 This is the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Alright, thanks for coming out. This is part of Reason's Little Singer series of salons and our guest tonight is James Kerchick, the author most recently of the book, Secret City, the Hidden History of Gay Washington. We're going to be talking to him about his work and his career and his commitments to free speech. You define yourself, Jamie, which is how you go by you define yourself as a free speech absolutist. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't we start by, tell me, what does that mean? Like, because you obviously don't believe in free speech always being legal, do you? I support the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which is the most expansive in terms of any law of any country in the world and basically permits any speech that is short of inciting imminent violence or could be or harassment, right? Yeah. Short of that, I think we should have a pretty wide berth. You recently turned 40 years old. So you are, what, a millennial? Technically, I turned 40, yes. On the inside, you're obviously much older. But why? I mean, so millennials and even worse Gen Z, are there any Gen Z in the audience? Okay, look at one. But why are you a free speech absolutist? Your generation does not believe in free speech anymore. I mean, I maybe trace it back to I think when I was in sixth grade and I read 1984. And I wasn't really politically aware of anything or much until that point. And that book just sort of opened up a world to me. It sort of, it taught me what the Cold War was. It was great literature. It taught me what freedom meant, it taught me what authoritarianism was. I think the next year I joined Amnesty International, which was a very different organization that we're talking like almost 30 years ago, was a very different organization. It was mostly concerned with you write letters to dictatorships to free political prisoners. So every week it'd be some new, you know, person in some benighted land. And it was literally you'd write like, you know, Dear Commendante, you know, Juarez or something like please release this writer from jail. And then I also actually think I think being a closeted gay person from, you know, until I was 18, not anymore, not anymore. But I think being in the closet from, you know, until I was 18 taught me the value of expression and honesty and speaking your truth. I hate that term, but well, because it's become a sort of form of relativism, you know, my truth, there is a truth, right? But anyway, I think being understanding what it means to have to lie about yourself about something so integral to who you are, it just made me very sensitive to this issue. I mean, in my book, Secret City, I compare sort of the plight of gay men and women in America 50, 60 years ago, to that of dissidents in a communist country, because their bars were rated by the police, their phones were tapped by the FBI, they had to live a lie, they had to pretend to be something that they weren't. And so I really do think that being gay and sort of, you know, suffering in the closet in high school and whatnot made me much more supportive of free speech. I guess a couple things while you're talking, I realize I have a lot of bills that I need to pay, you know, other things in my mind came up. That was a joke that obviously did not go over, right? You should host the Golden Globe. So you thought about that? I turn that down for this, if you can imagine, right? But what, why was it difficult to come out? And what made it easy? There are not easy, but what? Well, I, first of all, everything's relative. And, you know, I grew up in a very, you know, pretty liberal, accepting household. I was very lucky in that sense. I went to an all boys school, which, you know, all male environments tend to be more homophobic, because it's all homophilic. Yeah, my high school, unfortunately, was not. But, you know, it's a kind of, you know, bravado and, you know, proving you're not gay is very much a part of those kinds of environments. I think a lot, by the way, has changed in the 22 years since. I mean, everyone's coming out now at 12 or 13, it seems like. Half of Gen Z is LGBT. I don't believe that for a second, by the way. But that's what it says according to the polls. It's actually fun. And it's incredible when you think of the dramatic change where being gay or LGBT queer, whatever term you want to use, was considered a bad thing, a terrible thing, a sin and whatnot. And now it's like, if you're not, you're awful, right? Or you're not cool. Or you're not interesting. You're not interesting, right? And so that's, that's a strange, somewhat positive. There are also negative aspects to that as well. In Secret City, you talk about how you, the book that you wrote and the history you wrote was possible because of the people who came before you. And, you know, how did they, how did kind of gay liberation? I guess this is a good way to talk about this in conjunction with free speech. And Frank Kamini is kind of the patron saint of free speech as well as of gay liberation. Could you talk a little bit about how his life kind of illustrates what you're talking about? Yeah, I mean, Frank Kamini was a PhD trained Harvard, Harvard trained astronomer. This is back when Harvard was a great university. When it was a state school, before it was an extension school, right? Who was working for the Army Map Service in 1957, which was the predecessor to the Geospatial Intelligence Agency. And you have to understand this is just a couple of months after Sputnik is launched into space, right? So it's the height of the space race. He's working at an observatory out in Hawaii and he's summoned back to Washington and he's fired on the spot because they have evidence that he's gay. And this is during what was called the lavender scare, which was a purge of gay men and women from the federal government. It rivaled the red scare that was going on at the same time in terms of numbers of victims. And what Frank, and you have to understand there were thousands of people up to this point who had lost their jobs, who had been fired, who just sort of slunk off into anonymity because being publicly identified as a homosexual in 1957 was a, you know, it was career death. What Frank did that was so remarkable was he decided, you know what, I'm going to actually challenge this. I'm going to take it to court. And what's interesting is that he tried to get the ACLU to take his case. The ACLU would not take his case. The ACLU would take the cases of people who were accused of communism or actually were a communist. They would not take the case of a homosexual in 1957. He tries to get the Supreme Court to overturn it. They reject it. And he goes on to form the Matashin Society, which is the first real sustained gay rights organization in the United States. They hold the first gay rights demonstration outside the White House in 1965. But every step along the way, every significant progress that was made came because of the First Amendment, right? I mean, these were people who were considered the most despicable people in America. They were perverts. They were sexual deviants. But they had a First Amendment right to express themselves. And it was through that that, you know, over a pretty remarkably short period of time, when you consider the full sweep of American history, to go from 1965 having a demonstration outside the White House, just advocating that people not be fired for being gay 50 years later to having the Supreme Court approve gay marriage. The Supreme Court be 50% gay, although they're still in the closet, right? I don't know about that. No. I think they're all Jews. They're all Jews and Catholics. Yeah, no, that's a big problem. And a lot of them are from New Jersey. Don't even get me started. No, but that is amazing to think about. And Kamini himself was an outspoken defender of free speech in the First Amendment as absolutely essential to all minority rights and majority rights. Do you think it's true that people, you know, your age, millennials and younger Gen Z, are they less respective, respecting of the First Amendment and the free speech? We know this. We can look at the polling results. Fire has conducted. I think you have a majority of college students now support forcibly preventing people from speaking on college campuses, if they consider their views objectionable. And I think it has to do with frankly power. I think that, you know, when progressives or the left were out of power, they were more supportive of free speech. And why was the ACLU founded? It was founded to defend the rights of Bolsheviks and anti-war activists around World War One. And then you look at all the major First Amendment cases. I mean, not all of them, but many of them involve gay rights, women's rights, African-American civil rights. There were some Nazis thrown in, too. Sure. And of course, the guy who led the Nazi march in Skokie was Jewish and gay. Sorry. He was maybe partly Jewish and he's a trifecta, right? Yeah. And I think what's happened is that as the left basically assumed power over a lot of these institutions, the media, certainly the academy, once you're in power, I mean, look, people in power, regardless of their political views, want to keep power. And it's in you don't, you're not, there's not much of an advantage to letting the opponent have their say, right? You have to really believe in the principle to do that. And so I think once these institutions became sort of ideologically monocultural, they just decided to sort of rule them as ideological fiefdoms. When was the crossover in that? Because when did you graduate from college? 2006. Okay. And would you? It wasn't as bad then? I'll tell you, for me, a signal moment was 2015. So it was nine years after I graduated. It was, and you're probably all familiar with this for most of you are, was the Nicholas Christakis Halloween costume furor at Yale University. When a professor wrote an email to her students telling them that Contra, the university, dictat, they should be free to choose whatever Halloween costume they wanted to wear. And also because she was like, don't be a dick about it. I don't even think she said that. I think she's what it's what it started. This was a administrator. And most of these problems on campuses begin with these superfluous administrators sent out an email to the entire university with literally photographs of Halloween costumes that students shouldn't wear. And one of them was like a student wearing a taco or a sombrero or a student in a Native American headdress. I mean, really patronizing to kind of explain to 18 to 22 year old Yale students what they shouldn't wear. I don't recall there being any sort of incidents regarding Halloween costumes when I was a student at Yale, but apparently the situation had changed by 2015. Although you were dressing up as the Baha men, right, with your friends. That just went right by me. Sorry. We'll let it go. But in response to this, a professor wrote to her student saying, look, you're adults, you can choose what costumes you want to wear. If you don't like what one of your peers are wearing, why don't you have a conversation with about it? Instead of going to the administration and complaining, have a conversation as adults. And this led to all hell breaking loose. Her husband was screamed at for three hours, yet cursed that in his face by a mob of angry students. And I watched this video and I felt like civilization was collapsing. This would not have happened at Yale when I was a student there less than a decade before. And so that to me really signified that something had sort of switched. Yeah, clearly something. And Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. They pinpoint that 2013, 2014 they say. Yeah, and they talk about it when students started demanding speech restrictions rather than administrators. That was a fundamental change. I guess my question is like, but Warren wasn't the left completely in control of Yale when you were there. So, you know, I think liberals were, I think liberals were. And I think what we're seeing now is more of a progressive. Yeah, can you I think there's a real distinction between liberals and progressives. I think liberals believe small liberals of which I consider myself one, I think you would consider yourself one, believe in individual rights, believe in might be free speech absolutists to use that term that you and I discussed before. I actually believe you should be mandated to yell fire and credit theaters falsely. That's how much of a liberal iron. And I think progressives don't believe in those things. I think progressives believe in group rights, not individual rights, right? So if an individual says something that could be interpreted as offensive to a group, that therefore would be impermissible because group rights supersede individual rights. That's so that that to me I think is a fundamental difference. And you think that's mostly about power? I mean, the ideology, ultimately, it's really about power and controlling institutions. I think they use these tools to, yes, to stigmatize people, to gain power in institutions and to basically defeat and destroy their ideological opponents. Yeah, you've as a journalist, you've worked at a variety of places and you publish in a variety of places like the Atlantic, the New Republic, Tablet Magazine, The New York Times, Air Mail, et cetera. Do you find, is that split going on there too? The thing, people will always say, well, the media has always been liberal, by and large, but now it has shifted into progressives? Or what's going on there? Is it analogous to universities? I think there's a generational difference in a lot of these institutions, not just media, I think, in publishing too. I mean, let's look back on when Woody Allen was going to have his book published. And Ronan Farrow, Rosemary's Baby, raised a ruckus about this complaining and demanding that the publisher pulp the book. And you had all these editorial assistants, the vast majority of whom were under 30 years old, had a strike. They actually left the office to protest the publication of a book, to which I say, why are you in publishing if you oppose the publication of a book? Go work as a censor in Uzbekistan or something. Like this is not the career for you, right? And you can see this in all these institutions, there's a real generational, and I'm not saying everyone under 30 is like this, okay? And I'm not saying everyone over 30 is on the right side of this, but you can absolutely see in these institutions a generational divide. You talk to people of a certain age, they live in fear of their subordinates. And this I think is a real problem across all these institutions. It's a lack of liberals having a spine and standing up to progressives, which is the same problem on the right, by the way, okay? What did we see over the past seven or eight years? We saw mainstream, reasonable Republicans did not have a spine when it came to Donald Trump. And they just, you know, they, they, it was like spaghetti, they just, they just collapsed. So where is that coming from, though? Then because if it's, it's not simply a liberal or conservative thing, because you're seeing it on the right and the left, that the extremes really are totally running the debates, right? It does seem that way, absolutely. And it's not just an age thing because a lot of those on the right, it's different. On the right, it's different. You know, I don't know. I haven't, I haven't thought about whether it's the same phenomenon on both sides. What are the motivating causes? I think just for, for liberals, it's very difficult when they're confronted with an argument, having anything to do with sort of race, gender, sexual orientation, right? If someone's making an argument from positionality, where it's like, you know, as a, you know, transgender, black, whatever, as a gay man, I tell you, I think a lot of liberals don't know how to respond to that kind of argument. They, they, they get really afraid. And they have difficulties sort of arguing from a position of first principles to say, you know what, it doesn't matter what you are. This is, this is the principle that we have, like we believe in these ideals. And if you don't believe in them, I don't care what you are, you maybe shouldn't work here. With the Woody Allen book, is it, does it matter? I assume you believe Woody Allen is not guilty of raping his daughter? I don't believe, sorry, I, I believe he's innocent. Well, look, there were two government investigations into this. I don't quote the government at me. There were no charges, no charges were ever filed if I'm not mistaken. So we have a legal system in this country, we have a system of justice. He has not been found guilty of any crime. So, and I, you know, to the extent that I've looked into it, and I'm not like a Woody Allen hobbyist, I haven't, but I've read, I've read enough. You're not, you're not old enough yet. Give it another five years, right? But so, by the way, and so, so to me, it was preposterous that one of our most acclaimed filmmakers, right, would have his book canceled because of what I consider to be spurious allegations, having nothing to do with the content of that book, which the book was about his art, about his films. I guess my question is, if he was guilty, if he was writing from prison, would you still feel the same way? And I'm not, I'm not trying to catch you in anything. Like, what is, what is the principle? Like, if you worked at a publishing house, and you know, there's this guy, you know, Hitler that has a great book, I think it's going to go big, right? You know, what, what is the limit of working out of place and saying, you know what, we shouldn't be publishing this thing. And if we do, I'm walking out or I'm quitting. I think that's a, that's a decision that I would respect. I might not agree with it. But I would respect someone saying, you know what, I don't want to publish O.J. Simpson's If I Did It, right? I can understand someone working for Judith Regan at the time deciding, I don't want to do this. In which case, you could find another job. But I don't think, I don't think Woody Allen was, was that case. And you feel more broadly that we're, we become overly sensitized as a society to being afraid of making any kind of offense. Absolutely. Yeah. Let's talk, we're not the worst though, right? Germany might be worse. I want to talk, you know, to run through some of your, some of the articles that you published over the last year or so to kind of clarify how your free speech absolutism kind of works out. For the Atlantic, just a couple of days ago, you wrote a piece that was called or titled, What Happens Where Free Speech is Unprotected? The subtitle is The Case of a Maverick Polemicist Who Will Go on Trial in Germany for Using a Nazi Symbol is a timely reminder of the liberty we should cherish. I guess I gave away the punch line of that. But it's a good example. Who is CJ Hopkins? CJ Hopkins was a guy I met when I was living in Berlin about a decade ago. He's a playwright. He's, by his own description, he's an old lefty. I would say he's, he's probably like a, like a Noam Chomskyite, if I had to put his politics somewhere of that kind of political dispensation. He left America in 2004 because he hated George W. Bush and actually was one of the very few, he's one of those people who's actually, I'm leaving the country because of the election. And he did. He actually did, he actually left. He couldn't have taken David Cross. But he actually left. And I got to know him because I was, he taught like a script writing class and I, and I was taking this class. And I didn't really stay in touch with him, but he added me to his email list. And he beginning in 2016 started writing kind of political satire pieces from a very kind of, you know, old lefty perspective. The pandemic rolled around and unsurprisingly, I guess he became an anti-vax guy. He published a book which is blurred by RFK Jr., calling him our modern Jeremiah. And on the cover of this book is a face mask with a swastika on it. So clearly what he's doing is he's comparing masking policies and COVID vaccinations and the whole sort of public health regime. He's comparing that to Nazism. He doesn't like Nazism. That should be pretty clear from the point, you know, the point that he's making. The German government is now prosecuting him for using a Nazi insignia. They're alleging that he's promoting national socialism. So this just shows to me that, you know, even though he's not violating German law, like you are allowed to display the swastika in certain cases. You can't go out in March with a bunch of Nazis with the swastika in Germany, but you're allowed to use the swastika, and this is from the German constitution, to protest anti-constitutional activities. Now, in his mind, and I don't agree with CJ on this, in his mind, he's protesting what he considers to be fascist policies, right? Making people get vaccinations and wear masks to him is the equivalent of the Third Reich. Personally, I find that ridiculous and maybe even offensive as a Jew. But this is an abuse of the German constitution. This man should not be prosecuted. He's not promoting national socialism. And I think it's important because right now, there was another article in the Atlantic a couple of weeks before mine about what is supposedly a massive problem of Nazis on sub-stack, where a bunch of busy buddies are going around now trying to get sub-stack to kick off people who may consider a term to be Nazis. I haven't looked at his list. I'm suspicious when people draw up lists of people who should be silenced, because yes, could we point to a couple of genuine, bona fide Nazis who have sub-stack newsletters? Sure. But what are they going to do when all those Nazis are kicked off? They're going to find other Nazis, okay? And there are going to be people who, again, I might not agree with, but who should not be considered Nazis and should not have their speech banned. So I just think this is an interesting case because it shows you that even when you are, you know, using a swastika in what in my mind, in everyone's mind is clearly intended as a mode of criticizing Nazism, you can still have the government interpret it how they want, right? It's almost like the German government is acting like Nazis. Well, that's the thing. You couldn't have seen that kind of thing. Well, as I say in the piece, if you're going to, if you're going to punish people for their speech and for accusing you of being a fascist, if you're going to penalize them for that, you're kind of validating the critique at that point. Right. Which brings to mind a piece that you wrote for Quillette, I think about a year ago or thereabouts where about calling out Alice Walker. And everybody, I suspect everybody in this room has read the color purple. Which has just been remade as a film. Yeah. And or seen the movie. And there's two versions of that. Explain the context of that. What were you calling out Alice Walker for? Well, I was at the Mississippi Book Festival, and she was the, I was speaking on a panel about my book, and she was the keynote speaker. She's a notorious anti-Semite. I mean, just she endorses David Ike. Is that how his name is pronounced? David Ike, who believes that there's a kind of what, a lizard people who control the world, basically, many different conspiracies and all these conspiracies. And he was a soccer player who then became a commentator. So it's as if Bob Yooker had become a world conspiracist of lizard people. Yeah. And he thinks that the Jews are, you know, part of this lizard people can. He knows that. Yeah. And Alice Walker has engaged in some, you know, this is not debatable the things that she's said. I mean, she's really, I think she said that the Jews perpetrated, they're also complicit in the Holocaust against themselves as a means of getting global sympathy. Look, a lot of this might stem from the fact that her ex-husband is Jewish. A lot, you actually, you find a lot of some of these crazy anti-Semites, it all begins with the Jewish ex, which is not to, which is not to validate it, but it is an interesting. But it is to explain it perfectly. Anyway, she was invited as a keynote speaker. Okay. Now I had a choice. I could have told the organizers how dare you invite this anti-Semite. I find this so offensive as a Jewish person. This is despicable. I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to show up. You're not going to have your big parties in Mississippi anymore. Boycott the state. What I did was I used, I used an answer to a question that someone asked me to answer a question. And I said, look, yesterday I visited the Civil Rights Museum here in Jackson, which is a great museum. There's a whole display on Jewish contributions to the civil rights movement. There's a prominent rabbi in Jackson who had his house fire bombed in the 1960s. All these details about how, you know, two thirds of the freedom riders were Jews, you know, two of the three civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi were Jewish, Cheney, sorry, Goodman and Schroerner. And I just said, you know, there's this great history of cooperation between blacks and Jews. And I find it really unfortunate that Alice Walker, who clearly cares a lot about civil rights and her people, would spit on that tradition. I think it's really shameful. And I think that she has a right to say these things as despicable as I find them. But I have a right to counter her and have my say. And that to me is sort of the model of how we should deal with these situations. The crowd applauded. And I think a lot of people in the crowd probably didn't know about Alice Walker's history of antisemitism. Did you, you also, now I'm thinking back, we've known each other for years. Didn't you get, was it RT, Russia Today, which doesn't exist anymore? But what does it? It's called, it's not Russia Today. It's called MSNBC. No, I guess they're not Russia today. Fox is Russia Today. But you, was it on RT when on RT? Yeah, you wore, this was the last good example of music rainbow suspenders to further the public good could after after Ronald McDonald or who? Look, nobody's wearing rainbow suspenders anymore. Weren't you wearing that by making that up? It was the summer of 2013. It was right around the time that the Russian government was passing these laws against the promotion of homosexuality. The Duma had just passed them a week or two before. I happened to be invited on RT to offer my opinion on the sentencing of Chelsea, who was then Bradley Manning. And I use that up. I was in Sweden on vacation, and I said, yes, I'll do this, obviously with the with the idea in mind that I'm going to, I'm going to say something about these dreadful, this dreadful law that's being passed in Russia. And I scrambled to find some piece of gay pride paraphernalia in Sweden, which is a lot harder to find than you would think. Well, it's everywhere. I would have thought that because it's such a gay country. Yeah, I had to go. Michael Moynihan is laughing and he knows exactly what I'm talking about. I had to think his ex-wife who is Swedish is laughing even more. There's a reason she emigrated. Oh, God. I went to a vintage clothing store and all I could find were some rainbow suspenders. And this was a live broadcast. And it was in it was weird. It was in the Swedish television cafeteria. That's where they that's where they did this. And there are a bunch of like fake plants behind me. And so it looked like I was in the waiting room of some, you know, suburban office building. And when I was asked to have my say, what do you think about the sentencing of Bradley Manning? I pulled these suspenders on and I shouted at the host for about two minutes. How dare you? You should be ashamed of yourself. You know, you're you're pressing gay people. This is disgusting. And they let me go on for like two and a half minutes. You can find it on YouTube. Yeah. What? Let's talk about Bayard Rustin. Is it Bayard or Bayard? Bayard. I always mispronounce it. He is another civil rights activist. You wrote a great piece in the fall for the New York Times titled Bayard Rustin Challenge Progressive Orthodoxies. How did he do that? Who was Bayard Rustin was known primarily as the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. A movie was just made about him. It's on Netflix. It was produced by the Obamas. It's a great film. It's a great story, not a great film, but continue. He was a former communist. He was a conscientious objector during World War II went to jail went to jail for two years and a black civil rights activist. And he was also an openly gay man. In the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, it was an extremely rare and courageous thing. And in 1963, just a couple of weeks before the march actually, Strom Thurmond outed him on the floor of, I mean, he was out, Rustin was out to his colleagues. Martin Luther King knew that he was gay, right? And maybe that he was a communist too. Yeah, an ex-communist. He was actually very, and I'll get on, he was very much an anti-communist. And just a couple of weeks before the march on Washington, Strom Thurmond, he has a police record of Byrd Rustin being arrested for having sex in a parked car, which, if you were a gay man in the 1950s, you were really living under the threat of the law, right? Because the police were after you. And he exposed this to the country. And what's remarkable is that the leaders of the march stayed loyal to Rustin. They didn't fire him. They kept him on. And Rustin would go on to be on the cover of Life Magazine. He spoke at the march. And he effectively became the first public figure in America to survive an outing, right? To have his sexuality revealed. And he goes on to have this incredible career, really emerging as a strong opponent of Black nationalism, of the Black Panthers. He's very much a class leftist. I think the arguments that he was making about where the left should go are very relevant to today, where you see this debate going on between the more identity-based left and the class-based left. Rustin was very much of the opinion that the only way that racial minorities in America were going to progress was in coalition with the broad, multiracial working class. You had to have a coalition. You had to have the labor unions. You had to have Jews. You had to have all sorts of people working together. He would go on to be throughout the 1970s. A lot of people accused him of being a neoconservative in his foreign policy views, because he was virulently anti-communist. I wouldn't say he was pro-Vietnam War. He was agnostic on the question of whether or not the United States should have been involved in Vietnam. He was very much opposed to a unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, because he didn't want to see the communists take over and turn the whole country communist. He was involved in all these sorts of initiatives that were concerned with making the Democratic Party more hawkish with not the anti-George McGovern wing of the Democratic Party. He was strongly pro-Israel. He started an organization called the Black American Support of Israel Committee, BASIC, in 1975, a very outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism in the Black community. None of that is in the movie. The movie ends in 1963. He has this fascinating political career for the next 25 years of his life, where he remained very much a social Democrat. He would have called himself a socialist, but he was very, he really opposed, for lack of a better term, identity politics. One of the things that you draw from him, and I'll point out, our previous guest in one of these was Coleman Hughes, who also looks at Rustin as a real kind of role model. And the book by Daniel Axed, War by Other Means, is about Rustin and David Dellinger. And it's fascinating. It's a immense history. But kind of what Rustin does and what you do is that you show up and you have the debate, right? That's the main... Oh, yeah. He debated Malcolm X. He debated Stokely Carmichael. He debated all sorts of people, which I think is really lacking in our political, public intellectual dialogue today. There are a lot of people who are called public intellectuals who refuse to debate. And Coleman Hughes, I think, has tried many times to get Ibram X. Kendi to debate him. Radio silence, right? And yet we uphold this guy as being the leading public intellectual of our time. I'm sorry, if you're public intellectual, you've got to debate people who disagree with you. That's part of the job. What happened to that debate culture? Is that a function of kind of media sorting so that everybody now has their own kind of channel or platform? Or is it before that? Is that kind of looking at the outcome or the effect rather than the cause? Because nobody had to debate Bill Buckley, right? Who was a big debater in the 60s? What happened to that positive culture of open debate? It's a good question. I mean, I was the president of my high school debate team. When I was at Yale, I was a very active member of the Yale Political Union, which is this great, very unique institution. There's nothing like it as far as I'm aware of in American higher education. If I may, I just want to point out I once spoke there and I immediately lost the debate when I announced that it was great to be in a room of people who, like myself, could not get into Harvard. I should have saved that for the afterwards. The Yale Political Union is sort of a combination of the Oxford Union and the British parliament, and that it's a debating club or debating society, but there's parties. And there's parties from the far left. There's a left party, which is socialist, basically, all the way to the party of the right, which is this weird sort of cultish, uber-catholic group. But every week, we would come together and we would debate. And we would debate really contentious issues. We'd bring in the guests. Do they still do that? They still, yes. But as I understand it, as I understand it at Yale over the past 15 years since I left, the left to sort of left the Yale Political Union, they're out protesting. They are involved in activism on campus. They're less interested in participating in these debates with their ideological opponents. It's kind of interesting. In England, which has very ideological outlets across the board, it seems like the culture of debate flourishes more. So it's probably not simply an epiphenomenon of media distribution, right? I think it's a good question. I do feel, though, that, look, I think with the rise of partisanship more generally in America and the rise of partisan media, I think it has made it just incredibly rare that there are outlets where you'd see a real civil, civil intellectual debate of people. And there's all these initiatives now. I mean, there's the Monk Debates, which I participated in, maybe in Canada, which is in Canada. There are all these sort of civic initiatives now that are sort of geared at... There's the Soho Forum, a monthly platform in New York City. Yeah. And there are some podcasts that I think try to kind of cross the partisan divide. Open to debate is another group that does that, formerly Intelligence Squared US. Yeah, but I just loved doing this when I was a kid. And I would look forward, it was kind of dorky, but I would look forward to going to the YP. I mean, my favorite comedy sketch growing up was the Monty Python Argument Store, where a guy walks in and wants to have an argument. I mean, I love that, right? And I just feel that it really is a generational change. And just a lot of these young people believe that words are a form of violence, and that words can do harm in the same way that violence can. This is a kind of specific question rather than a broad one. Do you think anti-Semitism is a unique phenomenon in the way that politics and ideology is generated or gets polarized and things like that? You know, I've been thinking about this a lot, obviously, since October 7th, and I really think that so much of what makes anti-Semitism so unique and persistent and protean, it all goes back to Christianity. It goes back to the Jewish rejection of Christ. I just want to point out, you know, it was started by a Jew. Yes, it was. But I think even if you look at left-wing, I mean, so what is the basis of Christian anti-Semitism? It's the Jews are rejecting God, right? And they were never forgetting. It wasn't until the 1960s that the Vatican overturned that. So you have millennia of just, you know, murderous anti-Semitism. And I think it's so deeply ingrained in Western society that even left-wingers who are secular, who hate religion, who hate organized religion, who hate the church, they've been marinated in this anti-Semitic culture that left-wing anti-Semitism bears the strong marker of this, right? Because what is the left-wing anti-Semitic critique? It's the Jews or the state of Israel rejects international human rights. The Jews are stubbornly rejecting progress. That was the Soviet, right? The Soviet, you know, it's the Jews are opposing our utopia. And that's pretty much what the Jew has existed as for millennia. It's this Jewish rejection of kings, of utopian movements, right? Because of refusing to get with the bigger whatever the program is, whether it's an Islamist program or a left-wing program or a right-wing program. What about the capitalist angle of this? Because this seems in America, it seems that anti-Semitism is perhaps distinct from European anti-Semitism, which seems more cultural blood and soil in Europe, you know, and so like Jews, you know, and this is, you know, so you have people like Otto Frank whose family had been in Germany for hundreds of years was, you know, at a certain point, we're like, you can't possibly be German. That doesn't seem to be the same thing in America, right? Where people, you know, people's backgrounds are more fluid or people pride themselves on both being American and a hyphenated version of that. Yeah, I mean, look, the reigning, the reigning form of anti-Semitism in America until relatively recently, I would say was your, your genteel conservative, if you want to put a political label on it, the kind of genteel, waspy Christian anti-Semitism, we're not going to let you into our country clubs. We're going to put quotas on your attendance at our universities, right? Which is, you know, it's bad. It's, it's not nice. I think what we're dealing with now is a lot worse, which is a kind of Islamo, Islamo leftist anti-Semitism that, you know, views Jews as being disloyal to the country that is basically making Jews choose between supporting Israel and being considered loyal Americans. I just, I personally find that more viscerally frightening. I think a lot of Jews do post October 7th. Yeah, explain that. Well, look, it was the kind of the, the genteel waspy anti-Semitism would have never publicly exalted in the mass murder of Jews, right? Like you, that's what, that's what happened on October 7th, on October 8th. Why, why do you think the left, you know, and it is mostly on the left, you know, the extreme right is doing some kind of weird kind of Christian fascist thing, but on the left, it seems to be a linkage between Islam and anti-Semitism. So there's actually a little bit of a silver lining and a lot of this left-wing anti-Semitism. And I think it's, to a large degree, a species of anti-white sentiment rather than hating Jews because they're Jews. And I'll explain what I mean by this, you know, Jews are coded as white in this sort of progressive, now, right? They weren't white. I mean, since, since World War II, I mean, if you asked, you know, the, all the wasps who were on the board of Harvard in the 1950s or Jews white, they wouldn't have known how to answer that question. I mean, Jews were not considered part of that community, certainly not. But in this new kind of, you know, woke dispensation, whatever you want to call it, Jews are coded as white. And because so, because so much of wokeness is frankly, I mean, I don't want to sound, I mean, it's basically anti-white ideology. You know, Jews are actually seen as worse than the average white person because they are a minority who sold out and accepted a place in the white community, right? They sold, they sold out their minority bona fides and they assimilated into the white power structure, which makes them like traders, basically, to the kind of, you know, virtuous coalition of the oppressed. And so I think, and so I think that's what's driving, and so they look at Israel, and they see Israel as a white country. They see it as the modern day equivalent of apartheid South Africa. That's why they use the word apartheid so much is because they want to make Israel a pariah state in the same way that South Africa was in the second half of the 20th century. And so Israel's a white country. It's oppressing a non-white subaltern. And I think that's where a lot of this anti-Semitism comes from. So it's different from the sort of traditional right wing anti-Semitism, which is very much blood and soil and racial. This is more of a subset, a subspecies of anti-white ideology. And this is coming out of post-colonial theory, et cetera. What is there, you know, what is the way to, I don't want to say reframe the debate because that seems kind of weak, a weak gesture, but what is, you know, how do we move past the moment we're in? Well, I see some people, and I don't really like this. A lot of people respond to that argument by saying, hey, look, most Israelis or a lot of Israelis are actually brown and black and of color. And it's like, yes, that's true, but it's that sort of accepts the argument that white people are a problem and are bad and are oppressors. Like, no, people are not bad because of their skin color. And of why is that so difficult? And that I think is the ultimate problem with this woke ideology is that it reduces us to our immutable traits. It's just reverse racism. Who is the left in America? Because the left in America, the people talking about this are not overwhelmingly people of color, are they? No, it's a lot. Well, no, it's I think it's largely progressive upper middle class white people who are really as whites. Well, they're really, it's my progressive white people problem and ours. It's no, it's like the Robin de Angelo's and and look, because they don't they have to overcompensate. Right, because if you're a white, if you're a white person, then that means you don't have the the victim status of a person of color, right? And so you have to go further, you have to go one step beyond in your progressivism. And so you see the kind of loudest and most active proponents of this ideology are, you know, I think, disproportionately white people. Before we go to questions, I want to talk about one other story that you wrote to a lot of attention about a year ago. And this was for airmail, which is a news subscription based kind of newsletter news platform. This one is called army hammer breaks the silence two years after some of the most shocking allegations of the Me Too era lit up the internet and destroyed his career. The actress finally decided to tell his side of the story. Again, you know, we have gone from this world where headlines really didn't tell you what a story was about because they assumed you would just read it because it was there. And now they actually kind of fetch you in with something. But who is army hammer? And what did you do in that story that speaks to a real bizarre oversight in contemporary journalism? So yeah, army hammer is was a rather famous actor. He played the Winklevoss twins in the social network, the movie about Facebook. He's the great grandson of Armand Hammer, the oil magnate slash Soviet age and international man of mystery. Um, you know, sort of a leading leading man, you know, very handsome young actor who in early 2021 was brought down by a series of Me Too allegations. And I actually think that I say in the piece that it was probably one of the most spectacular Me Too downfalls, just the things that he was accused of, which were cannibalism, for instance, was was one of the sexual. Well, yeah, but not just rape and sexual assaults, but bizarre kinky sex fetishes that he had branded that he had carved his initial in a woman's, you know, pelvic area and that he had these cannibalistic fantasies. And his career just ended in a week. I mean, it was it was done. And the story kind of went away until I was approached. I was approached by someone who was an intermediary who said, you know what, there's a lot more to this story that hasn't been told. And they offered me an interview with Hammer. He hadn't spoken to anyone in the media. And I spoke to him and the more I discovered and the more I, you know, researched this, the more it became apparent that there was a whole side of this story that was not being told at all. I mean, for instance, his chief accuser was being represented by Gloria Allred, who some of you may know is a very famous celebrity feminist attorney. Gloria Allred dropped this woman as a client. Okay. That's how, you know, how trustworthy his main accuser was, but that wasn't picked up. You know, no one else in the media decided to investigate. You know, they had printed in all these stories, they had printed his text messages to women in which he's expressing his support for, or he's expressing his interest in, let's say, you know, untraditional sexual acts having to do with SNM bondage. And yes, he wrote about wanting to eat various parts of a woman's body. What weren't revealed in any of these stories where the messages is that the women were sending back to him, which he would think might be an elemental, elementary part of a journalist's duty is to not print one side of a text exchange with someone, right? So I got all the texts that he was, and I painted a picture in which I'm not absolving him of being maybe a bad person. By his own admission, he told me that he was a jerk to some of these women. But again, three months, I'll just say three months after my story appeared, the LAPD dropped its investigation and it did not bring charges against him, right? And it just showed me I'm not a guy who covers celebrities. I don't even follow celebrity culture. But this story interested me because it was something that seemed odd and fishy with like the narrative that we were given seemed odd and fishy. And the more I looked into it, I realized, this is just completely, I mean, the things that he's been accused of are not true. But by the time I printed my story, yes, I mean, he would eventually be legally absolved, but his career was in shambles. And it just shows you how easy it is in this country to destroy someone's reputation and career. Do you think it's worse now that it was in the past or, you know, is journalism shittier than it used to be, these types of things? It's hard to say. It's hard to say. I mean, do we want, we don't want to go back to the days when the media was covering up the fact that FDR was a paraplegic or suddenly it all makes sense. But there were a lot of things that the media wouldn't cover back then, right? Whereas now it's gone completely in the opposite direction, I think, where so many journalists just do not do their basic duty of expressing skepticism. You know, when you have a source, this is so elementary. When you have a source in journalism, you have to have other sources because your source has an agenda. Every source has an agenda. You have to check their information against other sources of information. I feel that, and this is a problem that plagues both the right and the left, people have a narrative in their head and they get one source to confirm it and they run the story. And I just, you know, I look at one of the, what I think is one of the biggest journalistic scandals of our time is the Russiagate story. And I say this as someone who's a bona fide Russia hawk. I was kicked off a live broadcast of Russian television. I worked for Radio Free Europe. I was on... You wrote a book in 2017 called The End of Europe, Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, which is not pro-Putin. Not pro-Putin, but, and I'll say, you know, the first year of the Trump administration, I kind of went along. I was willing to believe these claims. And the Russiagate claims that. Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB, or they had Compromot on him. Whether or not they had Compromot, or he was ideologically simpatico and was working in cahoots with a foreign adversarial power to seize control of the United States government in a way that was redolent of the Manchurian candidate. Something like that. I was willing to go along with it for a while, but then I realized, you know, after... This was a story that was investigated, I think, more than any other story in American history, save possibly the Kennedy assassination in terms of the amount of resources that went into this, right? All these people, and they never came up with the goods. And I think this was a case of the media wanting to believe something to be true, because they couldn't explain it any other way. And I lived a sheltered existence in Washington, D.C., you know, I'm a gay Jew from Boston. I didn't know a lot of Trump supporters. It didn't make sense to me how he could have been elected other than by, you know, the innate racism of half the American people or some fishy scheme involving the KGB in Moscow. I'm admitting that. That's what I believed. But my views changed over time, okay, as more facts came to light, or in this case, facts didn't come to light. They still haven't proven this. But there are still... I mean, it still seems like a large portion of the country is under the impression that Donald Trump was recruited by the KGB in the 1980s or somewhere around then, and that he's a foreign asset. And I find that to be a real failure of duty on the parts of our media. Do you think that is like, there's no coming back from that, or do we learn a lesson? And by we, I mean both the media... I don't think the media has learned a lesson. Do you think the mainstream media has learned a lesson from this? I haven't seen the promoters of this conspiracy theory recant. Maybe one or two of them have. I haven't seen Michael Isikoff, who co-authored a book, Russian roulette with David Korn. He is... Michael Isikoff has kind of come out and said, look, we got some things wrong. Which means nobody reads them. Okay, but David Korn has not. David Korn has, you know, doubled down on it. And this is a problem. There used to be consequences for journalists who got stuff wrong. That I'm not sure. No? Yeah, I mean, in certain cases not. That's where... Maybe involving plagiarism or outright fabrications, like Janet Cook or something. Yeah, you know, I guess my question is, you know, part of it is that, you know, more people can speak, more people can do journalism, produce journalism. We consume it however we want and kind of do whatever. I mean, it seems to be simultaneously, it is a golden age for speech and for point of view. And it's also kind of like a nightmare. Because the problem is that most people aren't like us, where we have a lot of time. I'm presuming you're in the audience or you're listening to this podcast. You have a lot of time to expose yourself to different sources. Most people don't do that. Most people consume news in, you know, five or 10-minute bits. They maybe read a couple articles in the paper if they're even subscribing to a paper. Most people aren't subscribing to newspapers or newspaper subscriptions have gone down. So, yes, I agree with you that it's let a million flowers bloom. That's important. But how many people are actually taking advantage? How many people are exposing themselves to different ideological positions? Oh, I think it's more than it is, but it's also it's too much for us. I don't know. Of just as a final comment, could you talk, are you optimistic about, I guess, like about America in general? I mean, this is January 2024. We are in the kickoff period of a presidential election that nobody is excited by. You know, is are you excited or are you optimistic about the future? And if not in general about you've turned 40, so it's all over, right? I mean, it's all downhill from here. I think everybody in this room and the ones who are still awake would agree with that. And but what about free speech? Do you think free expression and free speech is going to grow or is it going to shrink and become more and more real? Well, look, we have the First Amendment, right? And as long as the First Amendment is upheld, we're going to be fine. What I'm more concerned about legally, right? I'm not concerned about people going to jail for their political opinions. What I am concerned about is people self censoring, right? Is the culture of free expression in this country seems to be on the wane, seems to be on in decline. And we see this in polls, again, pointing at fire. Fire has done polling that shows that a significantly higher of a significantly higher percentage of Americans self censor and are concerned about expressing their political beliefs than they were during the McCarthy era. That's a really bad sign, in my opinion. It's very and again, I go back to what started this. It's kind of like being in the closet. It's like a country of people who are in the closet, which is not a healthy place to be. Did it at least make the sex better? We can say that for a future episode. Thank you. Okay. Well, we will. I want to thank Jamie Kerchick for talking to reason.