Episode 211: Bari Weiss, The ‘University’ of Austin, and the Silicon Valley-Funded Faux-Iconoclast Media Industry
Citations Needed | October 30, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “The PC Police Outlaw Make-Believe.” “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.” “The Roots of Campus Hatred.” “End DEI.”
Adam: These articles all have something in common. They were all written by Bari Weiss. The right-wing New York Times opinion editor and columnist turned horseshoe theory media proprietor has made a name for herself as a victim and enemy of the perennial right-wing boogeyman, so-called wokeness. For over a decade now, Weiss has taken to the pages of major newspapers to complain, vilify, and sometimes target college kids and protesters who won’t let her and her right-wing buddies like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro speak their minds as loudly and publicly as possible.
Nima: There’s, of course, a comical level of irony at work here. Amid her claims of being silenced and repressed by a hostile left, Weiss has been paid to voice her opinions in legacy paper after legacy paper and has been given millions of dollars by venture capital firms to start her own media company, The Free Press, and her so-called “university,” the University of Austin. And despite her insistence that mainstream institutions are too intolerant of heterodox views like hers, she’s warmly embraced on CNN broadcasts and the pages of her former employer, still the New York Times and has been given glowing profiles across media outlets like Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine, Ha’aretz, The Information and the Financial Times.
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll discuss the rise of Bari Weiss’s Silicon Valley-funded media empire, the trope of the iconoclast rebel, truth-telling media lightning rod with banal conservative positions, and the broader, seemingly uniquely American psychological need and branding convention for people with 95% boilerplate right-wing opinions to view themselves as persecuted outsiders who don’t fit any labels.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by writer and editor Katherine Krueger, who is co-owner of Discourse Blog.
[Begin clip]
Katherine Krueger: Yeah, she’s really perfected this grift, which is being able to dine out twice. You know, she just kind of sends out test balloons. It reminds me of The Onion headline about Glenn Danzig just going door to door and trying to scare people. You know, she’ll put out a test balloon of something like, hey, does this shock you? And then people get mad. Then she gets to accuse him of attacking her right to free speech, basically.
[End clip]
Adam: So, as we are required to do by law, New Jersey, New York, and Illinois state law to tell you this is a spiritual sequel or spiritual successor, if you prefer, to a couple episodes. “Episode 147: The GOP’s ‘Rightwing Populism’ Rebrand” where we basically talk about the billionaire astroturfing of media outlets and pundits to try to rebrand Republican politics as something interesting, edgy, and subversive. And then “Episode 170: The Shallow, Audience-Flattering Appeal of the ‘Neither Right Nor Left’ Guy” where we delve into the psychology which we argue then, and we’ll argue again today, is not uniquely American, but it is disproportionately American with wanting to view oneself as a rebel, iconoclast, free-thinking, non conformist who sort of lives in the west and bales hay all day and squints with a leathery face off into the distance like a maverick and a rogue.
Nima: That’s right.
Adam: And wants to not be seen as conservative, even though 95% of their opinions are conservative.
Nima: They just don’t fit into a box, man.
Adam: A very popular pathology and branding stream that Bari Weiss has brilliantly tapped into, and we’ll get into how she’s managed to do that.
Nima: Yeah, so let’s start with a little bit of background on Bari Weiss. Bari grew up in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, visited Israel frequently throughout her childhood, and spent a gap year after high school living on an Israeli kibbutz, before moving to New York City to attend Columbia University. She started getting media attention in her sophomore year when she co-founded a student group called Columbians for Academic Freedom to organize complaints against professors who the students felt didn’t sufficiently support Israel enough, particularly Professor Joseph Massad, an acclaimed professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history. Weiss attacked Massad and others, campaigning for them to be fired for their opinions. In September 2005, Weiss told the Columbia campus magazine The Blue and White, “I will continue to stand up, even if people call me a McCarthyite.”
Post-college, Weiss would move on to stints at Ha’aretz, The Forward, and Tablet, publishing things like accounts of her “bonding” with IDF soldiers. By 2013, Weiss had become an editor at The Wall Street Journal where she’d continue her hasbara campaign, largely through denigrating and fear-mongering about Iran. And throw in some grumbles about “PC” universities and endorsements of right-wing cultural critic Camille Paglia who insisted that “ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization.”
Adam: And in 2017, Weiss took her most prestigious job yet, the op-ed editor for The New York Times where she’s been able to continue to complain about her bugbears, left-wing campus activism, the existence of trans people, and, of course, Palestinians, often cloaked in superficially liberal sounding language. And indeed, she self-identified as a liberal or left-leaning person. This is a key element, by the way, to the non right-wing, right-wing —
Nima: Faux iconoclast.
Adam: Yeah, she was just such a rebel.
Nima: She’s such a rebel that she’s a liberal who has almost exclusively right-wing views.
Adam: Whoa, no one’s ever done that before. Man, is that legal? So at the time, the New York Times had expressed a desire to incorporate more right-wing opinion pieces in the wake of Trump’s presidential victory and had accordingly hired Bret Stephens for the op-ed section as well. He came with Bari Weiss from the Wall Street Journal. As New York Times editorial page editor James Bennett said in an internal meeting in December of 2017:
…I think both on the editorial line and our columnists and a lot of our op-eds were conducting a debate that was often between the 40-yard lines.
…there wasn’t really an advocate for the Bernie Sanders view of the world formally in our pages. And we’ve had fewer voices to the right for quite some time.
Needless to say, they didn’t hire any pro-Bernie Sanders columnist, but they did hire many right-wingers. In her inaugural opinion piece in May of 2017, Bari Weiss critiqued Trump from the right on the topic of Israel in her column “Israel’s ‘Biggest Friend’? Not Quite,” outlining the following reasons why Trump had betrayed pro-Israel supporters, writing:
On Iran: the nuclear deal will remain in place. On Jerusalem: the United States embassy isn’t moving out of Tel Aviv any time soon. On the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank: the Trump administration remains opposed. On a peace process that would presumably result in the creation of a Palestinian state: Mr. Trump is eager to strike “the ultimate deal.”
Weiss, of course, did not have to wait long for her grievances to be addressed. During his presidential term, Trump abandoned the so-called Iran nuclear deal, moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognized all Israeli settlements as legal, and obviously did nothing to advance any peace process. So, Trump ended up doing everything that Bari Weiss was complaining he wasn’t doing in his first three months in office because seemingly, she didn’t read anything he had said or done or said he would do or any of the donors said he would do but just wanted to sort of be anti-Trump from the safest place possible, which is from the right.
Nima: And in the meantime, complaining that Trump wasn’t doing things that explicitly abrogated international law. All of those things that she was complaining he wasn’t doing, he then did, and all of them constituted grave breaches of international law.
Adam: Yeah, breaking treaties, legal settlements. But yeah, of course, those laws are for other people, not for us. Of course, Bari Weiss would go on to make a name for herself, publishing op-eds with deliberately bait-y headlines. And then to ruffle the feathers of the left, she took the Bill Maher approach, which is what we refer to as edgy but not subversive where you don’t meaningfully challenge centers of power, but you offend liberal sensibilities, and this creates controversy and metadiscourse around the New York Times.
Nima: Which makes you cool and bold.
Adam: Makes you bold, but doesn’t really actually offend anyone, right? It’s a way of stirring the pot and kind of getting attention, but you’re not really offending anyone with any power to shut down your voice. Her primary thesis of the Left is that it is demanding, illiberal, controlling, censorious, hostile, and repressive to intellectual thought in the right-wing. Specifically, she would often make nods to the so-called alt-right or avert white supremacists like Richard Spencer being the enemy but then scold the left for isolating anyone who wasn’t slightly quieter in their fascistic tendencies.
Nima: Here are some of the greatest hits from the Bari Weiss New York Times op-ed catalog. from August 30. 2017: “From Aug. 30, 2017: “Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation.” Now, in this piece, Weiss scolded the Left for characterizing right-wing extremists as right-wing extremists. So, don’t call John McCain an extremist, the argument went because then how would we possibly describe Trump?
And of course, there’s the infamous May 8, 2018: “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.” The IDW, as it’s abbreviated, included folks like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, David Rubin, multiple so-called canceled academics, Quillette founder Claire Lehmann, and anti-trans columnist Debra Soh, among others. Weiss, in this piece, described what they all had in common in this way:
First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.
Now, Weiss would become the toast of much major media, vaunted as a realist, forcing us all to confront some uncomfortable truths. She was the ultimate iconoclast truth-teller. She became a fixture on shows like Real Time with Bill Maher and was the subject of a number of splashy profiles across media, including one from 2019 in Vanity Fair headlined quote “Mad About Bari Weiss: The New York Times Provocateur the Left Loves to Hate.”
Adam: As many of our listeners no doubt know, Weiss’s work garnered lots of rightful criticism, usually for being racist, misogynistic, bizarrely and obsessively anti-trans and violently Zionist and anti-Palestinian. In July 2020, Bari Weiss resigned somewhat ostentatiously from the New York Times, painting herself as a victim of “bullying” from colleagues and on Twitter. Because of her conservative views, Weiss claimed she was subject to “unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge,” which sounds pretty serious, but Weiss, of course, didn’t file any lawsuits against the New York Times. Rather, she posted the letter on her website and parlayed her false victimhood into a lucrative career speaking out against wokes and cancel culture.
Weiss’s resignation garnered much media coverage naturally because again, there was one article I wrote for FAIR back in 2018, pointing out that The Atlantic magazine had written three articles specifically about people on Twitter being mean to Bari Weiss but wrote zero articles about two journalists facing 60 years in prison at the time for covering the J-20 protest in 2017. So, it’s really important to get their free speech calibration set appropriately.
And Weiss’s resignation got a lot of attention because it also happened around the same time as other high-profile departures of right-wing media figures like Weiss’s former boss James Bennet and Andrew Sullivan, formerly of New York Magazine. They had left their respective jobs and also either joined other publications or started Substacks.
Axios, for example, reported in July of 2020:
The reckoning around systemic racism in America has forced the media to address decades of inequality within their own newsrooms and how it may have created longstanding imbalances in their coverage.
But that industry-wide conversation has become more hostile against the backdrop of an increasingly hyper-partisan political environment that is tethered to the 24/7 social media news cycle.
So, she was subject to a left-wing attack, a sort of conspiracy from the left to go after her. She, of course, wasn’t fired from the New York Times. She claims she was harassed into quitting, and then again, parlay this very quickly into a Silicon Valley-backed media empire, based primarily on this kind of origin story, this grievance of being canceled by the far left New York Times.
Nima: Simply for just supporting free speech and open inquiry. About six months after her very public resignation from the New York Times, this now in January of 2021, Weiss launched a Substack entitled “Common Sense,” which has now been rebranded to be “The Free Press,” which would eventually host the screeds of people who’d have very similar trajectories to Weiss: landing a prestigious job at a major institution or corporation, then throwing a tantrum over being “canceled” and publicly quitting in a huff because that entity had supposedly become too woke and lefty. Weiss was, of course, far from canceled, we should make clear. Rather, she was given major platforms throughout her entire career and after leaving the New York Times, through which she was able to promote her Substack and have her own narrative reinforced. In one example, she made an appearance on CNN’s CNN’s Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter. Here is a clip from her appearance.
[Begin clip]
Brian Stelter: When there is a crowd on Twitter or some other social media site, complaining, you know, saying you’ve offended me, you’ve hurt me, you’ve been racist, you’ve been sexist, you’ve been whatever it is. And then that Twitter mob can sound really loud and really powerful. It’s actually still a small number of people, but we do see companies sometimes cave to what sounds like a huge crowd that’s actually pretty small. And that is a story that’s happened over and over again, and it sounds like you’re trying to push back against that.
Bari Weiss: I’m definitely trying to push back against that. One of my ways of pushing back against that is simply starting another party, meaning you can stay in the room and try and, you know, scream as loud as is possible every single time it happens. Or you could say, you know what, I’m going to be my own boss. I’m not going to worry about, you know, angering a tiny group of people on Twitter and then being subject to, you know, a masthead or a boss that doesn’t have the spine to stand up to it.
Brian Stelter: So, we need institutional reform.
[End clip]
Adam: So from the beginning, there was this victim narrative. She had been oppressed. She even silenced. Again, I started a Substack, right? We have a podcast, fairly successful. I’ve never been invited on CNN so clearly, she’s not being silenced. There are thousands of or hundreds of people who have podcasts and Substacks, many of which at that point had more following than Bari Weiss had. But those people don’t get to go on CNN and promote their Substack and their podcast.
Nima: And be touted as brave truth-tellers in the face of corporate caving to the woke mob.
Adam: Yeah, one of the largest cable, you know, news networks to promote their supposedly “alternative media.” So, she posted these opinions. Again, these are elite people with elite positions, typically with money who got pushed back from some mob or some sort of underling who dared challenge their power. One in February of 2022 was a piece she published by Levi’s “Brand President” Jennifer Sey in which Sey explained that she quit Levi’s after arguing that school should remain open during the early months of the pandemic.
Weiss also started a podcast called Honestly, which in its first month, released among others the following episodes: an interview with Mike Pompeo on foreign policy and the origin of COVID that demonized, of course, Palestinians and China, a debate between reasonable Republican and New York Times columnist David French and far-right filmmaker Christopher Rufo on whether schools should teach critical race theory, an interview with Amy Cooper, the woman who called the cops on Christian Cooper, no relation, a Black bird watcher in Central Park. The interview was intended to “show what the media had intentionally left out of the story.” Curiously, of course, Bari Weiss did not interview Christian Cooper, the victim of the controversy.
And if that weren’t enough, The Free Press had been criticized for publishing outright false statements. In April of 2023, the site published a profile headline, “‘I Felt Bullied’: Mother of Child Treated at Transgender Center Speaks Out.” Author and Atlantic magazine contributor Emily Yoffe told a story of a mother named Caroline who had felt pressured by the St. Louis transgender care center into approving a puberty blocker called Supprelin for her child, pseudonymously named Casey. Casey, according to Yoffe, suffered a “devastating decline in his mental and physical health after this intervention.” Side note about Yoffe: she used to write the Dear Prudence column for Slate.
The story was found to be wildly inaccurate and often false. The St. Louis Post Dispatch published a story in March of 2023 in which nearly two dozen parents of patients at the center stated that the treatment their children received was far more careful and methodical than the one represented in the article. And Casey, the pseudonymous subject of the article, the teenager in question took to Twitter under their real name Alex to note that Caroline “expressed her frustration with the transgender clinic at Washington University, many of which are false perceptions that my mom has about the doctors and clinic.” Alex later added, “The article makes it out that my mother had no say in the implant of the Supprelin. This is completely false.”
So, we’re off to a kind of dubious start. So, it’s a lot of finding lurid and salacious cancel culture stuff gone too far, sloppy editorial standards. Obviously, it’s about reinforcing their own worldview and finding these campus extremists. And of course, the positions themselves are fairly standard issue conservative positions: anti-trans, anti-Palestinian, anti any kind of COVID protections. Anything like that is considered woke and bad and annoying. But again, it’s framed as rebellious iconoclasm.
Nima: Yeah, and by this point, Weiss wasn’t just the owner of a bogus but still much heralded media company, no, she was also the new co-founder of a university. In 2021, The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s publication, released an announcement about the launch of what it called the University of Austin, later abbreviated as UATX, which would essentially be an unaccredited depository for right-wing academics who considered themselves canceled and needed a new intellectually free home. Here is an excerpt from that announcement:
On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender.
Now, what exactly do you think the Portland State philosophy of Professor Peter Boghossian may have done to elicit such harassment as stated in this announcement? Well, as just one example, he authored a left-punching “satirical” academic article entitled “Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon,” published and now retracted in the journal Gender, Place, and Culture. In the piece, Boghossian asked if “dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?” Ah, so hilarious. It’s like Portlandia for the right.
Adam: So, yeah, he’s trying to do a Sokal affair, which is where you sort of publish ridiculous, satirical left-wing satire in left-wing publications because they don’t really edit it. They kind of just trust you. So, he committed fraud, basically. He deceived people, took advantage of people’s, you know, good faith, and earnestness to make them look like a bunch of fucking loopy weirdos. And this is a common way of approaching, I guess, I don’t know, queer theory, gender theory, you know, whatever. They’re so lame, right? And Pano Kanelos, who’s now President of the University of Austin, went on to make this faux-populist appeal, writing:
The priority at most other institutions is simply to avoid financial collapse. They are in a desperate contest to attract a dwindling number of students, who are less and less capable of paying skyrocketing tuition. Over the last three decades, the cost of a degree from a four-year private college has nearly doubled; the cost of a degree from a public university has nearly tripled. The nation’s students owe $1.7 trillion in loans.
And to what end? Nearly 40% of those who pursue a college degree do not attain one. We should let that sink in. Higher education fails 4 in 10 of its students. A system that so brazenly extracts so much from so many without delivering on its basic promises is overdue for a reckoning.
Adam: Weiss would echo these points in one of her many appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO. This clip from January 2023, she takes this populist track. You see, they simply care about the inequities in higher education.
[Begin clip]
Bari Weiss: There are something like 4,000 universities in the country. You wouldn’t think that we need another one. And yet, somehow, all of these schools with all of these unbelievable endowments that have fancy slogans like veritas and claims to truth in their motto and in their mission statement, you know, and above the doorposts of the schools, they don’t actually believe in those missions anymore. You know, I think often these days, college degrees aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.
Bill Maher: They are bullshit.
Bari Weiss: If someone applies for a job with me and they haven’t graduated college or gone to college, I am more interested in that.
Bill Maher: Well, and this is why this elitist argument works so well in places like Ohio. There’s nothing more elitist than college.
[End clip]
Adam: Alright, so needless to say, both Bill Maher and Bari Weiss went to Ivy League colleges. Bill Maher went to Cornell, Bari Weiss went to Columbia University. So, this is a common tactic for people who are elite, who want to position themselves as non-elite, to mock fancy dancy colleges. But of course, one of the reasons why they’re in their positions is because they went to fancy, fancy colleges. Now, does that mean college doesn’t rip off students? Yes, but of course, they’re not responding to this by saying we need free college education, by saying we need universal funding of higher education like they do in several other countries.
Nima: They’re complaining that students are paying so much to get the wrong ideas.
Adam: Right, to get to live the liberal indoctrination. Therefore, the solution is to go to Silicon Valley, find other billionaires to back your right-wing college as if there aren’t already conservative colleges, right? This, of course, is just omitted. And obviously many of these universities themselves, including Cornell and Columbia are themselves in many ways, deeply conservative. Yeah, they may have a token left-winger here or there or a token far-left winger here or there to kind of give the appearance of open-mindedness. But broadly speaking, these institutions produce conservative, ideological outputs. I mean, it’s not like they’re doing things that are genuinely subversive, again, with rare exception.
Nima: And if they’re not overtly persecuting, say, trans people, then clearly they’ve been overrun by the woke mob.
Adam: Well, they’re not doing the skull measuring shit. Yeah, exactly. And this is the thing she’s painting with this extremely broad brush because she needs to create a victim narrative, and this is her whole shtick. Again, I can’t keep going back to this, whether she’s at an Ivy League school, whether she’s at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, rising the ranks of media, getting cushy media jobs, born into a wealthy family in Pittsburgh, but she has to constantly paint herself as some oppressed person who’s sort of just speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, she’s able to start a university, which, again, is not something you really can do if you’re, you know, you’re not some obscure Dickensian orphan or in some prison somewhere. This is a pretty elite thing to do.
Adam: So, the University of Austin received quite a bit of cash itself, contrary to what Bari Weiss implied in that interview. In November of 2023, University of Austin President Kanelos stated that the “university” has raised around $200 million or about 80% of the school’s $250 million fundraising goal. As Noah Rawlings wrote for the New Inquiry in 2024, “That number is significantly larger than the endowment of comparably small schools, like Antioch College ($49.5 million), American Baptist College, ($11.2 million), and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts ($4.6 million).”
Adam: Also, one might argue that those at the top ranks of the schools are definitionally members of the elite. Other co-founders of the University of Austin include Niall Ferguson, a Reaganite Hoover Institution fellow; Arthur Brooks, the former president of the American Enterprise Institute and current “chief happiness correspondent” for The Atlantic; and Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and big-time Republican donor worth about half a billion dollars. So, these people, we’re told, are going to take on the elites. Again, I don’t even know what the fuck they’re talking about at this point.
Lonsdale is known for arguing in now-deleted tweets in December of 2021 that Black people had “broken cultures” and needed to “stop having as many kids born out of wedlock.” He also wrote a pro-rape book, I believe, in college, but we’ll skip over that. The University of Austin, which Discourse Blog’s Rafi Schwartz aptly describes as “a laughably stupid exercise in masturbatory libertarian whining,” also counts among its members loads of corporate executives and venture capitalists, including Peter Thiel and Chase Koch, son of Charlie Koch. According to the website, so-called “members” — these are members, these are the wealthy members who are part of the founding members’ council. And they can “help design industry-relevant curricula; sponsor research; mentor students; participate in executive events; promote internships and jobs.”
So, here you have billionaires with direct influence over what people learn, how they learn, and who gets to learn what, which, again, is the ideal Silicon Valley right-wing idea of education that without any firewall at all, the pretense of independence is about being dependent on and to be steered by super rich people who, again, we are told are not elites.
Nima: That’s right. And so, it should come as no surprise that Bari Weiss’s media company, The Free Press was recently, just at the end of September 2024, valued at $100 million because of a new round of funding, namely from hedge fund billionaire Paul Marshall. So again, the money is flowing. There is no lack of platforming. And yet, who are the iconoclastic truth-tellers who, you know, just need to venture out on their own because their ideas are so dangerous to our liberal elite.
Adam: And again, this ties into the theme we talked about, the not left or right guy. Because again, Bari Weiss routinely refuses to call herself conservative or right-wing. She’s identified as a liberal. In fact, every article she writes criticizing the left starts off with, Well, I’m liberal, but —
Nima: Sure.
Adam: Right. It’s just like, what is it about? Again, this is astroturf to a great extent. She gets funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, obviously boosted by right-wing media, boosted by corporate media, boosted by CNN, etc. But there is some organic, I think, market for this kind of conservative media that isn’t conservative. And again, this is something Bill O’Reilly would always do. He’d always say, I’m not conservative, I’m not Republican, I’m independent. Glenn Beck always did this. You’re not Republican, you’re not Democrat, you play it by ear. And there is this sort of self-image people have of being rebels that you can pander to while making fairly inoffensive, not very subversive, conservative claims and positions, picking on obscure trans kids in Missouri or trying to get pro-Palestinian academics fired, which Bari Weiss has spent the last year doing nonstop.
Nima: Because everyone wants to be a rebel, right? Like, you don’t want to be part of the power structure. In your cool, journalistic or fuzzy intellectual sense of self, you want to be the iconoclast, the truth-teller, the one that, like, you know, hey, I’m just sharing possibly dangerous ideas. But if all you’re doing is just recycling and regurgitating right-wing pablum, then you need to invent a new identity, and that identity is built around being persecuted for your ideas. And that persecution is seen as then validating those ideas. Like, oh, if it weren’t offending anyone then I guess I wouldn’t be doing anything important. But the reason you’re offending people is because you’re racist, right? The reason you’re offending people is because you’re anti-trans. The reason you’re offending people is because you’re pretending that there’s some intellectual veneer to just appalling ideologies about the world and other people and other identities, and then using that to claim victimhood on yourself. And then using that to raise millions and millions of dollars for your fake, iconoclastic truth-telling media outlets and university scams.
Adam: The reason why the Koch brothers are involved is that this has been their shtick for decades, that to attack higher education as elitist, which again, is obviously the total inverse of what they’re doing. Because to even have the modicum of independence or firewall or academic freedom, and within that context, you’ll have a few left-wingers, right? I mean, there are left-wingers at university, no doubt, rather than just liberals who they call left-wingers but are, you know, sort of just biding their time before they work for the US State Department or whatever, right? These aren’t genuine left-wingers in the sense they’re subversive, right? But they’ll have a couple token ones, and this outrages them. This is unacceptable. Everyone has to be under the umbrella of the hundred billionaires that run the country. And this is why the Koch brothers have spent tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars attacking higher education. And K-12, let’s not forget that. But also universities, right? This was [30:54]’s shtick. You don’t need to go to college. It’s stupid and gay
Nima: After he majored in opera at college, by the way.
Adam: You’re right. They all have fucking college degrees. That’s what’s so funny about this. They take a genuine popular anger towards the rising cost of college and the general sense that only those in college deserve a middle-class life. But rather than saying we need to give people who have non-college jobs, working-class jobs better standards of living through unionization, through higher minimum wage, through universal health care, through universal free education, right? This would be the track you would take. This would be the genuine populist track. You piss and moan about bisexual gender study queers who annoy you. And also, we need to have Silicon Valley have even more control over education and use the University of Austin as a kind of extreme Vanguard, as almost like a PR effort, as part of a broader attack on higher education based on a totally fictional, broad brush impression. What Bari Weiss said about education is simply just not true. I mean…but it’s just a broad brush you take. It’s just fake, faux populace suspender slapping, oh well, you know the elites, and it’s like, you went to fucking Colombia. You’re from a wealthy fa — what are you talking about? And it’s a shtick the right has been doing for a very long time, which is you take genuine frustration with the elitist, highly expensive, conservative, ideological, and class reproduction elements of college, and then you totally misidentify the solution. Rather than democratizing it, making it free, I guess everyone’s supposed to have their own Silicon Valley billionaires.
And then you can indoctrinate the way that you want. To discuss this more, we’re now going to be joined by writer and editor Katherine Krueger, co-owner of the Discourse Blog. Katherine will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
Nima: We are joined now by Katherine Krueger. Katherine, great to have you back on Citations Needed. The last time we spoke to you was literally between our seventh and eighth episodes ever back in September of 2017. It has been way too long. Welcome back to Citations Needed.
Katherine Krueger: Thank you so much. Yeah, I feel like I’ve had three or four defunct media jobs since then so it’s great to be back.
Adam: Well, that’s actually below the average. So well, we really appreciate it. I want to sort of talk broadly about Bari Weiss’s shtick, which, you know, she’s someone who rose through elite media, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, went to an Ivy League school, comes from a wealthy family, has fairly boilerplate conservative views with the exception of perhaps some social issues and has been the subject of over a dozen fawning media profiles in major magazines from New York Magazine to The Guardian yet she insists upon marketing herself her various media projects, which are almost impossible to keep up with, as a bold truth-teller, as an edgy outsider, kind of taking on the supposed liberal hegemony, the liberal media hegemony. Now, since the dawn of conservatism, conservatives in the United States especially, have always gone out of their way to frame their reactionary politics as actually subversive. So, this is not necessarily new shtick, but she’s taken it to kind of tedious extremes, especially with respect to her taking on what she views as academia or kind of elite academia, manifesting most absurdly in the University of Austin. So, I want to sort of begin by talking about this general idea, this general obsession with being a bold outsider and how this doesn’t conform to reality from your perspective.
Katherine Krueger: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, Bari Weiss, you know, I basically view her through the lens of, you know, a suburban rich girl where their worst fear is being unmasked as someone with nothing to say. You know, she kind of comes on the scene as a Columbia student. This is back in ’05, I think, being covered by the New York Times, the newspaper she would eventually work at and infamously leave, leading what she had already branded as a free speech crusade but what is really, you know, an effort to tamp down free speech against a number of Arab and Muslim professors at Columbia for being critical of Israel. From there, she works at The Wall Street Journal, but she really becomes the Bari Weiss we know and love when she comes back to the New York Times and works as, I believe, an editor on the opinion section. And, you know, while she’s at The Times, she publishes what I view as basically some really milquetoast reheated conservative takes.
But you know, everything boiled over when she was responsible for publishing an op-ed during the summer of Black Lives Matter by Senator Tom Cotton, which basically argued that, you know, the National Guard should be engaging in a military response to stop these, you know, protesters against police brutality in the streets. Naturally, that did not go over very well with her colleagues at The Times. And I think really sets her up as someone who — maybe she views herself as a bold truth-teller but really realizing that you are so out of step and so unpopular, not only with this country as it exists today but especially with your peers, you know, in your age bracket, in your socioeconomic bracket, and certainly among media elites. So after that, she infamously left The Times, wrote a scathing letter to the publisher of The Times about leaving. You know, there’s no free inquiry left anymore. Blah, blah, blah. And now she’s really emerged in what I view as kind of her final form, which is running The Free Press, which is, I call it a newsletter, but I guess it’s a Substack, that there was reporting about how it’s valued at, apparently, $100 million, following, you know, a bunch of big hedge fund investments. So, that’s where we meet Weiss today.
Adam: Yeah, because I want to talk about the other manifestation of this, she sent out a somewhat amusing tweet we mocked earlier on the show where she references her partnership with John Lonsdale, who’s one of the founders of Palantir, is worth about half a billion dollars. And she said something to the effect of, you know, it started as a dream three years ago between me and John Lonsdale and Niall Ferguson, and now it’s true. We’re opening the University of Austin. It’s like, yeah, if you have a faint ambition for a project and you happen to be sitting next to somebody with half a billion dollars, it’ll manifest. And it’s funny how that works.
Nima: It was through just the true sweat and grit of her convictions.
Katherine Krueger: It’s bootstrapping. It’s grassroots. You know.
Adam: Yeah, you know how her peers didn’t like her. But I think maybe a more precise way to say that is that her peers of color probably hated her, and obviously those who were sort of further down the chain of command at the New York Times. Rather than say you’re James Bennett, who, of course, ended up defending her because, again, I think most of what she says is kind of boilerplate. Again, she was brought on at the same time as Bret Stephens who was kind of her mentor, and they more or less all have the same takes. You know, it’s the same basic takes, which is like Palestinians deserve to be turned into sawdust. Climate change is who cares? Trans people are out of control. And the fact that she was brought down indicates to me maybe a little bit of a faux quit, a kind of understanding of the grift, what could have been better monetized elsewhere.
Nima: Right, right. You can’t fire me. I quit stuff while also kind of simultaneously doing the thing where it’s like, oh, you’re calling me out on my bad opinions. I guess you just can’t handle the truth.
Adam: Yeah, she wasn’t at The New York Times lunch table, and they just, you know, they did the thing where she’s all by herself like Little Man Tate.
Katherine Krueger: Yeah, she’s really perfected this grift, which is being able to dine out twice. You know, she just kind of sends out test balloons. It reminds me of The Onion headline about Glenn Danzig just going door to door and trying to scare people. You know, she’ll put out a test balloon of something like, hey, does this shock you? And then people get mad. Then she gets to accuse him of attacking her right to free speech, basically.
Adam: It’s the Bill Maher formula, which we discussed. It’s the Blink 182 of politics where you can be edgy but not subversive. So, it’s like, I don’t want to actually challenge centers of power and actual people in power and the wealthy and the military-industrial complex, but I’m going to go after some trans people, college kids that are supposedly, in the Elon Musk right-wing formulation, are in fact the centers of power, right? Associate editors at Teen Vogue go home every day to their mansions and twiddle their mustaches, right? And that kind of faux populism, I think, as we discussed — we discussed other people in that world.
Nima: Yeah, I’d love to ask you, Katherine, about one of the areas that Weiss keeps returning to in her crusade against Big Woke and that is the consistent and vitriolic attacks on trans people, which you have written about yourself, the way that Bari Weiss has done this. Can you talk a bit about the case of Jamie Reed specifically, and its particular position in the Bari Weiss broader political crusade of taking on Big Trans.
Katherine Krueger: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So for me, this was kind of a high water mark in her turn from someone that was worthy of just being mocked and to write it online to someone who’s, I hate to call everything dangerous, but you know someone for whom these words she’s publishing have real-world weight, right? So, this was months back she published a first-person op-ed from this person, Jamie Reed, who used to work at a transgender counseling center in St. Louis, I believe. And it was basically all about, you know, I had to leave because this was just a chop shop. It included allegations like these poor, confused, and mentally ill kids are coming in here thinking mistakenly, of course, that they’re trans and that they want gender-affirming care. And also, the insane, not supported by evidence contention that you could basically have bottom surgery the same day or something. You know, just contributing to this argument that any of this gender-affirming care, particularly hormones, or even more so surgical options are offered or undertaken lightly at all.
And in response to this, there was great local reporting by the St. Louis Dispatch, I believe, who spoke to two dozen family members and actual trans people who were patients at the clinic, which is something you know, Bari Weiss, for her part, is never interested in doing. They all said that basically, the road was long for us to seek gender-affirming care. None of this was made hastily. I was not used as some kind of bargaining chip in my parents’ custody battle. I had to get both of my parents on board. Basically, it rebutted all of the really harmful claims that Jamie Reed said she witnessed at this clinic. And also it seems these people are always obsessed with HIPAA violations. Seems like she really violated HIPAA by reading these kids’ files and things like that. The real-world implication was that, I believe the Attorney General said he was launching an investigation into this clinic in particular. This is in Missouri where, at least, I think, almost a dozen pieces of legislation have been introduced to target gender-affirming care. It’s really something that has real-world implications.
Nima: Yeah, and that she’s used to just, you know, trafficking on this idea of, hey, I’m just a bold truth-teller. And if you can’t handle it, then I guess, you know, the problem is you.
Adam: Yeah, I think there are two parallel funding streams here. I do think it’s both, for want of a better term, organic and also, deeply inorganic. I think she definitely gets a lot of billionaire and multi-millionaire money. That’s been clear. We know that from the university, which we’ll get to in a second. But also, there is just an organic grift of people who want to hear this shit. They want to hear the more lurid, own the libs stuff. And you see that with the rise of a lot of the Substack. Not me, of course, I’m above all that. But for others on Substack who have a hundred times my revenue, and that’s the only reason I don’t have it. It’s because I’m pure. Clearly, there’s a market there. There’s a sort of stream of partisanship.
And I want to talk about the University of Austin. I think this is very curious because it is unique in the right-wing protestations and grift media framework because it seems like something that you would do if you’re at some Austin Silicon Valley party at 2 am, just banging lines. And you’d be like, what if we started a university that was like, fuckin’, you can just be independent from everything. None of that woke fire shit. They’re like, yeah, fucking do it. And then, like, one of them transfers $20,000.
Katherine Krueger: Again, you’re sitting around the kitchen table with your libertarian billionaire friends. Yeah, with a little hard work and grit and bootstrapping…
Nima: That’s right.
Adam: It’s kind of an interesting market proposition, which is the idea that you can go to university where you don’t get all the woke stuff, and you can take classes. And I guess in their mind, they think they’re taking classes, and like, you know, colonialism is good, right? That’s Niall Ferguson’s whole thing.
Nima: Yeah.
Katherine Krueger: Judeo-Christian values.
Adam: Yeah, Judeo-Christian. You know, the syllabus is gonna be nothing but Plato and Socrates. As if you go to the University of Texas, that isn’t also your, right. It’s gonna be dead white men and no one else, I guess, is the idea. But, of course, the whole thing, especially with the crackdown on Gaza protests, and that’s what makes their whole premise incredibly dubious. And it’s worth noting that in the speech that they opened up when they did the inaugural class a few months ago, the speech they opened up with made an explicit reference to basically not permitting Gaza protest on their campus as being a sign that they support free speech. Again, this free speech is utterly meaningless in this context. So, I want to ask you about the University of Austin specifically because it is, again, it is a kind of novel iteration. Not that there haven’t been right-wing colleges founded before but not ones that seem to emerge purely out of a Silicon Valley fever dream. Usually, it’s some religious crank or whatever.
Nima: And that are still waiting another five plus years for actual accreditation.
Adam: Hey, man, Liberty University’s got a hell of a football team. I want to ask about University of Austin and its specific milieu. And most importantly, do you think it’s child abuse to send your kid there? Because I’m curious who these parents are, like, You need to go to the University of Austin.
Katherine Krueger: If it is child abuse, I think any kid who would want to go to this university deserves it, and therefore, it should be legally permitted.
Adam: Fair enough. I think the state should take the kid, give him a wedgie, then send them to a real college. I think that’s the compromised position.
Katherine Krueger: Yeah, yeah. It is so interesting that in order to be bold truth-tellers, you have to basically create this hot house in the state of Texas of all places where you couldn’t possibly be opposed to any opposing ideas. You know, if you really wanted to challenge the free speech heterodoxy, shouldn’t you try and reform college campuses from the inside? But I’m really excited to see how this inaugural class goes. The inaugural class just began this fall, I believe, and I’ll never forget, there was reporting on the university, if you can even call it that, a while back, which I think was for one of those forbidden courses, which is so funny. And the key is there was a photo involved in the story, which was just a guy kind of brainstorming on the whiteboard. And among these forbidden ideas was can white people use the N-word? And it just made me laugh because it’s like, yes, ah, the inquiring minds have asked this since the beginning of, you know, since classical antiquity, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I wish them all the best in getting into their graduate programs at the end of four years if this whole thing doesn’t dry up by then.
Adam: Hey, you’re gonna laugh when they graduate with the skull-measuring degree.
Nima: [Laughs] That’s right.
Katherine Krueger: Yeah, yeah. They’re gonna be my bosses someday.
Adam: Well, that was another thing. The second thing you said after we will basically clamp down on a permit Gaza protest as if that was going to be a problem with these suck-ups anyway, was that they were going to basically design their curriculum to appeal to business CEOs. It was the exact language. So, it is also an issue of free speech that is going to make you a great automaton, I guess? Again, this definition of free speech strikes me as fairly blinkered.
Katherine Krueger: Right, and it’s so stupid because, you know, it’s not like any other university, especially elite universities, are being even a little wishy-washy on the issue of clamping down on pro-Gaza protests, right? Like Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, this is mainstream so yeah, threatening to clamp down on something that won’t happen is really bold.
Nima: Right, but Katherine, you know, they also might have DEI officers or some sort of public statement about reckoning with the real history of this country, and that is a no-go at the University of Austin.
Adam: But the thing is, I think it’s predicated on a very goofy idea of college that, again, everyone who starts these universities or complains about them, they haven’t really been in school in 20 years. I mean, perhaps they have kids in college, I guess. But I mean, their perceptions of college are largely downstream from Tucker Carlson, Fox News and this kind of cherry-picked, you know, Jonathan Chait, you know, they discontinued The Vagina Monologues because it was exclusionary to, you know, women without vaginas. This kind of one-off stuff. And I think it really warps their perception. I genuinely think they think that or at least maybe the ones that are less sophisticated and just writing checks, I think they genuinely think that college, for most people, is this bastion of Marxist orthodoxy.
Katherine Krueger: I think it really gives up the game that what they really hate is the young, and what they really feel but can’t articulate is the idea that the generation coming up behind them, including their own children, no matter where they send them to college, fucking hate you, and they hate your politics, and they can’t wait for you to die and stop voting.
Nima: Right.
Katherine Krueger: Which is why you need someone like Bari Weiss who’s a lesbian, she’s young, she’s been in the liberal halls of power. This is who they need, you know, like Sheldon Adelson’s reanimated head. That generation of moneyed conservatives need this young woman who they’re all astroturfing, or, you know, largely astroturfing into what they’re claiming is popularity. They need someone like that to point to, and, you know, soothe themselves to sleep about the idea that their whole project is collapsing as they age.
Nima: Right. I mean, something that seems to be consistent in this kind of ideology is really being frustrated with young people who care about things.
Katherine Krueger: Yes, yes.
Nima: And that the ultimate way to be like that libertarian CEO type is this faux not caring about things.
Katherine Krueger: Right.
Nima: Your conservative ideology is so, to you, status quo. That just means living your life, man. That’s just being super basic and like, why does everyone care about everything? Like, why can’t people just calm the hell down and just read some philosophy and take AP economics courses? But I think part of this also, Katherine, comes down to this consistent need of right-wingers to not just admit to being right-wingers. The idea that Bill O’Reilly has done this, Glenn Beck has done this, the Tea Party. It’s the idea like, oh, no, we’re not even, you know, we’re not really affiliated with any kind of political party. I don’t, you know, consider myself a right-winger. I just think the things I think. And it’s the kind of similar identity of a whole host of Trump supporters where it’s claiming that you’re not something that you are because you just won’t admit to it whereas I think most liberals and leftists would be like, hey, I’m liberal or I’m a progressive, I’m a leftist. But there’s this resistance or this need to distance yourself from the right-wing label when your ideology is clearly right-wing. So what do you, Katherine, chalk this constant branding and rebranding up to? Why is the label of being right-wing, which is clearly the political ideology of Bari Weiss and her buddies, why is that so toxic for them to just admit to?
Katherine Krueger: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s a crucial rebranding that they view as a response to an existential threat, which, again, I think is so generational. Young people on the whole respond to the conservative project as they should, which is viewing it top to bottom as repugnant, especially on social issues. That’s why, you know, you have to say, it’s not that I hate trans people. I actually love trans people. I love trans people so much that I think we should, you know, make the road a lot longer for them to get gender-affirming care. Or, you know, I’m not racist. Regular conservatives are racist. I just think that, you know, police keep our community safe. Or, you know, even more arcane or esoteric than that.
Yeah, you know, I live in New York, I also see this shit as kind of like the whole downtown, this kind of new nihilism, you know, the whole trad-cath thing, these spaces that are literally funded by Peter Thiel. This bizarre rebranding, which I think comes honestly post-Bernie losing, which was like, well, that was our chance to believe in something, and we didn’t really even believe in it then because we were worried about being made fools of for having believed in something. And so, we’ll never be caught out doing that again because that’s embarrassing. So, it’s this really weird, desperate need to cast conservatism as anything other than what it is. And, you know, worse to me is conservatism but it’s like, kind of punk rock or it’s in any way cool. Or even more than that, it’s in any way novel, right? These people so often think that what they’re saying should be offensive in part because serious people should take them seriously because they’re saying something smart or new when, in fact, they’re simply not.
Adam: Yeah, and that’s the thing. I think that, again, maybe this is a bit of a minor aesthetic criticism, but I do think it does reveal that it’s an emergent property of an underlying reality, which is that being conservative is seen in our culture as clashing with this self-identity of an iconoclast rebel. Nobody can just be Edmund Burke, no one can just be conservative. You can’t just be, I like the way things are, let’s keep them more or less.
Katherine Krueger: Yeah, conservatives have got no swag. They can’t hang, there’s no aesthetic there. So, you have to retcon something else.
Adam: And maybe some of them are squeamish with, like, religious conservatism, right? Maybe they’re pro-choice, light pro-choice or maybe they like weed or whatever, right? But that’s like, what? Five percent? I mean at that point, what are you doing here? And of course, Elon Musk does this all the time among others, and this is a whole ecosystem of media. I’m not conservative. I’m just responding to what I view as liberal or far-left excess. The Democratic Party has been captured by the far left, and I stayed the same. I didn’t leave, the Democratic Party left me, blah, blah, blah. Right? Reagan did this 45 years ago, and of course, in that context, it was the Civil Rights Movement.
And it’s just like, I don’t know, man, you just got old and rich. And you’re confused by these new bisexuals and their baggy clothes, and you don’t know what to do, and you kind of just fucking hate them, and your kids don’t talk to you anymore, you know, if you’re Elon Musk and others. And it’s like, again, it’s this neurosis that you see so much. It’s like every Fox News — I’m not a party guy, you know, Glenn Beck did this. You know, you don’t believe in right and left. You believe in the truth. We’ve talked about this to death in the show, but there’s something so tedious about that because it’s about self-branding and self-identity. But people just generally can’t say, yeah, I don’t know. I like low taxes, and I think that queers are weird and probably should be isolated. It’s like, we’ll just say that.
Nima: No, they have to be iconoclasts who are, you know, in the dark web because somehow they get to maintain some cool points, right? Like, that’s the aesthetic.
Katherine Krueger: Yeah, honestly, one of the worst things Bari Weiss has wrought is the concept of the intellectual dark web, which, you know, I guess these people are on the web, but the first word is where it really breaks down. None of these people are intellectuals, none of them are cool. This is all just the same reheated bullshit. I read this whole preening need to rebrand as coming out of a deep insecurity. It’s actually, you are unpopular. Your ideology is being left behind, and so you have to engage in these increasingly desperate mind games with yourself and also to please your billionaire friends at the Sun Valley Conference or whatever.
Nima: Yeah, I think it’s this idea of, you know, every time there’s a Bari Weiss conference, there’s free speech conference or whatever, everyone’s coming out to their pro-wrestling walk-on music. Like oh, these are the truth tellers doing battle in the new woke gone crazy society, and we’re gonna share our new ideas for getting us back to common sense and open discourse, open exchange of ideas. But like, it’s just the most banal conservatism with sexism and misogyny and racism and anti-trans and anti-Muslim rhetoric thrown in.
Katherine Krueger: Everything except anti-Israel, right? That’s the ultimate free-speech carveout, is the limits of free speech. And also, you know, the limits of free speech being who can afford to, you know, pay $10,000 for a table or whatever.
Nima: Exactly, exactly. Or you know, for the tuition at their fake university, which I think you know will soon be accredited in the year 2031. But this has been great to have you on again. Katherine, before we let you go, please tell our listeners where they can find your writing, what they should be looking forward to, what you’re working on these days.
Katherine Krueger: Oh, thank you. So, I just had a piece go up at The Nation. I’m writing freelance, a bunch of places coming up. But you can mostly read my political commentary, movie reviews, all that good stuff over at Discourse Blog. My stuff is often behind the paywall unfortunately so please subscribe. We are an actual independent media outlet not valued at $100 million so every little bit helps.
Adam: Get on that. You need to do more stuff about manufacturing controversies with whistleblowers who are the assistant Uber driver to the guy at a hospital.
Katherine Krueger: I know, I know, I really just don’t have that dog in me, I guess.
Nima: Well, we have been speaking with Katherine Krueger, writer, editor and co-owner of Discourse Blog. You can find her writing all over the place. Go check it out. Katherine, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed. It had been way too long.
Katherine Krueger: Such a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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Adam: Yeah, the “intellectual dark web” was coined in a glossy New York Times profile. The most widely read English publication is doing a profile on the intellectual dark web. These are people that are already known, they’re already popular, they already have large podcasts, or they’re published in large media, but they’re the dark web, and it’s like, well, okay, that’s not how that works. And look, do I think there are people that are kind of in the margins who have their own podcast, who have right-wing views because again, they entertain ideas that offend liberal sensibilities? Sure, but they’re still well-funded. They’re still platformed by conservative media. They’re platformed by CNN. These aren’t genuinely dark web. I can’t find Joe Rogan’s podcast. I gotta go to some weird fucking Bulgarian website. I mean, the whole concept is absurd, and I just wish people would be more honest.
Nima: They’re just in the dank recesses of the internet, Adam, because they can’t possibly be public about how they feel for fear of reprisal and cancellation.
Adam: You work at the New York Times. When I was a hipster in the late 2000s, back when I thought I was cool. If you read something in the New York Times, it was already five years old at that point. I mean, if you’re reading about intellectual rebels in the New York Times, they’re probably pretty safe and conservative by that point, at least. So, I mean, the whole thing is predicated on this idea that people who overtly offend liberal sensibilities, right? Because liberalism is fundamentally about euphemism, right? David Brooks has been saying the same shit in New York Times for 30 years, but he knows how to sort of couch it in liberalese. The only offense some of these people she mentions broke is that they kind of were overtly racist or overtly homophobic or overtly transphobic. So, really, it’s an issue of aesthetics. It’s an issue of emphasis, which is, again, why they’re profiled in the New York Times because they’re not genuinely subversive in any meaningful way because if they were, they would not be profiled in the New York Times.
Nima: No, right. Because so much of this relies on projection as well. The idea that, you know, Jordan Peterson who rails against so-called victim mentality, always claims himself to be a victim of cancel culture for just speaking his mind about being racist and misogynistic and all those other things that he can’t possibly find public forums for even though he has all the platforms that he wants.
Adam: Look man, they want to do race science, and they want to do gender essentialism, and they need a space to do that. That’s what a lot of this boils down to, to be honest. When they talk about forbidden ideas, and it’s like that goose meme, what forbidden ideas? Oh, it’s just more racism. It’s never anything genuinely subversive. It’s just like, oh, you want to bring back eugenics. Oh, okay.
Nima: Right. And so therefore, once they say that in public, and people actually call them out on it, all of a sudden they’re oppressed, right? Their entire ideology is built upon wanting to oppress others without any kind of backlash. And so, when there is pushback on their overt desires to oppress other people, they then claim themselves to be the victim. It is all about projection and as we’ve been saying, this kind of faux iconoclasm. We are the ones that are telling the truth, man. And they’re just not letting us. The liberals are so illiberal, and then you get 100 million dollar checks written to you by right-wing Silicon Valley billionaires. That’s how that works. Congratulations, you’ve done it. You’ve brought the intellectual dark web into the light.
Well, that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening. You can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook at Citations Needed and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com/citationsneededpodcast. We don’t run ads, we don’t have corporate sponsors, don’t have Silicon Valley billionaires cutting us checks. So, we are able to do this show because of the incredible generosity and support of listeners like you. And as always, a very special shout-out goes to our critic-level supporters on Patreon. I am Nima Shirazi.
Nima: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, October 30, 2024.
Transcription by Mahnoor Imran.
