Man! Shit's Crazy!

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and this is episode number 565, “Man! Shit’s Crazy!”, with guest Ben Burgis, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Thursday, October 29th, 2020.

Yes, there’s an election coming up. I recorded this just a few minutes ago, actually — we wrapped up just a few minutes ago — and I’m putting it out immediately because, well, the election. It’s topical. Apologies to the guest who I recorded an interview with a couple of weeks back on psychedelics. That interview will be forthcoming in the near future.

But for now, here’s me talking with Ben Burgis. For those of you who don’t know, Ben Burgis is one of the stable of writers over at Zero Books. That’s the imprint that Doug Lain manages, and I know of Ben through Doug Lain. I’ve spoken with Ben before, when I had a live radio show, and Ben has just recently appeared as a guest on the daily show Rising, which apparently I like better than he does — even though he likes it. I really like it, and I’ll say that at the beginning of the interview.

So what you’re going to hear is mostly unedited. I’ve trimmed out a couple of minutes of idle chit-chat at the very beginning, but other than that, this is an unedited interview — for ease on my part. But Ben knows how to handle himself. There was nothing that needed to be trimmed or tightened up. It’s all good. So here we go.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Rising

KMOYou are listening to the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and I’m speaking with Ben Burgis. And Ben, I was just looking at my email history with you. The last time we spoke, it was on live radio. This is in the very comfortable domain of the pre-recorded podcast, but welcome.

Ben BurgisGood to be back.

KMOI saw you on Rising recently. And I watch Rising — as the listeners know — every day. I at least watch the first three segments: I watch the opening segment, I watch Krystal’s Radar and Saagar’s Radar, and then, if there’s good stuff, I’ll fish around for the good stuff. But it’s so bizarre to have so much of the general public and the mainstream media — the corporate media, NPR — they’ve just gone insane, literally off-the-deep-end nuts. And then at the same time, here’s Rising, which is a show with some backing. It’s got production polish. It looks good. It’s the sort of thing that you can send to somebody who’s used to watching corporate news, and it looks like corporate news, so they’ll watch it. But this is frightening for me: I agree with like 90% of what Krystal and Saagar say on the show, even though Krystal and Saagar probably don’t agree with one another 90% of the time.

Ben BurgisRight, of course.

KMOSo the math doesn’t quite work. But it’s really weird to have a polished source like that that is saying things which are forbidden in the mainstream media, and with which I really resonate. I’m 52. This is a unique experience in my whole half-century of existence.

Ben BurgisYeah. No, I’m a fan. I don’t watch it as much as it sounds like you do, but it’s something I’ll put on, kind of the way that I used to put on The Majority Report or something — if I was going to be eating for the next 10 minutes and I just wanted something to be on while I did it, and to get a little bit of news.

I think it’s actually a really interesting — I don’t know — Rorschach test, almost. Because there are people who I agree with about most things, and who I suspect agree with at least Krystal about almost everything, who just obsessively hate that show. They’ll have these Two Minutes Hates about it. And I think it’s a really weird, unhealthy sign. I mean, there’s some stuff Saagar thinks I obviously really disagree with. But it’s a talk show, right? The way people talk about it sometimes, it’s almost like: do you support the formation of a Krystal Ball–Saagar Enjeti coalition government or something? It’s like, no, it’s just talking about the news. They’ll say some things you agree with and some things you disagree with. Calm down.

Righteousness, then and now

KMOYeah. Oh, I have to say, I have to skip any segment that involves marijuana. Because I’m a child of the ’80s, really. I was born in ’68; I was a teenager in the 1980s. That’s really where the roots of the person that I am now came about. And in the 1980s I was hanging out with artists and drag queens and Black people, and I was living in Kansas City, Missouri. And the Republican establishment — the social conservative establishment of society — was morally righteous. They thought they were morally superior to their opponents. And they thought that it was appropriate to use the power of the federal government and state governments — whatever power was at hand — to force other people to either agree with you or pretend to agree with you. And that was so odious, so obnoxious.

And now it really seems like the roles have flipped, and it’s the left that is really bent on using their power to coerce other people. And they feel great about it, because they believe themselves to be morally righteous — to be coming from a morally superior position and inflicting righteous correction upon moral troglodytes. Which for me is no different — no different at all — from how I was seeing the Republicans back in the ’80s and ’90s. Not necessarily Republican elected officials, but more like community leaders and people speaking from that position of absolute moral authority, because we’ve got God on our side. The blue tribe doesn’t have God, but they’re no less righteous.

And I’m encountering more and more defectors from the blue tribe who’ve really gotten burned. I talked to one just recently who didn’t do anything really awful — from a blue-tribe perspective, at least to me, it seems like she didn’t do anything awful. She chided her boyfriend for his white privilege, and then realized: oh my God, my boyfriend has lived such a hard life. He’s been knocked around. He’s been to prison. His white privilege didn’t buy him a cup of coffee. And so she sort of backed off on the really righteous, angry, hectoring rhetoric. And just backing off from it a little bit caused her blue-tribe community to notice that she had departed from the program, and they came down hard on her. So now she’s divorced from social media and really angry at the whole world, and has, I think, latched on to some voices that — I’m not a huge Tim Pool fan. Nothing against the guy. It’s just that people who have to articulate a position all day, every day, get caught up in it. That’s just how it is. And when they get caught up in it, they tend to get more extreme. You can even be extremely heterodox — you can be out there on the fringe in terms of your rejection of everybody else who’s out there on the fringe. And you’ve got to take a break. And Tim’s one of those people making so much media, he kind of goes down the Alex Jones slippery slope of: I’m just blathering into this microphone all day, and who knows what’s going to come out, and the stupider and crazier it is, somebody’s going to like it.

Ben BurgisYeah, yeah, right. And I guess there are a couple of things there. Because I think there’s something that people feeling defensive about some of what you’re talking about will say that I think is true, which is: okay, sometimes progressives and leftists can be extremely annoying about this shit, but is this really the most important thing going on in the world? And especially when you’re talking about people who fall down this kind of Tim Pool-ish rabbit hole, you’re maybe supporting political forces that are actually trying to do really bad things, with very bad consequences in the real world. And so something has gone wrong in this calculus. Think about the five or ten worst things the Trump administration has done in the last four years, and compare those to people being annoying on Twitter, and it’s clear which one wins. And I agree with that, as far as it goes. I think that’s right.

But what does frustrate me is that oftentimes people don’t split up the questions and say: okay, sure, fair enough — but also, if we’re acting in ways that predictably tend to drive people away and then lead them in those directions politically, then is that a good thing? Is that a counterproductive thing? Should you stop doing it, because it’s having the opposite of the effect that you want? And unfortunately, I feel like oftentimes those follow-up questions never get asked.

Because I think what your analogy about the evangelical right in the ’80s maybe brings out is that so much of this stuff isn’t really even about politics, strictly speaking. It’s about proving your own individual moral rightness and having it validated by others. Which is oftentimes something that doesn’t really go in the same direction as — sometimes you have to pick which one you want, right? Do you want other people to recognize you as a member of the club — that you’re extremely righteous, you’re going to heaven — and then really sharply differentiate yourself from the people who are going to hell? Is that your goal? Or is your goal to change the world in some sort of positive way?

Bernie, Rogan and the path of least resistance

Ben BurgisSo a very small example of this that I’ve been kind of obsessed with, because I thought it was so telling, was back in January, I guess, when Bernie Sanders was about to win the Iowa caucus, and there were people who freaked out because the most popular podcaster in the world, Joe Rogan, said some nice things about him. And then he did what any competent campaign would do and clipped the video of Joe Rogan saying the nice things about him, and put it on his Twitter feed. And I saw people reacting and saying, oh my God, Bernie Sanders is touting the endorsement of this horrible person, Joe Rogan. And even though, well, I know a lot of that was ginned up by supporters of other candidates, I was also seeing people with that Democratic Socialist rose emoji in their Twitter feeds who were going along with this: oh yeah, he really shouldn’t have done that. He really shouldn’t have touted that endorsement from Joe Rogan — touted that endorsement from the most popular podcaster in the world. Yes, that’s right. If you’re in an election where the goal presumably is to get more people to support you than to support the other candidates, then what you should have done is either said no — I refuse your support, because you’re a bad person; I don’t want bad people to support me — or at the very least remain silent about it. The whole thing was just bizarre. But I think it’s a telling detail.

It’s something that I feel like I’ve seen a lot, and maybe even seen more of this year, particularly since the beginning of the pandemic, even though that example is a couple of months before that. I think a lot of people spending a lot more time indoors, in combination with the way that the Trump experience has broken so many people’s minds, and in combination maybe with some of the post–George Floyd unrest, where people felt, I think justifiably, angry and frustrated with their inability to change real political institutions — so that you could actually change the way that policing works — I think that was very often taken out in these weird ways. Instead of asking: okay, what would a strategy actually look like to get to a point where local police departments weren’t sold surplus military gear? Or what would a strategy actually look like to really change, even on a local level, the procedures for firing police officers, anything like that? Even as you ask those questions, you can see: oh my God, that’s incredibly hard. Those would be hugely difficult political lifts.

Whereas if all you’re trying to do is to get people to change the name of something, or to pressure some small business owner into issuing a symbolic statement of support saying Black Lives Matter, or all you’re trying to do is get somebody fired from a media company or something — those things are really easy, where all that other stuff is really hard. And so I think just that path of least resistance, in combination with the pandemic, in combination with the Trump stuff, has led to some of what you’re talking about being — I don’t know if it’s an all-time worst; it’s probably not — but certainly, I think, noticeably more severe than was the case not that long ago.

The Cold War and suppression

KMOI think I’d plant my flag there: it’s the all-time worst that it’s been since I’ve been paying attention. When the Republicans were morally righteous and looking to coerce people who didn’t agree with them in the ’80s, there wasn’t the internet. There wasn’t the web. There wasn’t social media. There were three broadcast networks that all had basically the same news on. And there was just a level of cultural cohesion and worldview agreement that we no longer enjoy.

Speaker uncertainAnd there was the Soviet Union, which is huge.

KMOOh, totally. Yeah. Still a threat. I watched The Day After Tomorrow¹ when I was a sophomore in high school. The world could end at any minute, and we had to have some rational level of group identity. And that’s gone. That’s so gone.

Ben BurgisYeah. I mean, of course all of those things that you’re talking about — especially the part about the Cold War — did definitely serve to suppress a lot of dissent. And I think it is true that we maybe forget how bad some of that was. Not just the McCarthyist stuff before you or I were born, but even going into — God, what would that be, the early ’70s — when Ronald Reagan was the governor of California and he was trying to get Angela Davis fired from the University of California for being a communist, up through a lot that is much more recent than that.

I think there are things you can point to certainly during the era in which the war on terror was a defining issue — not that it’s over. Bill Maher, who I’m certainly not a fan of, losing his network TV show for saying something that I thought was obviously true, but that registered badly in a moment of patriotic fervor. I remember Ari Fleischer, as the White House press secretary, talking about that: you have to be careful what you say. There was definitely an atmosphere of suppression then.

And even now — I think even right now it is important to notice, when it comes to concerns about free speech and those issues, that whereas I do think there are real concerns about things that come out of progressive censoriousness — I think both things are true. I think all that stuff you’re talking about is real, and it’s worrying; it’s not good. But at the same time, I can absolutely see the point that would be made by somebody who could say: well, hold on. What about Trump sending the Department of Homeland Security to Portland to intimidate protesters? What about the many times during the post–George Floyd unrest when there were protesters or journalists who were beaten up by the police? And I think that’s all true. I think those are bigger threats in the greater scheme of things.

I guess I just think of — if you ever saw the movie Lady Bird, from a few years ago, there’s a line in there where the main character is in the process of breaking up with her boyfriend, who’s a Chomsky-reading leftist. She starts to complain about how he’s handled the relationship, and he starts telling her how many people died in Iraq, and she says: yeah, but more than one thing can be bad. So I think that you can acknowledge that all these other things are worse and more significant, but also say that doesn’t mean this other thing is a non-issue or not something we should worry about.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

KMOYou know, when I was getting ready for this call, I thought, well, I’ll go read some of his Jacobin columns.

Ben BurgisYeah.

KMOAnd then I discovered that my attention span is just not what it used to be, and I said, well, maybe I’ll just check out his Twitter feed. I did read your review of a five-year-old book by Jon Ronson — a book I’ve read and which I love — So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. And we’ve been talking a lot about the issues that that book covers already. I’d be curious as to what prompted you to write a review of a five-year-old book.

Ben BurgisYeah. Well, okay, so the immediate answer is that I was prompted to write it because Micah Uetricht [spelling unverified; heard “Michael Utrecht”], who’s the deputy editor at Jacobin, asked if I wanted to write it. So that was the immediate reason. But I think the reason beyond that — probably the reason he was thinking about that — is because I’ve written other things about the same cluster of topics. So he thought that this might be an interesting way for me to write something for Jacobin that was generally about all that.

KMOHad you read the book before?

Ben BurgisI did, yeah. Actually, oddly enough, I read it for the first time not very long before that, but yes, I had read it. And so, like I said, I’ve been thinking and writing about the more general issue. And I guess I’ll just take the opportunity to shamelessly plug: I have a book coming out next year that is in part about all this. It’s called Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left, from Zero Books.

And it’s actually funny, because I signed the contract to write this book like a year ago at this point, and I think I finished the first draft in March or whatever. And I did that annoying thing that writers do, where at every step of the process I’d tweet about it: oh yeah, I just got this stage approved for the book. And it didn’t really get that much attention at any stage of that. But then they sent me the cover file, and I posted the cover on Twitter — hey, the cover of my new book is up — and I figured 20 people would like that or whatever. And that’s when Twitter really noticed the existence of it, and got mad at me for having written it, on the basis of the title.

KMOCan’t criticize the left from the left. That’s not allowed.

Ben BurgisYeah, yeah, apparently not. My late friend Michael Brooks had a really good line on this, on [wording unclear; heard “the weekend show he’s due with Anna Casperian”], where he said that thinking that you’re against the left because you’re critiquing part of what it’s doing as being self-defeating and counterproductive is like saying that a basketball coach who makes his team do drills is against the team. Which I think is exactly right.

But yeah, so anyway, that whole kerfuffle had happened. And then Bhaskar Sunkara [heard “boss garson car”], who is the main editor at Jacobin, had asked me to do a presentation kind of about the general issue. Since the beginning of the pandemic — they’ve kind of changed the format since then — they were doing the Stay at Home series on the YouTube channel, since March. And so he invited me to do one of those. And then I think that’s probably what gave Micah the idea to have me write a review essay about the book and about what’s changed in the last five years. Which I was happy to do — and happier when I saw that Jon Ronson, who wrote the book, quote-tweeted it and said some nice things about it, which I was relieved by, because there was a section of it that was critical about the book.

Overall, I think it’s very good. But the one part where I did say — I think that Ronson is really, really good at narrating events in an entertaining and engaging way —

KMOAnd narrating his own consciousness.

Ben BurgisYeah, exactly. In particular, narrating his own experience of those events. That’s what he’s really good at, and he is really good at it. It’s very entertaining to read. But then the problem is that because he knows that he’s really good at it, sometimes he does that in places where he should be doing something else.

So So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is a good book. I think it’s the best thing that’s been written about the larger phenomenon of what — I think maybe shortly after the book came out, people were calling it call-out culture for a minute, and now they generally call it cancel culture. Which is a phrase that — I’ll use it, because I generally prefer to argue about things rather than about what labels we apply to them — but it’s a very imperfect phrase for what it’s meant to convey. Because it leads to all of these really tedious arguments about what counts as being canceled, and does this or that count as canceling, and do you have to not have a career anymore. And I think all that kind of misses the point about the larger thing that people are objecting to when they talk about it.

But in any case, I think it’s still the best thing that’s been written on that. My objection would just be that there are parts of it where I wish that he had taken a step back to develop his argument a little bit more clearly: okay, what exactly are you saying? Where is this coming from? And what, if anything, can be done about it? Those are things that you kind of get in a sideways way at different points in the book, but I did wish he would address it head-on a little bit more. But overall, I really recommend that people read that book.

KMOThe book certainly has a point of view, but it’s not a polemic. And he is a reporter. He’s not a philosopher.

Ben BurgisThat’s true.

KMOSo your criticism as a philosopher is that he’s approaching this as a reporter, and not really constructing a cohesive overarching argument throughout the book. But as I say, he does have a point of view, and it’s a very simple one. It’s like: look, this behavior, while intoxicating and tempting, is destructive. Please notice.

Ben BurgisNo, that’s pretty much it. Yeah, that’s right. And again, I think he’s 100% right about that. I think there is a lot of the book that’s spent — I don’t want to harp on this too much, because I like the book — but in a weird way, sometimes it feels less like you’re watching a movie than like you’re watching the behind-the-scenes documentary about the movie.

KMOWhich might be more entertaining than the movie.

Ben BurgisNo, that’s true. Sometimes it is. But a lot of what he’s narrating is kind of his process of researching the topic and trying to figure out what’s going on. And so maybe it’s just disciplinarily inappropriate expectations, but what I sort of wanted was: okay, and as a result of all this, here’s what I figured out is right. Here is my conclusion.

Jon Ronson’s voice

KMOYeah. Yes. You know, I’m going to cut in just a little bit of Jon Ronson’s voice right now, because he is in a category along with — oh — Terence McKenna, and David Sedaris, and William S. Burroughs, where they can put words down on the page great, but it really comes alive when you hear them read it in their own voice. Particularly because their voice is not a polished, professional presenter’s voice. It’s a very idiosyncratic voice. In McKenna’s case, it’s very nasal, like this — he sounds like he should have surgery for that, like I did. And Jon Ronson’s voice is just so soft and so high-pitched and so unchallenging. So I absolutely love his delivery, as well as how he puts words together on the page.

I said, “I wonder if some other fellow long-term sufferers also feel weirdly calm. My theory is that we rehearse catastrophic what-if situations in our heads so often, when a real crisis happens, we’re quite good at it.” And I mean, I’ve suffered from anxiety for 25 years, and I have noticed this. I catastrophize about the most ridiculous things that will never happen. And then when a real crisis happens, I’m calm and focused. I know exactly what to do. So I tweeted that. — Jon Ronson (clip)

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO.”

Glenn Greenwald leaves The Intercept

KMOSo, as I say, I started off on Jacobin and got lazy and went to Twitter. And one of the first things I discovered from your Twitter feed is that Glenn Greenwald has exited The Intercept. Would you summarize that?

Ben BurgisYeah. So this is something that happened extremely recently before we talked. So what I can give you is my understanding of the first couple of hours of what we know about this. I expect —

KMOWe’re recording this late in the day on Thursday, October 29th, 2020. The election is a few breaths away.

Ben BurgisThat’s right, that’s right. And actually, funnily enough, this morning I was listening to the Joe Rogan episode from a couple of episodes ago where he interviews Greenwald, while I made breakfast. And then I got on Twitter and I saw this, and I read the article. Like I said, I’m sure it’s a developing story, as they say. I’m sure that various people will have their say, and it will complicate things in various ways.

But the basic thing that happened is that Glenn Greenwald — when I started reading him, he was writing for Salon, and then he was at The Guardian for a long time; he was at The Guardian when he published the Snowden revelations about NSA spying — several years ago he actually helped co-found this media company, The Intercept. And he has done some great stuff there, particularly in exposing some of the shenanigans in Brazil having to do with the prosecution of the former president, Lula da Silva. There was stuff that was leaked to them that Greenwald published, showing that that was a very corrupt and politically motivated process.

All of which is just to say — because I know that a lot of times when people have takes on some figure like this, it’s very much about however they figure into the politics of the moment: what TV shows are they going on, what are they saying about whatever everybody’s concerned with this week. But this is part of why I really admire Glenn Greenwald. I don’t always agree with him. I think he always makes interesting arguments. But I think he’s also done genuinely courageous things as an investigative journalist.

And part of the idea behind The Intercept was that he and his co-founders were going to have more editorial freedom there than they would have at old media outlets like The Guardian. And for a time they did. And then they didn’t. That’s basically what happened. That would be the very short version.

The slightly longer version would be: I think there have been some signs for a little while that something not great might have been going on there. Over the summer, Lee Fang, a journalist at The Intercept, was accused of racism, basically. Really, it was for some article that he did where he was quoting someone — who I think was a Black man in Minneapolis; don’t quote me on that — who was talking about street crime, and why people seem to care less about that than they do about police violence. And the fact that he was highlighting this — he was accused by his colleague. I think that was part of it. And then part of it was him tweeting, or maybe he wrote something for The Intercept, about peaceful protests being more effective than riots. And whatever you think about his takes on all these issues — and probably if we got into the nitty-gritty, I’d agree with some of them and disagree with others — there did seem to be something very weird going on there, where it seemed like after some of his colleagues got mad at him about this stuff, the media company itself, First Look Media, The Intercept’s owner, seemed to be very much siding with the critics. And he was kind of allowed to stay because he apologized for some of this. And the whole thing, I think, left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.

But then, fast-forward to the present, this week. The issue with Glenn Greenwald was that he was preparing a story which I believe had a lot to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop — the whole kerfuffle surrounding that, and the various things that the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop showed — and I think maybe also about criticizing the way that the rest of the media had covered this, or not covered it, or, in Twitter’s case, suppressed coverage of it. Now, I think he’s putting it out now on his own Substack, but since all this happened within the last few hours, I haven’t read the original article. But the issue is — because some people are saying, oh, Glenn is crying censorship, but really this is just editorial standards or something like that; he doesn’t have a legitimate complaint here —

KMOBut he published the email exchange with the editors. I started to read that before I talked to you. So it’s not a he-said, she-said. We could just tell what happened, right? I mean, you can just read the email exchange, and it’s very clear that the editors at The Intercept would not print anything that legitimized the idea that Joe Biden exercised poor judgment in allowing his son to make millions of dollars trading on the name of the sitting vice president.

Ben BurgisYeah, yeah. And I think the larger issue too — even outside of what you think about that story and what it says about the Bidens — is that while it’s certainly true in general that editors deciding what stories they want to run, or making decisions about how to change stories before they’re run, isn’t necessarily an illegitimate thing. If you looked at my email exchanges with editors, you could find articles that are rejected; you could find articles that are changed, sometimes in ways that made them much better, sometimes in ways that I thought made them worse. But that’s all fine. Except that the whole point of The Intercept was supposed to be to really unleash these journalists who were founding it.

And Glenn Greenwald’s particular employment contract with them, according to him — and I haven’t seen a denial of this — which I think is something he insisted on even at previous places of employment, is supposed to give him a lot of latitude to pursue whatever stories he wants to pursue. And there’s actually not supposed to be any editorial interference in advance with what he’s writing, except for a couple of narrowly defined exemptions, having to do with new investigative journalism that’s newly uncovering things, and having to do with things that might expose the company to legal liability — neither of which seem to apply in this case. So I think that makes the language of censorship more legitimate. Because it’s not that this is just a journalist having a temper tantrum because he’s being edited. This is somebody saying: hey, we had a deal, and you’re reneging on the deal, and you’re reneging on the deal for pretty transparently political reasons — which is to say that you don’t want me to publish things that would be embarrassing to Biden just days before the election —

KMOLike that’s going to swing votes. Who reads The Intercept?

Ben BurgisYeah. I mean, it’s silly, right? But I think there are basically two reasons why Intercept editors might be reluctant to do that. One of them is because I think it’s easy for anybody who does media stuff to want to think what you’re doing is important. And so they might actually have an exaggerated idea of what would happen there — that somebody is going to read a Glenn Greenwald article and change their vote, or decide not to vote. I don’t think there are a lot of swing voters in Pennsylvania who are hanging on every word of The Intercept. But I think that might be part of it.

But I think another part of it is just — I think it really might be as simple as not wanting people who you might like or respect, or who are in your professional circles, to get mad at you. And you know that if you’re publishing things days before a presidential election that everybody is extremely emotionally invested in, that could be seen as undermining Biden’s chances of victory, then people get mad at you. And so far, I haven’t seen anything to lead me to believe that some combination of those two things wasn’t their motivation. Because otherwise — if there’s something where you can say, hey, here’s a really specific factual claim that you’re making, and here’s why it’s wrong, and here’s how you could change it — then okay, fair enough. He might still have a legitimate complaint if it violates his contract, but on some level, fair enough. But in this case, at least based on — I read his initial Substack post, where he laid out his understanding of what happened to him, and I read the response that was going around from the editor-in-chief of The Intercept — at least based on those two pieces of evidence, nothing in the response made me think that this isn’t what was going on there.

NPR tells you how to feel

KMOI’m a lifelong NPR listener. I got irritated with NPR in the year after 9/11, because they were beating the drums for war like everybody else, and I really hated that. But in general I like NPR. I like their take. But man, as soon as Trump took office — I mean, it’s gotten worse over time, but the change was immediate — they just started telling you how you’re supposed to feel about their news stories. And it’s in the headline, or maybe the subhead. I listen to like 10 minutes of NPR every day on my flash briefing from the Amazon device whose name I will not mention, so she doesn’t wake up. Anytime there’s a mention of Hunter Biden, or the possibility that maybe he did something inappropriate which might reflect poorly on Joe Biden, they always describe it as the discredited conspiracy theory that Hunter Biden did this or that. I mean, they tell you in the headline what your opinion is.

Ben BurgisYeah. Have you read Matt Taibbi’s book Hate Inc.?

KMOI have not, no. I generally like Taibbi, though.

Ben BurgisYeah. Well, I read it not that long ago. I really liked it a lot. He talks about this in there. He originally envisioned it as an update of Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent — to think about, okay, what’s changed in the decades since then? We don’t have the Cold War, all that. And that’s still to some extent how the book ended up, but it ended up covering much broader territory, and a lot of it is about the way that the media landscape has changed and segmented, in particular in the Trump era. And he gets into a lot of stuff like this: media outlets — I guess in some sort of overcorrection for what I think was a failing, that the media in general maybe propped Trump up early on by obsessively covering everything that he did, because isn’t he terrible, isn’t he terrible, let us tell you 12 hours a day how terrible —

KMOYeah, yeah, yeah. Haven’t heard his voice in the last two minutes? Here it is.

Ben BurgisYeah, because he’s the most entertaining game in town, so why wouldn’t you [wording unclear; heard “raise good friends”]? But then I think people felt bad about it, and at any rate there was a lot of backlash about it. And especially because we live in a much more segmented media landscape, everybody can pick the media that conforms to what they want. You just get to order it à la carte, in a way that certainly back in the era you were talking about, in the ’80s — I mean, you watched what was on TV. That was your choice. Whereas now you can really just consume a diet — there are so many different news sources you can pick. You said you watch Rising every day; that’s on YouTube. Everybody can pick their own media.

And so I think that also makes media companies much more liable to capture by their customer base. And so if there’s a feeling that they maybe were part of the problem in 2016, then they’ll do this thing to overcorrect for it, where they’ll paternalistically tell people what they should think about a story as they’re giving you the story. Which of course just makes the problem even worse. Because then anybody who’s listening to NPR — if there are such people — who might support Trump or buy his narrative of events would listen to what you’re talking about and say: yeah, okay, well, these guys aren’t even trying to hide it. They’re clearly just giving me news from the other team. They’re giving me the other team’s perspective on it as they’re giving it to me. So I think it even defeats the point, because it’s going to be less effective with anybody who might be persuadable. If you’re going to have a spin, you’ve got to make it subtler than that, or it’s not going to do any good.

The BBC, NPR and Al Jazeera

KMOEvery now and again I think, okay, I’m going to listen to some — what’s the network that Rachel Maddow’s on? MSNBC.

Ben BurgisMSNBC, right.

KMOSometimes I think, okay, I’m going to watch MSNBC and Fox today, just to see what they’re saying. And I can’t bring myself to do it. For me, the exercise in media balance is just to go outside the U.S. Every day my flash briefing starts off with the BBC, then there’s NPR, and then there’s Al Jazeera. And the striking difference between the three is that, starting off with the BBC, there will be multiple international stories. There’ll be stories about things happening in Africa. You wouldn’t even know that Africa exists if you just listen to NPR. So you’ll hear a bunch of international stories on the BBC. Then NPR comes on, and really it’s all just the election. Every single story is about how terrible Donald Trump is, how he’s Hitler incarnate, and how the world is going to burn if Joe Biden isn’t elected. And then comes Al Jazeera, and suddenly it’s an offering of international stories again. So I don’t recall NPR always being so hyper-focused on the domestic scene, the way that Fox News is. And I don’t know when that transition took place. I think it was before 2016, though.

Ben BurgisYeah, I don’t know. My experience of NPR is that I listened to a great deal of it while I was growing up, because I grew up in a household where it was on all the time, and then not very much at all after that. Over the years I’d occasionally put it on if I’m in the car and I want news, for a few minutes. But I think my particular sort of rebellion was that if I was listening to the radio, 95% of the time it would be music.

KMOAnd music your parents didn’t like, probably.

Ben BurgisSure, sure, sure. But yeah, look, I can’t speak too much to NPR, but I’ve certainly seen this in other mainstream outlets. MSNBC has obviously been aggressively pursuing this niche as the Democratic Party news organ —

KMOThe blue Fox.

Ben BurgisYeah. It’s been doing the blue Fox thing for many years. There was a point where it wasn’t —

KMOIn fact, I think that was Keith Olbermann. I think his ranting was so successful that they just said, hey, here’s a formula.

Ben BurgisThat’s right. I think that’s right. Because I think it was after Keith Olbermann got big that they did that rebranding with — was it “Lean Forward,” or whatever it was?

KMOI don’t follow it. I liked Keith Olbermann. I watched his stuff, and that’s all.

Olbermann and Limbaugh in alternate timelines

Ben BurgisYou know, I’ll say this about Keith Olbermann: I did like him for a while during the Bush years. I enjoyed his rants and his “Good night, and good luck” shtick. And then there was a point later on where — lacking Bush as the central hate figure; not that anything he said about him was wrong — I think the commentary got a lot less entertaining to me, and maybe some of the flaws were more evident. But what I actually really did like was when Olbermann briefly went back to ESPN, because he did a sports talk show that was in the same format as his old MSNBC show — right down to, I think, a sports version of his Worst Person in the World segment. The whole thing. And so I was like, oh, actually, this I kind of like. Because I always found the format really entertaining. I always found Keith Olbermann’s persona really entertaining. It’s just that the extremely predictable liberal Democratic talking points — but just angrier than Maddow — I kind of got sick of. But if he’d kept the ESPN show, I’d probably still be watching it now.

KMOUnfortunately, my guess is that Keith Olbermann must be the most difficult person in the world to work with, because he only seems to keep every job for like six months.

You know, there are the time-travel fantasies: oh, if I could go back and do this and change that. And of course everybody wants to go kill Hitler. But maybe more compassionate people would say: well, what if we could go back and get Hitler into that art school that he applied to?

Ben BurgisRight, right, right.

KMOI think Rush Limbaugh really wanted to be an ESPN sportscaster. That was his vision. If only we could go back in time and get him that job — let him talk about football.

Ben BurgisYeah, absolutely.

Speaker uncertainHe’d be happy. We’d all be spared his decades-long crusade against rationality.

Ben BurgisYeah, no, absolutely. Obviously, I feel about Rush Limbaugh’s actual career pretty much the way you’d expect me to. I pretty much think he’s a piece of shit. But in that alternate timeline, I might even enjoy the show. Because I’ve hate-listened to enough Rush Limbaugh over the years to have a sense that he’s actually a very talented broadcaster. He’s kind of fun to listen to.

KMOOh, yeah.

Ben BurgisSo if he was doing that without the rabid right-wing content, then yeah, I’d probably listen to that. I’d totally listen to Rush Limbaugh talk about football.

The final word

KMOWell, hey, we’ve been on for about an hour. Let me offer you the final word. What should we take away from our friendly chat here?

Ben BurgisYeah. The media landscape is very bad. It’s not getting any better. Even though I’m part of the problem here — because I just mentioned that maybe it’s not great that everybody gets to order à la carte the media diet they want — I think you’re still probably better off steering clear of mainstream news sources and watching stuff like Rising, or The Majority Report, or —

KMOYour own humble podcast. Give them an argument.

Ben BurgisBut otherwise — yeah. As far as a lot of the rest of it, I think this is one of those things that should be mind-numbingly obvious, but maybe isn’t: when you feel tempted to start berating somebody for their political unrighteousness, maybe stop and think about whether the effect of this is going to actually be to convince them of anything, or to bring them back into the fold — or whether maybe they’re going to say screw you, and go start listening to the people who hate you, because they think they must have a point. I’m not saying never yell at anybody, but if you just do that spot check, I think that would go a long way.

KMOAnd there’s always going to be somebody wrong on the internet. You have to be able to take a deep breath, let it out, close the laptop, put the phone down, turn around and attend to something real, and not dwell on it. That’s my issue. Even when I close the laptop and put the phone down, it’s still just replaying in my mind.

Ben BurgisI know, it’s bad. It’s bad. It is. It’s really bad. I have not come up with a good solution yet in my own case for how to use social media just enough to get the word out about what I’m doing, and to emotionally disentangle myself from everything else that goes on there. But I know I’d be better off if I did. So I hope, if there’s a similar amount of time between now and the next time we talk as there was between now and the last time we talked, that by then I’ll be like: oh yeah, dude, I’ve totally figured it out. I found the right meditation protocol.

KMOYeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Ben BurgisYes, I have. I’m on Twitter for two minutes a day, and then I sit [wording unclear; heard “says n”] for a while, and then I’m good. So I think that probably won’t happen, but I really hope it does.

KMOGood luck with that.

Ben BurgisAll right. Thanks, man.

KMOAll right. Take care, Ben.

Closing: a vote that doesn’t count

Program identification: “On the C-Realm Podcast, a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

KMOOkay, friends, that was my most recent conversation with Ben Burgis. I put out a video a while back — and I haven’t been doing YouTube videos much recently, other than my daily live stream, which is just focused on drawing, really. But back when I was still doing videos fairly regularly, when the Biden campaign announced Kamala Harris as the running mate, I put out a video saying: Kamala Harris? Really? Fine, I’m voting for Trump.

Well, I couldn’t really bring myself to do it. I voted by mail a couple of weeks ago. I voted for Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate. And I didn’t really mention this in the recorded interview with Ben, but this is a source of frustration for me. I live in Vermont. It is possibly the bluest state in the nation. My vote doesn’t count here. It just does not count.

And another thing that’s kind of frustrating is that while it’s a solidly Democratic state, there’s a progressive Democrat running for governor against a Republican. You’d think in a solidly blue state the progressive Democrat — come on, in Vermont — would have an edge over the Republican. But it really looks like our Republican governor, Phil Scott, will coast to an easy re-election victory over David Zuckerman. David Zuckerman — if you’ve been listening for a while, you’ll probably recognize his name and his voice. I’ve interviewed him a couple of times. I’d really like for him to be the governor of this state, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

And when it comes to a presidential candidate, never in my 52 years of life have I ever voted for the winner. So for all you righteous vote shamers out there — or voter shamers — you don’t want me on your team. I’m cursed. No, that’s getting the causality backwards. I always vote for somebody that I know has no chance of winning. And 2020 is no different.

All right, well, I’m not going to ramble on here, because there’s a new episode of Star Trek: Discovery to watch. And so far, season three — fingers crossed, knock on wood — it’s been okay. I really want to like Star Trek. I do. I know most of you don’t care, so I’ll stop talking about it, and do what little editing I’m going to do and get this up so you can listen to it. And I will talk to you again soon. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. As spoken. The nuclear-war TV film from KMO’s high-school years is The Day After (1983); The Day After Tomorrow is a 2004 climate-disaster film. ↩