Benjamin Ryan on Cosmopolitan Elites’ Truth Problem

[00:00:11] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast featuring smart guests talking about the problems facing blue cities and how to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. Hello, Sandeep. Hey, David. How are you? I'm good. And before we get going, I just wanted to give a big shout out of thanks to everyone who tuned out for our event at the National Nordic Museum.

[00:00:30] Yeah, it was a great event. People might have heard in our previous episodes, it was about how big tech has transformed, remade not just the economies, but the politics and culture of blue cities like Seattle and San Francisco. And we had an all-star panel and a great conversation and a good crowd turned out for it. So yeah, fun event. We should do more.

[00:00:51] Yeah, yeah, yeah. With GeekWire. And if you live in the Seattle area, we have another live event coming up later this month with our other podcast, Seattle Nice. It's a live debate for Seattle City Council District 5. So there's certainly going to be questions about how to regulate sex work and how to protect people, including the women involved and public safety issues up in Aurora. That's October 21st, starting at 6 p.m., also at the National Nordic Museum.

[00:01:20] So put that on your calendar. Yeah, well, if you care about Seattle City Council races, which is a- Is Aurora still a big, like, call? Oh, yeah. It's the second biggest right now. It's understood to be the second biggest sex market in the country. Yeah.

[00:01:37] That voice you're hearing is our guest for today's show about what happens when people in blue cities and blue institutions believe claims that advance morally righteous causes, basically to the point where that ideology starts to cloud their judgment. He's independent journalist Benjamin Ryan, and he says it's not just the right that does this. Benjamin Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

[00:02:34] Thank you.

[00:03:03] It seems to me that you became increasingly disillusioned with cosmopolitan progressive elites. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you come to believe that kind of the sort of cosmopolitan establishment that dominates mainstream discourse has often proven itself unwilling to accept scientific truths that contravene their ideological priors.

[00:03:27] So let me start there by asking about why you came to that conclusion. You know, what was your career trajectory and arc that kind of brought you to that place? I mean, I think on the left, there's a presumption that the right is always wrong about anything. And that's, we saw that so much during COVID where, you know, Donald Trump was throwing spaghetti against the wall a lot of the times and talking about injecting bleach or sunlight and that kind of thing.

[00:03:55] But occasionally he and his people would be correct. Not necessarily because they read the science and they became correct, but maybe they just guessed. We look at that with, you know, school closures and mask mandates and that sort of thing. But the left, ultimately, when something becomes coded left or right, the left kind of won't let go of it. And I think what I've seen the pattern, especially in the HIV world, is it is anathema to blame the victim, essentially.

[00:04:24] And you see that with injection drug use, and that's such a big issue in Seattle. And Michael Powell covered that in The Atlantic recently, as I'm sure you guys know. And you see it when there are disparities in outcomes, you know, HIV, it's much more common among young black men, for example.

[00:04:41] So every study that you see dances around the subject of blaming the victim and saying, well, there are cultural factors that lead these young people to, say, not see the doctor to obtain an HIV prevention prescription for what's called predisposure prophylactis or PrEP. It's a pill you can take every day to prevent HIV.

[00:05:00] So there's millions of dollars that will be spent trying to blame structures and stigma, always sort of dance around the subject of never attributing it to the individual's actual choices and behavior. The idea of individual agency is almost anathema in these kind of ways of thinking of the society's problems.

[00:05:23] And I think you can apply that to anything, certainly to harm reduction, to sex works in Seattle, of whether this sort of like classic liberal permissiveness goes overboard at the point of – it makes me think of Abigail Shrier, who was a year above me at Columbia. I graduated in 2001. She was graduated in 2020 or 2000. And in her recent book, Bad Therapy, she sort of talks about like the way she was raised where parents would say things to her like, well, just got over it already or that's too bad or tough.

[00:05:53] And my parents were quite like that. But my mother said tough or you'd ask her why. And she'd say just because. You know, I am the authority. Right. And, you know, to look at that politically, I think people, political theorists have often said that the left is, you know, the mother, the maternal figure. And then the right is sort of like the Old Testament God, you know. A righteous condemnation if you're a bad, but you're supposed to, you know, live up to him.

[00:06:22] And there's a lot of ideas of like filial piety. So I think what I see and the patterns I see in my writing is that especially just sort of focusing on the left, because it's frankly a little bit more interesting to me than focusing on the rights. And like more like, I guess, criticizing your own tribe. And I think there's is more fruitful than just sort of old man yelling at the cloud of, you know, Stephen Miller, bad kind of talk. But I think that that mindset can really go awry.

[00:06:50] Right. If you think of the scene in Annie Hall where the parents are fighting in the flashback over the, you fired the cleaning woman? She stole. And I can't say, I can't even repeat what they say next because someone would cancel me. But if you recall the scene, like fill that in your memory. Like, Leo, I married a fool. That scene encapsulates at least Woody Allen's perspective in the 70s, even of the insanity of the permissiveness of the left, essentially.

[00:07:17] Yeah. Okay. So just before we get into more of your great reporting and some examples, I wanted to ask, follow up that with a little bit more about how this compares to what we've seen on the right, since we're kind of dancing around that. Like in the George W. Bush era, you have Stephen Colbert talking about truthiness, which is basically, you know, the evidence for invading Iraq might not completely add up. But we definitely want to take out Saddam Hussein. So that must be right. Then we get to Trump and sort of MAGA. And it's a whole different.

[00:07:46] I won the 2020 election, despite all of this public evidence proving that I'm lying about that. It seems like a completely different kind of a thing. Whereas what you're describing is something I was wondering if the phrase progressive truthiness might describe it, where it's a little bit more sophisticated. So there's a study that says something that we already believe. And we're like, oh, yeah, look at this. The science is totally clear or the data is totally clear about this crime report or whatever.

[00:08:13] I mean, this happens all the time to Sandeep and I when we're talking about Seattle politics and debating it with folks. But there's a study that reaches a conclusion that that progressive person doesn't like. And suddenly they're all like, oh, oh, well, that's just one study or who funded it or, you know, sort of nitpicky about it. So how are these kind of instances of truthiness, if we want to call it that different? I mean, I think I myself had to catch myself from doing that because I tend to write very critically about pediatric gender medicine.

[00:08:42] So I have to stop myself and say, are you going to leap and look for all the errors in the one that's more critical versus the other? So, I mean, it really goes both ways. I think, you know, in the Maha movement, it's strange because, again, like for the left, anything on the right must be incorrect. And anything RFK does is totally insane. And the guy does a lot of stuff that's totally insane. And just in his personal life alone and the bear and the whale, you know, all that weird stuff that he's done.

[00:09:07] And that'd be a great children's book, The Bear and the Whale, the story of R.K. Jr., you know. And yet there are elements of the Maha movement that are totally logical and that may be good for you. Granted, I think that they focus on some things that distract from real purposeful systemic change and dealing with chronic illness, like taking red dye number five or whatever it's called out of cereal, which is just sort of a token, if you will. But my focus has really been on pediatric gender medicine.

[00:09:36] And there's a real war over the strength of the evidence. And if you use, you know, so-called evidence-based medicine principles to apply to it, you find that the studies, when you put it through a systematic literature review, are called either very low or low quality evidence. And those are lay terms. What they really mean specifically is that with very low, like the actual outcomes in the real world compared to what we see,

[00:10:02] the outcomes in these studies of this field of giving these gender drugs to kids could be wildly different from what we actually see in the studies. And then you get up to moderate and your highest, if you have high quality evidence, and that means we are quite certain that the findings in this study, like typically a randomized controlled study that went on for years with lots of participants, etc., that it is very close to what you would see in the real world.

[00:10:26] So if you look at, say, the HIV world, it took forever for them to prove that beginning treatment earlier rather than later was advantageous. There are all these balances because you're looking at toxicity of the drugs. And the earlier drugs, when they first came out in the mid-90s, were very toxic to the body. And they caused like terrible disfiguring side effects and that kind of thing. So there was a theory, like maybe if we delay it for a while or we give drug holidays, that would give people a break from the toxicities without really harming the immune system.

[00:10:57] So first I did a randomized controlled study of drug holidays, found out they were actually harmful, stopped the study early in, I think, 2006. And then finally in 2015, through huge studies of worldwide participants and thousands of participants, they were able to randomly do a randomized controlled trial that proved that, yes, starting earlier, prevent, it was associated with lower morbidity and mortality. Whereas if you get the studies, you look at pediatric gender medicine, they're very weak. They have very short follow-up times. Almost none of them have a control group.

[00:11:26] So you're really shooting in the dark in that sense. So it also opens the door for exactly what you were saying. For people when they do see studies that have a positive outcome, they leap on it. Whereas, say, a more recent study of puberty blockers, after the study directors had for years said that these drugs would save these kids from horrendous anxiety and suicidality, that these drugs in and of themselves, which are supposed to prepare people for probably going on cross-ex hormones,

[00:11:53] the study of just puberty blockers more recently found that their mental health didn't change at all. And so suddenly the authors of the study turn around and say, oh, well, that's because they were doing fine in the first place and we just sort of held them in place waiting for their cross-ex hormones and then they were still fine, which is perfectly logical, but they don't acknowledge that they suddenly changed the script. So you see a lot of that moving of goalposts in this field. And, you know, as people get more and more critical of their,

[00:12:20] where the outcomes aren't very well defended in terms of suicidality or improved mental health, you see the field moving towards what's called embodiment goals, where we really aren't trying to pathologize the condition of gender dysphoria. We don't like that concept. What we're really just doing is trying to get these young people's bodies to align with their goals. And then that starts to get off the rails when you hear them talking about non-binary people. And it's really just like a free-for-all. Like we get a little hormones there and a little hormones there.

[00:12:49] And this person wants, you know, wants facial hair, but they don't want clitoral growth. And so they're sort of selecting from a grab bag and you're like, okay, how is this just different from plastic surgery? And if it is, if that's what you're saying, you can't therefore rationalize it as a scientific evidence-based field, you know, based on rational outcomes and medical necessity. It's just a matter of a person's whims. So you can see them sort of like almost deliberately driving themselves off the rails

[00:13:18] in terms of science, just to get away from people trying to catch up with them, saying like, you're not running an evidence-based field. So I kind of wanted to ask about the fear that people have in blue spaces of stigmatizing marginalized groups, which is a really reasonable fear to have for all kinds of reasons. And I did some of my own reporting back in 2019 about a major measles outbreak here in the Vancouver area.

[00:13:46] This is a pretty big, relatively speaking, outbreak. And I think almost all of the cases were kids in the Ukrainian-American community that have a very high rate of vaccine hesitancy for all kinds of reasons that we could get into. Part of my reporting had to do with the fact there was a lot of Russian language, social media, you know, affecting this community, which has a strange history in the war between Ukraine and Russia.

[00:14:12] But as I remember it, basically public health officials at the time did not want to mention in any of their press releases or even really talk about the fact that this was the Ukrainian-American community. And I was like, that's really weird, because if you're a part of that community, maybe you want to make some health decisions. You know, maybe you want to take, get your kid vaccinated or whatever. It's, yeah, there's some kind of abstract fear about stigma. Like people are going to start, I don't know, avoiding Ukrainian restaurants or something.

[00:14:39] But what about the public health value and just telling the truth about what's happening? And so I thought about that when I was reading about your reporting on monkeypox in 2022, when gay and bisexual men were primarily the group that was most ever- Overwhelmingly. Overwhelming, yeah. Notice how you even absorbed their language. And yet I remember originally, like, holy shit, for all of us, it was like, oh, one more thing we have to be worried about, monkeypox. And it took a while for that story, the larger story to come out.

[00:15:07] So what was your, when do you first remember looking at that going, oh, yeah, here's another instance. It's funny, because I didn't see that through the political lens that I would see it through now. Immediately, because what had happened was people instantly started leveraging monkeypox to further their own political goals. There were a lot of COVID maximalists who were really upset that people were starting to abandon masks at that point. You know, I think most people across the country were really sick of it and didn't see the point in it anymore.

[00:15:38] And so they leveraged COVID and the fear of COVID to try to further their own goals of keeping people isolated from one another, essentially. So it was inconvenient to them that this was not airborne and that it was transmitted largely to extremely intimate contact. So I, an editor of mine at NBC had asked me to start looking at it at the end of May of 2022. And I looked at it for a couple days and what little information was out there and quickly

[00:16:07] realized like, oh, this is a gay thing and no one wants to talk about it. I see. And that was the rest of the summer. So it ultimately, it started in mid-May in Western Europe and about a week and a half later, it really hit the shores of the United States. Got really big during June and then it peaked like the first week of August and then rapidly collapsed. That's the infection incidence rate that I'm describing. So, you know, during the first weeks, the CDC, you know, it was a liberal, liberal, liberal

[00:16:37] administration at the Biden administration. So everyone there is very unlike the people who are now running at the Trump administration. So they were very eager to get the word out, but they would always say this mantra of anyone can get monkeypox. And that was their leading concept of anyone can get this. And so they're really taking a gamble there. They are prioritizing, de-emphasizing the infection rate being overwhelmingly amongst gay men.

[00:17:02] And so their preference in doing so is to hopefully find the other nooks and crannies where this infection might be. But primarily they're concerned about not making gays look bad. And I'm frankly just a little tired of this over the years of like gays being treated as so precious. And are we really that vulnerable that we can't handle it, that people know that most HIV is amongst gay people, for example? And just for our audience, you're obviously you're a gay man. A person. Yeah.

[00:17:32] A gay person. Yeah. I was like, I still let Seattle people on the horn. But so I grew up in Seattle in Madison Park and went to Bush, you know, the private school K through 12. Both my brothers were quote unquote lifers there as well. So I was the first gay person to come out at Bush in their history in the spring of 1996 when I was a junior. And it went very well. So and since then there have been lots of gay people, blah, blah, blah. So that's my own history with this. So I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post.

[00:18:00] I think it was the end of June or beginning of July that summer, which I criticized the CDC for using this expression, which I thought was a shame because you could see from especially from the surveillance data that came out from the United Kingdom, they released these weekly numbers. And the percentage rate of the infections, the diagnoses that were in men was always in like 95 percent. It really just stayed like a flat line.

[00:18:26] So and this virus was transmitting very quickly, you know, much more quickly than HIV, which took a while to sort of wind its way into some other groups other than injection drug users and gay men, you know, especially say black women or like people in prison. But that was not happening, happening week by week with monkeypox. And so you can be pretty confident that this was trend. This was largely transmitted by something that could only happen between men, namely anal sex

[00:18:56] between men. And the thing about gay men transmitting HIV in particular through transmission chains is the concept of being a receptive or an active partner in anal sex. So being receptive partner is much more likely to acquire the HIV and much more likely to transmit it if you're the insertive partner or being a top or a bottom is the lay term. So that's one of the reasons why HIV transmits so readily between gay men, in addition to the fact that they have a lot of partners or concurrent partners.

[00:19:23] And so it was a surprise to people during monkeypox, to my surprise, that gay men have lots of sex. On average, gay men have more sexual partners, more concurrent partners, a lot more casual sex than straight people. So I was getting all of this pushback online when I was just saying, like, you know, this is an artifact, a product of gay men's sexual behaviors. You know, like, it just is what it is. Like, I'm not saying this to criticize anyone, but if you want to be real about the epidemiology

[00:19:50] of it, then I would get these, like, 18-year-old girls on Twitter criticizing me, saying that the problem during the HIV epidemic, during the 80s in particular, is that people overemphasized how much it was in gay men. Like, are you out of your mind? I wasn't even told this, but literally little girls were telling me this. And I was just so dismayed. I mean, I started working in the HIV world in Seattle in what was called the Northwest AIDS Foundation in 1995, where I started doing volunteer work there.

[00:20:17] So I've spent, you know, by that point, 25 years working in this world. So it was extremely frustrating. And I got all this pushback from gay activists and HIV activists for being so forthright and honest and blunt that this was largely transmitting between through anal sex, through gay men, and almost not at all elsewhere. And they just didn't want that stigmatizing message to be out there because they were more worried about kind of the gay brand.

[00:20:43] But there are very real fears about homophobia or, you know, homophobic-driven violence, let's say, or stigmatization even impacting health-seeking behavior. So people, if gay men are more stigmatized, they may be less likely to seek out testing and treatment for STDs, and that can raise your likelihood of getting HIV, et cetera. So these are all proven things. But you have to keep it in context that this was an emergency, and people were over-prioritizing those feelings.

[00:21:09] And I really just think there's this sort of, like, sacrosanct law in the gay world that thou shalt not tell gay men what to do with his sex life. And that, we can sort of look at it in all the debates about the Cornell 7 right now, where, you know, you could say, like, one aspect of feminism is saying that if women are liberated, they're also liberated to make bad choices and regret them. And I'm not saying that I know what happened with the woman, the Jane Doe character at all, whether she was or not raped. But there is that debate going on.

[00:21:39] And I think that's something similar. You say, like, why are gay men being infantilized that they can't be told, like, you're a grown-up, this is an emergency, shape up, at least for now, and protect yourself and other people. Going back 10 years, right, to let's say 2016, Trump gets elected for the first time. And in the wake of that, right, there's a whole resistance politics that rises up in cosmopolitan and blue America. And most of the major institutions of cosmopolitan America kind of participate in that kind of

[00:22:09] resistance regime, you know, in the early days of Trump. And there's a whole new academic discipline and journalistic beat to cover what's called, you know, misinformation and disinformation that rises up in that Trump 1.0 era. And to my mind, even at the time, I thought, boy, this beat has kind of a partisan tinge to it. I mean, it seemed entirely devoted to exposing how people on the right were adopting and expressing

[00:22:37] false claims about things like COVID vaccines or the outcome of the 2020 election or name your, you know, name your kind of crazy MAGA obsession or article of faith. But the academics at places like Stanford or here at the University of Washington that kind of took up this kind of disinformation, misinformation issue were very noticeably

[00:23:01] uninterested in exploring whether similar denials of reality were happening among polarized progressives in their own information networks and cultural spaces. And did you see that, Ben? Ben, and is that something you were reacting to, you know, as your own kind of reporting issues and interests of all? Yeah. My own coming to awareness was more recent than during that time.

[00:23:29] I think I was more in that mindset. At that time, I was writing for Paws magazine, which is an HIV magazine from 2012 to 2020. So I was just constantly churning through HIV studies and which were very based in that mindset. But I did start to see the ways that researchers would not ask questions that would have an inconvenient answer. For example, no epidemiologist has ever published, which would be a very simple analysis to do

[00:23:56] these days, the rate ratio between the rate at which men who have sex with men or gay and bisexual men, is the other way to put it, acquire HIV compared to heterosexual men and women. No one has ever published that figure. And I asked a guy at Emory to calculate it for me and did it just in a few minutes. And it was, I believe it was, gay men require HIV at a rate 250 times greater than heterosexual women and 400 times greater than heterosexual men.

[00:24:24] And the obvious reason to me why no one has ever bothered to publish that is it makes gay men look bad. Despite the fact that it can help direct resources to where it's more needed. You see an inordinate amount of money being spent in the HIV world on trying to get black women in particular to take predisposure for phylaxis, the HIV prevention pill. And I always say, you know, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to find the person who would most benefit for it. So there's a figure called an NNT, which is the number needed to treat.

[00:24:53] So in pharmaceutical world, in particular for PrEP, that's the number needed to get PrEP for one year. Number of people need to get PrEP for one year to prevent one HIV infection. And in one study, in particular in England, these gay men were at such high risk of HIV, that number was nine. So depending on like how, if you ask what population you're in, what demographics they are, you know, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 30. But that is a very good number.

[00:25:20] That means that as money well spent, it is very cost effective to direct resources to those people, especially now that PrEP is only like $30 a month for the generic version of the pill. Meanwhile, to try to direct it to heterosexual women, no one has ever calculated an NNT for that. And I can guarantee you it would be in the thousands, which means that if they did calculate it, that means that somebody else would turn around and perhaps calculate whether this was cost effective to direct all this money.

[00:25:49] Because, you know, trying to try to find these women and bring them in and keep them on the drug and all that energy would be in the thousands. And yet you see all these studies which are constantly trying to get black men to take these drugs. And I'm just saying there, not one person would ever stand up in one of those meetings, those medical meetings and say, I think this is money poorly spent. I'm sorry. As much as we want to prevent HIV in African-American women, which we should, this is not the best use of our limited resources. It makes you sound terrible.

[00:26:19] It makes you sound like you don't care. But if we're going to do the best job of spending money effectively, you have to make those judgment calls. And more recently, you know, speaking of Seattle, I think one of the worst proponents of the ideological lens, filtering through an ideological lens of the misinformation beat is Michael Hobbs. So he's extremely, he's in Seattle, he's an extremely successful podcaster.

[00:26:43] He runs, he used to run the podcast You're Wrong About, and now he runs Maintenance Phase and If Books Could Kill. I spent a long time last year reading reams of his transcripts because I couldn't bear to listen to his voice. It's very shrill and very smug. Um, but the basis of Maintenance Phase, it's him, he's very fit and thin, I've met him. Um, and there's Aubrey Gordon, who is a quite obese woman, is his co-host.

[00:27:12] Both of those are pen names, by the way. Neither of them use their real name. Um, but the basic premise is that obesity, there's definitely this thing such as like healthy obesity, which can happen. You can be medically healthy and obesity. But they never acknowledge the concept of a hazard ratio, that there is very solid evidence to prove that the more heavy you get, the more obese you get, the higher your risk of death from various causes, all cause mortality.

[00:27:41] And they never acknowledge this. Everything's very binary in the way they see it. And the thing about Michael, and you see him on, on Michael Hobbes, you see him on Blue Sky in particular, where he sort of holds court and no one ever objects to anything he says, is he would never acknowledge that somebody, one of his ideological opponents, somebody on the right or a reactionary centrist, as he likes to call them to dismiss everything they say, uh, is ever right. Only the left is ever right.

[00:28:06] And that's to me is a sign of somebody who is very ideologically honest, uh, if they can acknowledge that their opponent has, there's something to what they say, or that maybe sometimes like, you know, as I was saying earlier, the Maha movement is onto something, you know, maybe we should focus more on these chronic conditions. Maybe not in that way that they do, but that in and of itself is a worthy goal. And maybe the right was right. Oh, maybe we really did overdo it with school closures, et cetera. There is this kind of annoying podcast dial.

[00:28:36] That's very, uh, Twitter slash Blue Sky slash social media, where instead of taking on a claim or disputing it, there's just this kind of smug dismissal of it. Like Sandeep Kaushik said that, oh my God, you know, Sandeep Kaushik, that kind of stuff, uh, drives me crazy. I'm wondering like. I should be smugly dismissed actually. True, true. But, um, when you're doing this reporting over the years, do, I mean, obviously most,

[00:29:04] most, some people are writing you back and saying you're wrong. Your facts are wrong. You're misleading us about the science or the evidence, but do people also say you. I've never heard anyone successfully say you're wrong about your facts. They didn't. Okay. So that's my question. Are people, are people actually saying to you, Ben, you're right about this stuff. Um, you should, you just shouldn't say it. Uh, it's more ad hominem attacks, attacks that you're a transphobe, for example.

[00:29:29] So, you know, I write about the pediatric medicine industry and there's a lot to be very critical of. Um, you just open one door, you know, and all these sort of bats fly out, if you will. Um, so it's, it's always a bad sign that somebody's position about a certain topic, they can't defend it on its merits and they're more likely just to try to attack people who would dare criticize it. And I found that immediately. I became interested in pediatric gender medicine in the fall of 2022.

[00:29:59] Monkey box as a topic had faded away. I had just recovered from cancer treatment. So I was in this sort of nadir period trying to figure out what to do with my life. And I saw that there was all of this hullabaloo on Twitter in particular about the New York Times reporting about pediatric gender medicine. So earlier that year, Emily Bazelon had published this very big and seminal piece in the New York Times magazine about the fight over the revised guidelines for pediatric gender medicine that had been published that September, 2022.

[00:30:27] Um, she wrote about it in advance of that. And then also in the fall, um, it was Christina Jewett and Megan Toohey who, Megan Toohey won the Pulitzer for starting Me Too for writing about Harvey Weinstein in 2017. They wrote a very critical article about the potential side effects and downsides of prescribing puberty blockers, um, in particular bone loss. And people just leapt on these reporters, these very fine Pulitzer Prize winning reporters, you

[00:30:56] know, Emily Bazelon, you know, teaches at Yale law school, et cetera. Super far right though. You know, she's, she's so MAGA. Her son, her son, interestingly enough, um, I'm blanking on his name, but he was a big, uh, big author of one of those recent, um, post-mortem reports about what's gone wrong with the Democrats. So, uh, he, he has inherited the scorn from his mother, the Nepo baby scorn has tripled down, took it down to him.

[00:31:22] And like, you see him talking to these podcasts and he's like 24, just, you just graduated from Yale and he's like, sentimentally smart, by the way. I'm like, good for you. I wish I was, you know, that killing it like that right out of Columbia. Um, anyway, so very fine articles and they always love to rail on Jesse Singel. So Jesse Singal is a journalist and who really established the beat of being critical of gender medicine, I would say in the United States, um, perhaps around the world in 2018 with his

[00:31:50] cover article on the subject in the Atlantic. And I think that, I think the cover, the title on the cover was when kids say they're trans. Um, and it was a very sensitive look at the science of this field, what happens when people try to transition, how can kids know at a young age that they really are better off medically transitioning genders, et cetera. And he was just pillory for that. And, you know, kind of run out of town of mainstream journalism for a while.

[00:32:17] And luckily for him and for the rest of us, Substack came along. He became, he started a podcast also with Katie Herzog, who's in Seattle, um, blocked and reported about internet madness. And he's become extremely successful. Um, but kind of on the outs because he was run out of town by pitchforks effectively. But you would see online people making these wild accusations about him being some sort of a pervert, et cetera. And I had worked with Jesse briefly a couple of times in some articles because he was an editor at New York Magazine. I wrote for him a couple of times.

[00:32:46] So I knew him a little bit, um, and I'm like, gee, you know, are these things true? And, you know, similarly, I think with the Cornell case, I don't want to leap to conclusions when I see things like that's something I try to resist in myself and just say, what is the evidence show? What do we know at this time? And I think that a big problem people have in society is with, we're not sure, or we don't know. They want to know immediately. Um, and that's the case of the pediatric gender medicine.

[00:33:13] And in the case of whether or not people writing about that were evil, I looked at the evidence. I looked at the kind of people that were saying this and their motivations. And I'm like, I don't see anything proving what they're saying is true. And so that got me interested. And so I started tweeting about pediatric gender medicine in December, 2022 is around Christmas. And I just said, gee, you know, I read these articles in Reuters. There was a series they did about this medical field. And one was about how much detransition research is discouraged.

[00:33:43] Retransitioning is when you have medically transitioned and then you revert to your birth sex and, you know, try to reverse any treatments or surgeries you might've had, which is only, there's only so much you can do in some cases. So I just tweeted, gee, you know, it's a shame that people would discourage researching this, this field, this particular subfield, you know, people should do more of that. And it was leapt on by Alejandro Caraballo, who is this great vicious leading transgender

[00:34:09] activist who is a clinical instructor in the cyber law clinic at Harvard Law School. She's not a professor, mind you. And she's a transgender woman. And it was very clear that she was trying to beat me out of ever saying anything. She had no idea that I would go on to become also, you know, sort of like, like Jesse following his footsteps, a lady figure in this field. But had I had different personality and different circumstances in life and was more afraid

[00:34:35] for my own reputation or my own ability to make a living, I would have been scared off. And, but unluckily for her, because she wants to scare away people like me, it didn't work. And I became obsessed with the topic, started reading about it like mad and just saw so much to talk about. And again, I think I didn't quite see the paradigm politically. Oh, here we go again with the left.

[00:35:01] It's kind of elite misinformation is a term that I've heard a lot lately that I quite like that that was defining this field. But it certainly was an entry for me as a reporter, because there's just nothing but stuff to write about. And most people are afraid to do so. And then most people who write from the left, if you're say, Slate, something like that, you know, these really definitively lefty publications, they don't want to write about it in critical way. You know, they see that as being opposed to their political positions, which is protect

[00:35:31] trans kids, which is in itself a political statement because it presumes that the kids themselves are definitively transgender, whatever that might mean, and therefore must have these treatments. And it precludes actually deciding whether these treatments are right for them. Because they are trans, therefore they must need the treatments. Right. So more recently, Ben, you took up writing and I think wrote an important early piece for

[00:36:00] the Washington Free Beacon on the whole Jason Arday affair fiasco, whatever you want to call it, right? And just for our readers sake, just to remind them, Jason Arde was with great fanfare appointed the youngest full professor at Cambridge at the age of 37 teaching in the education department. Cambridge made a very big deal out of this appointment. It got kind of almost worldwide media attention at the time that it happened.

[00:36:29] And then earlier this year, Arde's both life story and his scholarship, you know, started to unravel. And then very rapidly, the whole thing came apart. He had told all of these stories, these kind of fantastical stories about the hardships he had overcome to, you know, become a professor where, you know, he wasn't able to speak during

[00:36:55] his childhood and, you know, wasn't able to read until a very late, you know, age and so on and so forth. And then, you know, did all these kind of fantastic physical feats as well, running multiple marathons day after day and so on. Almost none of this turns out to be true, right? And so, Ben, you hopped on this whole situation early. Why? What prompted you to take it? Just to challenge you, you know, you said almost none of this is true.

[00:37:23] I would challenge you to say instead, this is not pure to be supported by evidence. Okay. There were some of these things which were definitively untrue. You could absolutely say for certain that he did not do these things. But otherwise, did he run 300 miles in three days or 600 miles in six days? What we can say for sure is there's no evidence of this. Or he claimed that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days in 2010 and that he fractured his leg after having a seizure and ran the last, it was either nine or 10. The story is always changing.

[00:37:52] That's a big theme with him. The story would change whenever he was telling it. And depending on the audience, that he ran with a hairline fracture. I think it was in his tibia. And then his leg was swollen to twice the size. But there are photographs of his last marathon. And in at least one of them, you can see his legs and they look fine.

[00:38:39] Yeah. They hired this big law firm, Carter Rock, which is a huge defamation firm that defends like Scientology and celebrities in England and elsewhere. Jason already sicked this firm on Jack Grove, the reporter at Times Higher Education, in September of last year. And wrote them this very ominous letter. They didn't have to threaten them. It just sort of was like a specter of a threat.

[00:39:07] And accusing them of racism and saying things that were defamatory, etc. And that got Times Higher Education spooked. And they spiked the story. And ultimately, Jason Arde, apparently, who else would have been, called the police on this reporter. The police investigated him for four months and then called him and said, we call up our investigation. By the way, you were investigated. But please don't ever talk to this person again or call him or go after him. For we're concerned about his mental health.

[00:39:35] And that just, especially for an American, just makes one's mind spin when you talk about free speech. And yet, you know, they don't have the Constitution that we have. And the libel laws there are very imposing, to say the least. But indeed, that did scare this guy. And, you know, he didn't then make a big stink of it at the time, as we might have in the United States. But this all came spilling out. And so I just did this deep dive and said he's made all these claims, Jason Arday,

[00:40:03] about having raised, at that point, five and a half million pounds for charity over the previous 15 years. So I just started to check, like, what evidence is there that he's raised any of this? And ultimately, there was only evidence documented that he'd raised about 10 and a half thousand pounds. You know, and he put out a memoir right the last days of his life. Ultimately, he died probably by suicide, I believe, in August, the beginning of August. You know, days after this memoir came out.

[00:40:31] So you can compare all his claims over time. And also, you can see how his bio changed more recently. And you could start to tell that his bio had changed on these websites for these different universities that had given him honorary doctorates, for example. And he was tweaking how much he ran. Or he would say, oh, I raised the money as a part of groups. And ultimately, when I came to a British publication, interviewed him, and he made the grand mistake of talking to them at all.

[00:41:00] And he confessed, at least, or at least changed his story to say that he'd raised five and a half million pounds as a part of larger syndicates, but then refused to name any of them because claimed that he'd signed NDAs. Which is, I can say, having raised a lot of money for charity in my life is not a thing. Nobody wants to keep secret that they're raising a lot of money for charity. Quite the opposite. And they said, well, why didn't you tell everyone this in the first place? Oh, he's like, oh, well, they misunderstood. Or, you know, they just said things and I never corrected them. And why didn't you correct them?

[00:41:29] And he said, well, I never thought everyone would dig through my life. But he most certainly did because you can see the evidence of him having changed his bio a year prior. You know, he changed the bio for his speakers bureau to do with Simon Schuster, which published his book. So that was my entree in that. And I looked into a lot of other stuff of his, like, claiming that he was being subject to all these violent threats. And what, you know, there was a freedom of information request that I found that suggested he never even called the police about this stuff in the first place, etc.

[00:41:59] So it was a very sad story. I think that ultimately he was a token and he was used by one university after another to prop up their own sort of DEI cause during a time when that was especially in vogue that the George Floyd effect was really seeping across the Atlantic. And so in 2023, when he was hired by Cambridge, they did make a really big deal of it and they put their press department behind it.

[00:42:26] And as we can see, and as the New York Times has reported, they did not do their due diligence to look at his background and his claims and to really analyze his scholarship and that they had indeed lowered their standards. The New York Times showed that as well, that typically somebody getting a professorship, which is akin in the United States to having like an endowed chair in a university in the United Kingdom, you would be, you know, in your mid to late 50s, let's say, or maybe in your early 40s. You have a huge publication record.

[00:42:55] You're really prestigious in these fields. You've won all these awards and that kind of thing. And his publication record was very thin. And a lot of it was based on what's called autoethnography, which is a fancy way of saying talking about yourself and your friends. And it was just sort of him, you know, talking to him, you know, talking about his own experiences going through higher ed and talking with other African-Americans about their experiences, which is a worthy cause, I suppose. But it's not exactly highly rigorous research based on some complex methodology, et cetera.

[00:43:24] You know, it's storytelling, essentially. I'm curious what you thought about the Tyler Austin Harper piece in The Atlantic. Yeah. Where he basically says, on the one hand, yeah, former Bates College professor, he makes the same argument that you're making about kind of institutional failure, that there's no basic vetting or oversight. And that's part of what leads to this.

[00:43:48] But at the same time, the right ends up using this incident in a really bad faith way to basically attack black academics as a whole. So rather than kind of say, this is a bit like the Stephen Glass case at the New Republic or whatever, plus the institutional failure you both talk about, you know, it's just kind of black academics all must suck. And this is part of that. So I wonder what you thought of that piece.

[00:44:11] Well, I mean, a lot of what he's talking about is, you know, Christopher Rufo in particular, you know, he's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, conservative Manhattan Institute. He's become this very, also out of Seattle, by the way. He used to be liberal. And his origin story, as I was just hearing about from Katie Herzog and Blockton Report the other day, was, you know, that he was failed in the city council, as you know. And he was liberal at the time. And it radicalized him. And now he's very far on the right.

[00:44:34] So, you know, he and others really targeted black academics like Claudine Gay at Harvard and rifled through their scholarship and found plagiarism and got them fired. So the problem is nobody has done a rigorous study in which, without selection bias, they look at everybody's PhDs, black or white, and try to find out if there's more likely to have plagiarism if you're black versus white, for example.

[00:45:02] So the people who are bringing this stuff to the fore indeed do have an agenda. But the problem is it's very inconvenient for the left because while that is done, let's say, in the bad faith in the sense of, like, you do want to flush, that Christopher Ruffo does want to flush black academics out of higher ed. You're not getting equal attention to perhaps bad behavior by white academics. So we really don't know. All we see are a bunch of headlines.

[00:45:29] And the problem with the way the brain works, and this is something in my own writing, writing about science, I tend to prefer just the data in a story. I don't really care when they have, like, and here's the experience. Here's the individual person to whom this happened. I'm like, blah, blah, blah. You know, like, just get to the numbers. I am very atypical in that regard. Like, I'm like, what are the numbers? That's what sticks in my mind. But the average person, they hear stories. They don't hear, you know, like, on average, what is it?

[00:45:57] It's something like a few dozen, like, it's something like 25 armed-armed black men are killed by the police a year. Don't quote me on that. It's very low. What they see are the videos. And, you know, they see George Floyd on video being killed and all the others. And so that makes it seem like it's an enormous academic that's happening to everybody. And similarly with this in academia, I think part of the problem is to run a plagiarism check is very expensive.

[00:46:23] I know because I tried doing it on somebody in the A-DAR-8 orbit. I'm working on a story about that right now. And it was going to cost me over $300 to analyze their entire thesis. And so I just, like, cut it in half and did part of it for, like, $150 just to see what I could find. So it would be very expensive to funnel all of these theses through the entire system. And I think that's part of the problem of why you don't get a clear look of, like, whether there is a bigger problem of black away.

[00:46:53] And so it's easier to say that the product of these analyses, because the analyses were done in bad faith, therefore the product must not be true. But inconveniently it is true because you can look. And Jason Arde, all you need are eyes. And you're like, oh, there's four sentences in a row that are identical to this column. That wasn't in her PhD thesis. This isn't yours. And his, you know, John, Liverpool John Moore's University, who gave him his PhD, they apparently exonerated him.

[00:47:22] They analyzed his work and said it was all due to sort of mistakes and, like, understandable errors. And he chalked it up to his autism, et cetera. And I'm just saying, like, you can't have it both ways. You can't hold this person up as a beacon of intellectual prowess. But they make excuses for him when he's criticized, as anyone would be when they are a huge public figure in the intellectual field.

[00:47:46] The thing about the whole Arde fiasco that really grabbed my attention was, first of all, Ben, as you're saying, the way Cambridge came to hire Jason Arde in the first place, right, which clearly involved them, you know, completely avoiding any kind of scrutiny of his past record and violating their own kind of standards for marriage.

[00:48:14] For, you know, merit and quality and, you know, academic output and all of those sorts of things. And so why did they do that in the first place? And then once the whole story, the whole Arde story starts to fall apart, they really vehemently circle the wagons for a while and just absolutely refuse to. And so just a quick thought of mine, and then I'd love your thoughts about what was going on there.

[00:48:42] But it seems to me that for them, for those good white progressive people at Cambridge who were coming under a lot of pressure about the demographics of the faculty at Cambridge at the time, very few black professors there.

[00:48:57] So along comes Jaden Arde, this identitarian Superman, right, who's claiming awesome success in vanquishing personal impairments and traumas and triumphing over inequity and virulent racism that had been directed at him. Man, he's perfect for their ideological project, right?

[00:49:19] And his life story proved that they'd been right all along to kind of take these identitarian concerns and put them front and center in, you know, the academic project of, you know, the department that he was in. And so they found his kind of incredible tales of superhuman conquest just over impossible adversities credible because they needed it to be credible, it seems to me. So anyway. Again, I can't read their minds, but here's what evidence we have.

[00:49:49] We have Hillary Kremen, who is the head of the education department at Cambridge. She's a white woman. And we have the video that was published from the BBC when he got his job. And she's, I've said this before in a different podcast, but she goes up to him almost like he's a Christ-like figure and like one of them is going to wash the other's feet in any minute now. But she gushes over him, you know, the decision was unanimous by the hiring panel and you're the best in the world at what you do in terms of what you do, she said. And you look at that and you look at his work and there's such a disconnect.

[00:50:19] And who's to know if she either really believes this, has talked herself into it, is a little scared and feels like she has to overdo it. I don't know. But I can also say that Colin Wright, who also is at Manhattan Institute, he has a sub-stack. He and I co-authored this piece looking at the PhD thesis of, it was also out of the education department, a black woman who, and Jason Arday was on her Viva, which is the thesis approval panel.

[00:50:46] And it was this insane kind of affront to academia itself. She wrote seriously a poetry slam for her PhD thesis in which she went on and on about how she was opposed to these various high academic standards and was almost surprised she was getting away with what she was doing.

[00:51:08] And ultimately, her conclusion, which was based on these autoethnographic discussions about black women's experience in Cambridge or Oxford and how alienated it was, that they all really liked to go to have potlucks together in London. And there were all these fancy words she used, like marionage, which I forgot even what that means, that just put some sort of intellectual veneer on this idea of we don't feel a place, we go over there and we feel at home.

[00:51:36] And you're just like, and yet, you're going to write hundreds of pages about this and get a PhD based on this. But you just said that you don't even agree with the academic prowess that this is supposed to confer upon you. So her own academic advisor, I forget his name, he was a white man. And if you look at all his papers and his books, like the word white isn't like most of the titles, it's like white guilt, white shame and that kind of thing.

[00:52:01] So you can see that cross, I keep using religious iconography when I'm describing, on his shoulders. But fast forward to when we know for a fact that Cambridge was getting wind of that. They knew people were starting to complain, you know, immediately after the hiring that he was possibly guilty of plagiarism. They didn't act on it, clearly. And then the story breaks. Nathan Coffin's story comes out, Times Higher Education reports on it.

[00:52:29] You get, you know, we get, we get the, all the other, like especially conservative and eventually liberal as well, British publications are writing about this. So what does Cambridge do at first? They double down. They say, they blame the vile racism at first. And that's their major statement. And then public, public sentiment starts to turn against them. So they pivot and then they say, okay, we're going to investigate. And then they make another, like more sort of fervent statement about his investigation. And ultimately he resigns.

[00:52:59] You can only imagine what kind of conversation went on there. And then he dies. So then some time goes by, you know, and then they say, it's terrible, very sorry. And then after a couple months, they backpedal. And they say they're not going to engage in the investigation of his hiring and anything that might have gone wrong with that. They're only going to look at how they treated him in the time around his death.

[00:53:20] And again, you have to ask yourself, you know, let's just say, let's just say like a young kid says, you know, a horrible bigoted slur in a school presentation at some high school somewhere. And they expel him. Is it therefore then the responsibility of that school to sit around and tend to that person's mental health? They made a choice. They knew what they're doing was wrong.

[00:53:44] Similarly with Jason Arday, everyone knew he was vulnerable, but he was also held up as an intellectual beacon. And he had made choices and his life had collapsed all around him based on the scaffolding of lies that he had built himself over a course of 15 years. And not one, but I mean, constant lying, a book, a memoir based on lies that surely Simon and Schuster was aware of that there were problems like a year before, because that's when they started to edit his bio.

[00:54:12] You can tell. So how is it therefore the responsibility of the institution that he had defiled essentially to then care for his well-being? Was it not the responsibility of all the people who were near him, who could go to his house, who could have looked after him, who could have said, you need to be committed right now to an institution for your own protection? Those very people are turning around and blaming the press for telling the truth about him.

[00:54:39] And when people are always attacking me, you know, ad hominem attacks or whatever I'm writing about, very controversial. I just say like, I'm going to tell you keep telling lies about me. I keep telling the truth about you. And I think one thing I've just gotten used to certain people, once you realize that they call you some, you're racist, you're transphobe, whatever it is. And you know who you are and you know you're not. And you know that eventually that had bounced off of you and you've managed to continue with your life and you have your friends and you have your work.

[00:55:07] And granted, there are people mad at you and sometimes they see you in the street, they might yell at you. But there are certain people among us who can get used to that. And so we are, people ask, oh, if you would say, oh, look, it's all the transphobes. They move, they move right into this Jason Arde story and colonized it. Well, you want to know what that is? Because we know what else, no one else would do it. And we're used to being called things like that. We know it isn't true and we can stand up to it. And we also see all the same patterns of elite misinformation.

[00:55:35] Like, we're used to this. And so that's what I've seen in HIV and monkeypox and the transphobes and Jason Arde is liberals being overly concerned with protecting the marginalized, expensive everybody else and at expense of the marginalized in general. Because it doesn't help, you know, if you're overly permissive with drug users, it doesn't help them in the long run, let's just say. You can debate that for a long time, but let's just say that that could be an argument.

[00:56:00] It doesn't help gay men to pretend that they're not the ones who are overly at risk for monkeypox. And similarly, holding up Jason Arde ultimately is going to make all black academics look bad and make everyone suspect them more and suspect that they don't deserve to be there. And that, you know, you hear from like John McWhorter is an argument against affirmative action in general because it creates a pall where people don't pay as much respect to black people in general.

[00:56:26] And they've, you know, you see that in the way that people talk about Michelle Obama and talk about Ketanji Brown-Jackson, that they're DEI hires, etc. That they don't deserve the positions that they have earned. And so, like it or not, that's always going to hang over, hang over blacks who do well, because there was that system, at least when they got into college, that did advance people, that gave people more credit and made it harder for Asians to get in and easier for blacks to get in.

[00:56:52] Well, I mean, one of the things, Ben, obviously, Cambridge has walked back saying, hey, we're going to investigate what happened here and what went wrong. Right. And now all they're going to investigate is were we too mean to Jason Arde? Right. You know, it seems like a major walk back on their part. But what struck me is that, as you say, in the wake of of Jason Arde's death, there's these huge rallies in England.

[00:57:16] Right. Progressives coming together to basically create their own entire kind of self-contained narrative of what happened there.

[00:57:26] Right. Which completely denies that there was any kind of acts on Jason Arde's part that, you know, might have contributed to his fall from grace or or that there were real issues with his scholarship or that the plagiarism was real or, you know, complete just denial of any of that or just ignoring all of that.

[00:57:47] Just to say that he was a persecuted black man. But, you know, who was hounded by hateful, vile, you know, right wing racists and and their fellow travelers in the media. Right. Yeah. So he died on a Friday. The following Monday, there was a huge vigil in Trafalgar Square, that very iconic site in London.

[00:58:13] And there were a lot of speakers and they all got up and they were all coached into calling him Professor Jason Arde. They would hit that note, professor, every time they talked. And that to me was just an extraordinary act of this kind of misinformation peddling because he resigned himself. He was not fired. He did not die while he was a professor. He died no longer a professor.

[00:58:36] So that in itself, he made that choice and he made a choice to step down after having found out based on his own choices. And it was very interesting because one person after another, few of these people who spoke knew him very well. And so it reminds me of when Matthew Shepard was murdered in 1998.

[00:58:56] And, you know, similarly, he was created, turned into a martyr and he became a beacon for the gay rights movement at the time and for hate crimes legislation, etc. Because he was killed in the sort of Christlike way, tied to a fence and beaten to death, etc. And so in theory, he's killed because he was gay and these two men were homophobic, etc.

[00:59:17] Years later, you know, a lot of investigative journalism from this guy named Stephen Jimenez found that, you know, he was probably murdered because of his relationship with the local drug trade. You know, one of the men who had killed him was a former sex partner. That doesn't mean he couldn't have killed him for homophobic reasons necessarily in and of itself because there's, you know, internalized homophobia, let's just say, and shame. But it was probably because of a drug money argument, essentially.

[00:59:42] But that's very inconvenient for the narrative and the way that he was used very effectively for politics for many, many years. And so similarly, the one person who got up who really did know him very well was Lord Simon Woolley. So he's a big, it's called a Don in the Cambridge world and was a mentor to Stacey Nardy. And he gets up there and the narrative had already established that all the plagiarism accusations were bunk and people had got up and that they're trying to debunk it.

[01:00:10] Meanwhile, there's all these other plagiarism accusations and fraud that are coming out. They're not mentioning at all. And he gets up there and he says, he was not guilty for stealing more than a bag of crisps. And I think I'm doing a slightly wrong accent. It was more like an Indian accent, but it's a little too Indian. British Indian. But in any case, he's telling you, you'll have to go back and listen to the tape, but it was quite a character accent. But in any case, he gets up there and said this.

[01:00:39] And I'm like, you are a professor, a Don at Cambridge. And you are at the very least lying to yourself right now and transmitting that to the public. And that's a big problem. If you lie to yourself, if you make that a habit as an intellectual being, and then you're going to transmit it to other people, they don't know that you're lying to yourself because they trust you because you're an intellectual beacon. And that is very tragic. And then similarly, I was able to get a recording of this group of academics in the United Kingdom.

[01:01:07] They're the activist wing of this major union for academics and other support staff in academia in the United Kingdom. So this was, I think, the Tuesday after he had died, the day after this Fulgur Square ceremony. And they get up there and the main theme was the press had murdered Jason Arde, the evil press, that he was not guilty of anything.

[01:01:33] And then the main guy, who's named Elizabeth at the moment, who spoke and hosted the, you can go on my Substack if you want. It's benryan.substack.com. You can see the recording. Is the main thesis that he was presenting was that mere textual overlap is not plagiarism. And I'm like, are you saying that, like, it isn't necessarily plagiarism? No, he was not saying that. He was saying that in and of itself is not plagiarism. It has to be the stealing of ideas.

[01:02:02] And so this guy was at University College London. I go and look up the policy at UCL. What is it? Completely disagrees with him. These people, you know, work in universities. They teach young people who will very likely be expelled for doing the very things that they are brushing off. And so, again, like, this has a cost when you are transmitting these permissive attitudes about bad behavior.

[01:02:28] This has a cost because other people might hear it and think they can get away with it and they don't. And then their life is over, you know, so to speak. So it's shocking to watch grown men and women behave this way. But in a way, it's understandable because, I mean, I felt very bad for these people. They were genuinely very distraught. You know, none of these people didn't necessarily know them very well. But, you know, one of their own had fallen in this way after, indeed, being targeted by some very racist coverage.

[01:02:54] You know, Fleet Street, the British press, as much as there are very strict liberal laws, they're also, like, viciously cruel, especially, I think, in their op-ed writing. So a lot of that had gone on. But I didn't read – I was reading as much as I could. I read all the major tentpole pieces about him, and they seemed like very sound journalism that caught this guy red-handed in the act. Red-handed, there's an expression I'm not supposed to say anymore. Makes me think of – in The Great Muppet Caper,

[01:03:23] we're going to cut those bastards red-handed. What color are their hands now? Anyway. But I remember the APA released this list of, like, words you're not using anymore, like, kill two birds with one stone or whatever, because it was, like, violence against animals. You know, a brown bag lunch. There was something wrong with that. I forget what it was. Or, like, a standing – I think we banned that in Seattle in 2012.

[01:03:46] Offensive to, like, people – it makes me feel like offensive – offensive slogans, you know, like, stand up for Greg Abbott or something like that, you know. So, you know, our tagline for this podcast is the problem facing blue cities and how to fix them. So let's talk about how hopeful you are for solutions or if you've got any ideas about that. And I think we all probably agree that there's been some progress recent years in fixing some of the cultural problems

[01:04:12] in blue cities and institutions, like, at least we can have the conversation about whether or not these things are problems as opposed to those conversations themselves almost being completely forbidden. You know, but if the question is, like, are reporters or the public applying the same level of skepticism all the time? The answer is clearly they're not. Like, they're not living up to your expectations at all.

[01:04:41] But, you know, I feel like at my old news organization, you know, before it changed and maybe to some extent now, like, at least we tried, right? There was the pursuit of objectivity in journalism. So that was still a thing. But these days it's like, I don't know how much space there is for that. The public doesn't seem to value it very much except for kind of this narrow set of, you know, audiences for your work or blocked and reported or maybe our podcast, right?

[01:05:09] So what I wonder is just sort of given how tribal we are and the historical moment that we're in, like, you know, what's your level of optimism and what do you think about in terms of solutions other than just doing your work? I mean, there is a lot of hope, I think, in Substack and that kind of independent media, but it can only ever be so big. And yet there are some writers in that field, heterodox writers, who have become very successful. You know, if that's Jesse Singel or Matt Iglesias, that sort of thing.

[01:05:37] He's more, I say, centrist rather than just heterodox. But I think a big problem is the filtering mechanism by which editors say no. And I've experienced that a lot. You know, I started trying to write about pediatric gender medicine in liberal media. So I went, you know, around town, so to speak, with my little satchel of ideas. And you'd get these, oh, let me think about it kind of attitudes. And there was one guy, he hummed and he hawed. And you could tell it was the most anodyne pitch.

[01:06:05] It was, what's it like for pediatricians to work with these kids who come in with gender dysphoria? No one has answered this. Not one person has ever covered this. They are the front line. And so they have very important observations that we have not documented. I've never done this story. But, you know, one guy said, oh, I don't have the institutional bandwidth for this right now. Which was cut for, I am afraid of my younger staffers because that last guy lost his job. And that is not going to be me.

[01:06:32] And people will prioritize their own professional interests and keeping their job in a shrinking media environment. And that's one reason. If you are more afraid for your job, which you should be if you work anywhere except for, let's say, the New York Times these days, everybody's shrinking. You're going to take fewer risks. You know, that's a very sort of economist way of looking at it. So that pressure is coming in and keeping liberal papers and outlets from taking more risks and writing about stuff that they think will infuriate readers.

[01:07:00] And you see that, say, with the coverage of the Cornell 7 slash Jane Doe case. There's so much presumption in politicians, be it AOC, Tish James, Kathy Hochul, Chuck Schumer, who have come out and defined this woman as a survivor. And what that means, that's a code for a rape survivor. That's a truncated term. Therefore, why in the world is Tish James bothering to investigate? Why doesn't she just indict these seven men right now? And that makes me crazy.

[01:07:28] You know, and I certainly have come into this my own experience being sexually harassed and having experience is very negative in the realm of what we're talking about here, let's just say. And yet, I think over the years, you know, I have become much more skeptical about we talk about these things and we don't use the presumption of innocence in our language. We frame stories around the concept that this woman was definitively wrong, despite the fact that we don't know for sure.

[01:07:57] That kind of thing drives me crazy. And, you know, just other things that's come up lately is Nicole Hannah-Jones' piece, slightly mani culpa about her deciding to send her young daughter to an all-black poor school instead of using her, leveraging her resources to send her to a better school, quote-unquote. And then it turned out to be a mistake. And yet, what you see from the way she wrote and the way she discussed her piece afterwards, she doesn't look at the meta level of, okay, therefore, are you wrong about the way that you've pressured society as an activist?

[01:08:27] To look at schooling, say, mostly through a racial lens as opposed to, say, through an economic lens. And to, it seems like a blunt instrument to just try to sort of shift races around rather than saying, who's the principal of this school? Did we hire people who are any good? Are all the people who have no experience going to that school?

[01:08:48] You know, and then similarly with all the amazing reporting that you did, Cindy, about Seattle, are we looking at failures and saying, like, let's analyze this. Let's get independent voices to analyze what we did, see what we did wrong. Is there anything we can learn from this? And I am not sure about Seattle. I'm not confident. But, you know, I grew up in Seattle, went to private school. But Bush in that day was very opposed to staging. And there was a myth that everybody was equal. Nobody was special.

[01:09:17] And that all the kids knew who was in the pecking order. If you asked them, like, here's a little doll for each kid in the class. They would have been lined up. It would have been almost exact who was the smartest, who had the most trouble. And so because of that, I spent the first nine years of my schooling life bored out of my mind. And so when I see them getting rid of, I forget what they call it, the gifted and talented in Seattle, that is so distressing for me.

[01:09:41] Because as much as it's important, again, to lift up the marginalized, if that's coming at the expense of the people who are doing well or the privileged, that costs society as well. You know, Bill Gates came out of Lakeside in Seattle, very privileged school there. You know, he's very smart. Should we have denied him the access to the tools that he was given to learn computers? You know, the very first computerized thing he did was he computerized their scheduling at Lakeside.

[01:10:10] That was like his entree. Should he have denied an opportunity like that because we had to concern ourselves more with the kids who were struggling? We have been denied somebody who has been an innovator, who has fueled the economy, who now is like out there preventing malaria in the third world. There are plenty of bad things you can say about it, et cetera. But it is a shame when we focus all our energy just in the marginalized and not on saying, you know, there's some smart kids who could do some amazing things and we should give them some resources too.

[01:10:39] And instead of saying like being cynical and like if on average we're doing worse on the low end, if you cut out the high end, it'll make the low end look better by comparison. And I don't think people did that consciously in Seattle, but that is effectively what they did. And that is so deeply offensive to me as the former child that they would have shortchanged had it been in public school. And I was shortchanged even in private school in those days. So just because you brought it up a couple of times, we haven't asked about it.

[01:11:08] And you mentioned what AOC said. And so I was quickly Googling to get the exact quote here. Seven men drugged and gang raped a 20-year-old woman. They lured her into a fraternity house. They drugged her with ketamine. They then posted to a group that chat that she was incapacitated and seven men took turns gang raping her for seven hours. But this is somebody who may well certainly become the Democratic nominee.

[01:11:32] And, you know, it's like if you read the New York Times reporting, obviously, like there's about 10 different factual errors or at least what was the word that you used earlier? It's unclear exactly what happened in this incident. And that's really what you're talking about, right? It's not like as a reporter, you know, we're waiting until the facts come in for something like this before we make statements like that and repeat them. And that's the thing that's kind of infuriating in blue spaces. We're constantly pointing to the right and saying, how dare you claim the election was stolen?

[01:12:02] Science is on our side. And then turning around and sort of accepting this kind of statement by AOC because the topic is one where, of course, we're sympathetic to the woman. We think, you know, a lot of these guys were acting really badly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, really, really badly. And that there was some we suspect there's some really bad shit that happened here, but we just don't know. So anyway, yeah. Kind of what are you getting at with this Cornell case? I would challenge you to say that necessarily what she was saying was incorrect. I would say we don't know the answer to the question. Right.

[01:12:32] She was confidently telling a story. And you could also tell that story in a very different way using all the major tentpoles of what happened. You can read the summary that was sent to the DA that he read that she approved that she had signed under the threat of perjury. And she was able to annotate it after they wrote it up for her. So the campus police with a Title IX person in the room with, you know, a victim advocate worked on this statement after having interviewed her. That story is very different.

[01:13:01] She said, you know, she did not define it as rape in that story. But then we also hear that in the interview, she said, I could say with 100% confidence I was raped. So we're getting a lot of competing narratives. What sort of structures do we have in society to try to reconcile these conflicts? We have courtrooms. We have trials. We have investigations. Sometimes journalists do them. Sometimes, you know, sometimes someone like Tish James does it, etc. Have those things happened yet? No.

[01:13:28] What we have had is an adjudication process that has no transparency within a university. It's not transparency on purpose because Title IX protects people's privacy. By definition, that's not supposed to be transparent. So we know that some of these young men were punished, who were expelled. I can't remember two or three of them were suspended. And then two were found to be culpable for lesser things and got lesser punishment. But then the narrative floats to the top of, oh, they only had to write essays.

[01:13:54] And that was somehow woven into her legal complaint in her civil trial. But that is an incomplete narrative would actually happen. But it sticks in people's minds. Right? So it's shocking to me to see politicians skip all that and to define these men for the rest of their lives in a way that we don't know yet whether or not that is accurate. So when I was in college, I went to Columbia from 97, 2001.

[01:14:23] And my junior year, they were trying to revise the sexual misconduct policy at Columbia. And at the time, sexual misconduct was adjudicated through what's called dean's discipline. Essentially, some deans had to be like the punishment barons. So, you know, if you're caught, you know, doing drugs or something or, you know, cheating on a test, they would decide if you were punished. But this was not set up very well for this sort of the horrors of being of accusing or being accused of sexual misconduct.

[01:14:52] So they were trying to devise essentially a mini court system. So I wrote this very intense investigation. I interviewed three young women about being sexually assaulted on campus. And they were all very similar. A lot of alcohol. One of them was kind of like picked up almost like a version of the Pieta and like carried back to this room. So very similar narratives.

[01:15:14] So I published that and I published it for the purpose of trying to influence the Senate vote in Columbia on this new policy. So then the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or FIRE had just come about at the time. And they swooped in, saw this potential policy and thwarted it. They went on CNN. They embarrassed, you know, people I'd become friends with who were my friends in school, on television, made them look stupid, etc.

[01:15:44] And their main point was that this did not afford proper due process to the accused. And again, I'm a young person, you know, I'm really and I'd had bad experiences myself that really made me sympathize with the accusers in these cases. And I remember being at Thanksgiving with some people around that time. And I think they had read about this, these debates. And they really put it to me. What about the rights of the accused? And I was kind of a deer in headlines. I didn't have an answer.

[01:16:12] And that started a process for me that really took 10, 15, 20 years for me to start thinking. And then Emma Salkovich comes along, the mattress girl, her accusations at Columbia in the mid-2010s. And in that case, the accused was a German student. And she accused him of sexual assault. And then she carried this mattress around in this performance art piece, essentially, called Carrying the Weight, I think it was called. And she was bearing the weight of the burden of being sexually assaulted.

[01:16:42] But Columbia's process at the time found him not guilty. And yet they sanctioned her performance as her senior thesis. And that to me was an extraordinarily foolish act on their part because it opened the door for a phenomenal lawsuit. And so when I do not know what happened between those two people, and it's one of those gray area things that maybe no one will ever know. And they just have their own feelings about what happened because there's no documentation, let's say. There was no videotape of it.

[01:17:13] What I do know is there is a conflict between Columbia's behavior in terms of what they said and what they did. And indeed, he got a huge settlement and moved back to Germany. So, indeed, I am quite confident in saying that most people who accuse others of sexual assault are in the right. But I can also say that there's a lot of gray area, especially when drugs and alcohol are involved, where it's really hard to define. And then we find out in New York State, as there is about half the states in the country,

[01:17:40] that just being drunk or high in and of itself, if you became voluntarily drunk or high, you weren't like roofied, let's say, or pressured really hard to taking and sniffing this, whatever. That in and of itself does not qualify you as being unable to consent. You have to be incapacitated, unconscious, asleep, etc. Or you have to have been drugged or gotten drunk outside of your will. And then so you see all of these politicians saying,

[01:18:07] OK, we want to change this or describe it as a loophole, Kathy Hochul, etc. And this gets into a phenomenon that I see where liberals, when it comes to a status that is afforded some sort of a benefit for being vulnerable, and this includes being wheeled around in the airport in one of those little wheelchairs. It includes saying that you're disabled in an Ivy League school and getting more time in your tests. And it includes also how we define rape.

[01:18:37] Liberals are far more worried about there being under-inclusion, and conservatives are far more concerned about there being over-inclusions, false positives, essentially, gaming the system. And so that's where we move the needle when it comes to alcohol in particular. Liberals are trying to move it. But with that, inevitably, it will come more people swept in the system. And you have to ask, which is funny because usually liberals are more concerned with the carceral state and its deficits

[01:19:06] and how it sucks in people of color, for example. And you look at the differences between, you know, coke and crack and how those were prosecuted in the 80s in particular and all the Rockefeller drug laws. So it's ironic that there's an exception to the rule of the left being especially concerned with the detriments of the carceral state when it comes to sexual assault or sexual misconduct. You don't see that in Seattle in particular with drug use and playgrounds. So that's curious. I don't have an answer for why that is.

[01:19:35] But it is a conflict that I don't think that liberals ever even try to reconcile with. And I'm not saying what's right or wrong. I'm just saying that inevitably you're going to sweep more people into the court system. And in some cases, this will be unfair. But it's going to take more resources and it's going to be messier. Putting that line a little farther away makes for cleaner court cases, I would say. That is my understanding, given how hard it is to prosecute these cases.

[01:20:05] Benjamin Ryan, who writes on Substack at Hazard Ratio and publishes in all sorts of different outlets, will include some links to some of the recent stuff that we've been talking about in our show notes. But Ben, thank you so much for joining us on Blue City Blues today. Thanks so much for having me. Really fascinating conversation. That's it for another edition of Blue City Blues. He's Sandeep Kaushik. I'm David Hyde. And thanks everybody so much for listening.