more racism shown by the most rigorous methods of doing that. And what accounts for the disparities in your mind? What accounts for the disparities in my mind is a myriad of factors, but it's, you know, the kind of things that it's an actual skills gap, right? Like an actual human capital gap between black people and white people, between different ethnic groups of white people. You see Nigerian Americans doing far better than Jamaican Americans. You see white Americans of Russian descent doing far better than white Americans of Irish descent, right? And clearly in this era, although discrimination against the Irish, for instance, was a huge thing in the 19th century, most of those identities are not even active anymore, right? White Americans, by and large view themselves as just white, and a lot of them don't even care where in Europe their ancestors came from. And yet you still find large disparities everywhere you look, right? You see disparities between Indian Americans and Pakistani Americans. And most Americans couldn't even really tell you the difference because we're not sensitive enough to whatever slight differences and appearance could be there. And yet you see big skills gaps that have to do with the history of each group that lead to disparity all across the board. That's very smart. I wanted to ask you about, do you tell young people, I get asked this a lot, when they tell you talk to you about being sort of scared or feeling like they have the center of their views, do you tell them, no, you should speak up or do you tell them don't ruin your life? Just keep it to yourself. It's a good question. It's a good, I think I've done both. I know me too. I've got done both because sometimes I get a piece of advice that is like, hey, Coleman, this is my situation. This is my job. I have a family. I want to speak out at work. What should I do? Personally, I don't feel I can advise that person to say what I would say because I don't pay the price that that person pays. I'm not going to be there holding your hand when you've lost your job and your wife is pissed off at you and you have to pull your kids out of some after school activity because you're not making enough money. I'm not going to be there with you. So it's a little bit like when Jerry Seinfeld had this thing of every time someone comes, some kid comes up to him and says, I want to be a comic. He says, don't do it because he knows the ones that really should be a comic, won't listen to him. And there may be something analogous where like, I'm not sure it's my role to tell people always speak up no matter the price, but I know that the people that really need to speak up will do so whether or not I tell them to. I don't want to have that blood on my hands. In other words, I can pay my own price. I have no problem paying my own prices and taking responsibility for what I have gained and lost in life as a result of my choices, but I have trouble telling other people what to do. All right. So Nikki Haley announced she's running for president. Her big, to me, before she became Trump's ambassador to the UN, her biggest achievement was taking down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state Capitol after Dylan Ruth murdered all those people on that. Church while wearing a Confederate flag. She then said, she gave a speech and she said, look, the flag does not represent hate to everybody, to many people who represents family, honor, history. It doesn't represent slavery and racial hatred, but we're taking it down because he appropriated it in that way. Now, I know a lot of people in the South who feel that way about the flag, who feel that it does not represent slavery. They never supported slavery. Their families didn't have slaves, but it represents to them their pride as Southerners. But I also know a lot of Black Americans, especially in the South who that flag has one meaning to them, it being slavery. So what I wanted to ask you is what you make of this whole situation. Do you think there was any merit in what Nikki Haley said? Who do you think has the right to define what the meaning of that flag is? And what do you think it means? That's a very tough question. I want to be respectful of people that have different viewpoint on it. From my point of view, that flag represents the Confederacy, which was an attempt to secede from the United States to leave this country because of a desire to protect the slave way of life and the slave economy. So it was an attempt to do a bad thing for an evil reason. And that's what the Confederate flag means to me. I can't impute that meaning onto someone else, right? If I, if you were sitting across from me and you said, actually, I grew up in the South, I grew up seeing that flag. And it meant it means the pride of my region. I think that's okay. That all I can give you is what it means to me. And all I can do is to receive what it means to you. I think it should be, I don't think I should be in charge of whether that flag comes down. I think in a democracy, when we're living together, has to be like a negotiation. And you have to, you can't drag people along with you. You can't hector them. It has to be a negotiation. So that would be how I answer it. I think that's all our time. I think we're about to get kicked out of this video. Oh, no. Okay. So thank you so much, Baccia. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you enjoyed it, be sure to follow me on social media and subscribe to my podcast to stay up to date on all my latest content. If you really want to support me, consider becoming a member of Coleman Unfiltered for exclusive access to subscriber only content. Thanks again for listening and see you next time. Have you ever wondered what it's like to be buried in an avalanche? Weird foreign feeling of despair. Or how it feels to crash a skydive? I remember feeling my body hit the ground. These are the stories you'll hear on the podcast called What Was That Like? True stories told by the actual person who went through it. And you'll hear actual 911 calls. 911. There's a man at my back door trying to get in. 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