Jamie Paul on the Memory-Holing of the Excesses of Woke

[00:00:11] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Blue City Blues, a podcast where we try and talk honestly about the problems facing blue cities and what it would actually take to fix them. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. And Sandeep, I was thinking like we should probably add like no sacred cows, no partisan talking points or something like that to our intro. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, no sacred cows. Sure. Yeah, maybe there's some partisan talking points. Are totally fine. All right. I mean, you traffic in partisan talking points all the time.

[00:00:41] I do. I make my living off partisan talking points in part. So yeah, I may not be able to escape my own orbit on that. One of the things that we often sort of dance around in this podcast is whether or not blue cities and blue city spaces kind of culturally have moved beyond woke or whatever you want to call woke. But Sandeep, of course, there's another question. Should we just forget about it at this point?

[00:01:05] Well, look, in Seattle, you can't even really use the term woke anymore without somebody on the progressive left immediately getting in your grill and saying that, you know, all you're doing is repeating right wing, you know, mischaracterizations and falsehoods about what happened with progressivism and stuff, which I think is fascinating because this is a word that the left itself created to explain a kind of

[00:01:35] cultural change that cultural change. Cultural change that they were pining for 10 or 15 years ago, right? And then all of a sudden, once the right sort of weaponized it against them and it became clearly unpopular with normies, it suddenly became a kind of foreboding word to use.

[00:01:51] And anyway, we can get into it with our guests here. But yeah, I mean, I do think that there has been an effort to erase the recent history of what was a very widespread and powerful cultural phenomenon that happened in cosmopolitan America.

[00:02:11] That's still with us in many, many ways. And today's guest says we should definitely not forget about that period in our history. Jamie Paul is a writer, editor, and sub stacker, managing editor for Queer Majority, a contributing editor for Buy.org, and the founding editor of the American Dreaming publication and podcast, which launched something called the Memory Hole Archive. And that's what we're going to be talking about. Jamie, Jamie Paul, thanks so much for joining us. Great to be here. Thanks.

[00:02:40] So let's just start off. I wanted to turn it over to you and say, look, Sandeep and I were both trained as historians, so we have a hard time not thinking as historians and could probably each give you lots of reasons why we think forgetting stuff is a pretty bad idea, whether it's right-wing crimes or problems, you know, on the progressive left. But what do you think? Like, why did you think it was so important to start the Memory Hole Archive in the first place?

[00:03:07] Well, I think the period of cultural trends on the left from 2014 to 2023 were disastrous for the political left and for society in general. And I don't want to see that repeated. And over the last few years, I've noticed a trend of not only, you know, progressives kind of gaslighting you and denying that these trends ever happened,

[00:03:31] but also finding it increasingly difficult to dig up examples of things that I know I lived through and that were ubiquitous everywhere around me. And I kind of projected this forward, you know, five years, 10 years, 15 years, and the churn of the Internet and things getting taken offline and URLs getting broken And the constant, you know, march of just denialism that these things ever happened or that they happened but were good.

[00:03:59] And it almost seemed like this whole era was just kind of slowly drifting into the quicksand. So I wanted to preserve an archive of it, not only to, you know, just for posterity as a resource, but I also wanted something that would, that anyone could link to in conversations with people who were denying that these things happened.

[00:04:23] Because ultimately, I think that the path back for the left involves them acknowledging that these things happened and that they were mistakes. And the more, you know, the more archival information exists, you know, in one spot, easily defined, free, I think that it makes it harder for the denialism to happen.

[00:04:45] And when the denialism is, you know, when that path is foreclosed, ultimately, the acknowledgement of error becomes more likely. Yeah, and you're up to now, I think, 10 entries, right? In your, you know, 10 different articles that you've written as part of this sort of memory hole project with more stuff to come. Right, right.

[00:05:10] So this is a pretty comprehensive compendium of the, you know, quote unquote, kind of woke era or the era of left progressive cultural ascendancy, or at least within the cosmopolitan cultural institutions of blue cities and blue America. And, you know, and I just, you know, let me quote you from one of your pieces here.

[00:05:35] You say that it was in this era, this decade, right, 2014 to 2023 is the temporal bookends you put on it. Quote, far left social justice extremism hijacked large portions of American culture and fueled wide scale backlashes that have contributed to our current political moment.

[00:05:55] And you go on to say, and to invoke the woke years in the presence, basically nowadays, to invoke the woke years in the presence of any cultural progressive is to be machine gunned with a barrage of lies and falsehoods. Some will look you in the eye and unblinkingly deny that anything amiss went down at all or spin years of collective insanity and mass psychosis as nothing more than a simple opposition to bigotry.

[00:06:19] Those are pretty strong words, Jamie. So, so yeah, what prompted you to, to go so hard at this, right? Mass psychosis. I cover a wide variety of things in my work, but time and again, it veers back into some of these cultural issues. And after so many years of just receiving this kind of feedback, you know, it pretty firmly established these patterns.

[00:06:44] And I just felt, you know, that it had to be pushed back on. And also I'm a fan of colorful writing. So I write the kinds of things that I as a reader want to read and I don't really want to read academic prose. So I was very, you know, I was very cleary eyed at the outset of this project. This was not going to be like, you know, Encyclopedia, Woke Tanaka or something. It was not going to be like a wiki entry. I wanted something that had to go here. That's a pretty catchy title though. Yeah.

[00:07:16] You can market that. Encyclopedia Woke Tanaka. I definitely wanted something that had a clear, fluid narrative. Something that was, you know, a kind of page turner where you would start to read it and you couldn't put it down. So I definitely kind of like let her rip. Yeah. Yeah. We want to get into some of the specifics in a minute. But I was just thinking about kind of why all this memory holing is occurring in the present.

[00:07:45] You mentioned that. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that. I mean, it's just, you know, we can't think critically on our own side about stuff that went down because of Trump basically is the bottom line. It seems like even if thinking critically is exactly how we might go about figuring out how to defeat authoritarianism or whatever you want to call what the right is doing right now and actually make the world a better place in blue cities, which is what our podcast is mostly focused on.

[00:08:12] But I was thinking about in the context of reading a story about New York City Mayor Zoran Mondami. I don't know if you saw this about fair evasion on the subway. He's getting criticized by the progressive left for aggressively enforcing fair evasion because, you know, that's something that has historically and in the present disproportionately affected people of color, black and brown people.

[00:08:35] And, you know, from 2014 to 2023 in progressive circles, just saying that was essentially enough to shut down the conversation, even though great cities need to have great mass transit and fair evasion is costing cities like New York hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

[00:08:52] And even if it's just perception, you know, there's a lot of concern during the pandemic and even more recently in New York about fear of crime on the subway and the perception that there's a kind of lawless atmosphere in the subway, whether these are low level crimes or not, makes people feel unsafe. And I bring it up because the Mondami administration hasn't really responded to this latest round of criticism. He's a socialist.

[00:09:21] Previously, he kind of talked about, like, maybe we should have more free transit or, you know, there are other kind of liberal ideas, maybe more reduced fares, that sort of thing, which is the kind of conversation I would want to have. But he seems to just kind of want to move on from this stuff and not debate his critics. So kind of practically speaking for folks like that, I kind of get it. Like, it sort of makes sense for him to want to memory hole things just for practical reasons.

[00:09:47] So I wonder if you thought about that in the context of the reasons to sort of dredge this up and obsess about it the way Sandeep and I and you do sometimes. Yeah, I mean, the New York context is a little bit different because that issue in particular of crime in cities has been such a damaging issue for Democrats that it makes sense why he would bend on that.

[00:10:08] In terms of why progressives more generally are failing to fully acknowledge and reckon with, you know, the last 15 years, partly that's negative partisanship. There's such a strong animus to doing anything, even if it's the right thing, that could end up getting weaponized against you by the other side. So, you know, people on the left clearly recognize that the whole, you know, quote unquote woke era was a mistake because you see them backpedaling. You see politicians moving away from it.

[00:10:37] But they're simply trying to move on without actually acknowledging the period and saying that, you know, mistakes were made, which I believe is what's required in order to win back public trust. Not just for, you know, the Democratic Party, but also all sorts of left leaning institutions that have kind of torched their credibility.

[00:10:59] So that that really is why there's a avoidance of clearly saying we were wrong because it kind of wounds wounds their pride in front of the right and also arms the right with a talking point. Yeah, though, you bring and you bring this up in your first entry. And this is something that that I've been talking about since it since it happened. I mean, I make my living as a Democratic political consultant. I, you know, kind of obsessively follow politics and campaigns.

[00:11:28] In 2024, Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, ran, I think, in some ways what I would call a technically solid, if uninspiring campaign where she avoided all of the, you know, the kind of woke trappings of the kind of 2019, 2020 era.

[00:11:50] You know, she basically evolved all of her positions from that era without ever acknowledging them and kind of rested her hat on the fact that I can just say something different now and it'll be enough as long as I don't invoke some of that stuff from the past. And it turned out that didn't work at all. The R's very ruthlessly ran against 2019 Kamala, right?

[00:12:17] When she first ran for president in 2019, they took some of the crazy woke shit she was saying, including that famous ad at the end about her being for they, them and President Trump is for us, right? And they weaponize that stuff to great cultural fact, right? They turned her into a cultural alien from the planet Transsexual Transylvania, right? And then Brad and Janet flipped out and voted for Trump, right? That's what happened.

[00:12:42] And so to me, that is just the emblematic example of why just sort of memory holding this stuff and pretending we never did it isn't going to work because there's a record of it. And anybody who wants to pull it up can throw it right back in your face if you haven't explicitly repudiated it. But anyway, Jamie, weigh in on. Yeah, I mean, you definitely can't say that this strategy hasn't been tried. It's been tried and it's been shown not to work.

[00:13:11] Now, I think in any event, she was probably destined to lose that election. It does seem when you look around the world that right-leaning parties definitely had the edge that year. But that being said, I don't think she would have lost by as much as she lost. And I don't think the down-ballot races would have been as much of a bloodbath had she simply said three words, I was wrong. I think she would have earned a lot of credibility.

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[00:14:30] That's bluecitypodcast at gmail.com. And send along show ideas, guest ideas. Sandeep and I would really appreciate that as well. Okay, back to the show. I think the reason she didn't say I was wrong is that even in that race, she had a kind of fervent base of progressive supporters who really would have—

[00:14:58] I think she was afraid, you know, why didn't she go on Joe Rogan? Because she couldn't go on there and have a three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan and walk back some of that stuff without her folks worrying that her base would erupt in, you know, a backlash. Like, how dare you nuance our positions on trans rights or whatever, right? Or whatever it is. Which raises the question of, like, has woke really gone away, right?

[00:15:24] I mean, you know, yes, the cultural vibe has shifted. But it still seems—some of these ideas still seem very deeply entrenched in progressive cultural spaces and institutions. Do they not? Yeah. I mean, you know, on campus, it's kind of like permanent 2020. And there's all sorts of other spaces where, you know, the climate is pretty much just as left-leaning or far-left as it ever was.

[00:15:51] You're right that what changed is really like it lost its mainstream cachet. But what the Democrats need to do and what I believe they are in the way of blunderingly doing is, you know, sidelining a bit their progressive activist base and trying to appeal to a broader public, which is what they're going to have to do. Because they, you know, the math just doesn't add up. There aren't enough progressive activists to carry elections. Since you bring up campus politics, let's get to one of your entries.

[00:16:21] One of the ones that—is the word enjoyed, right, for this? But one of the ones I found particularly engaging was the one titled Safetyism and the Cult of Fragility.

[00:16:33] I first started to encounter some of this in the news business at my local NPR station where I was working as a producer and then later as a reporter when some of the younger reporters or producers would come in, you know, with things like the expectation that we should have the equivalent of trigger warnings if uncomfortable topics get brought up in news meetings. Which was certainly something that I had never, you know, heard of before in the news business.

[00:17:01] Or I remember on the University of Washington campus, there were some activists saying that the George Washington statue made them feel unsafe. And I hadn't heard that language before. And I remember we had Jesse Jackson on and asked him what he thought about that. Of course, he was an older guy and was kind of like unsafe. Yeah, he wasn't kind of on board with that language. But just I wonder if you could say a little bit more.

[00:17:28] Again here, I'm sort of interested in where does this stuff come from and what did you document? What are your thoughts about that culture of safetyism, you call it? Yeah, I attribute the rise of safetyism back from the 80s and 90s in the kind of like self-help movement, the self-esteem movement, the kind of rise of like therapy culture. And all of these things, you know, there are a bunch of other trends and forces, economic ones as well.

[00:17:56] That kind of converged right as millennials were, you know, sort of entering the adult world where they were raised on these, you know, basically white lies that they could do whatever they wanted. But then they were also treated as being incredibly fragile and everything was childproof. And then all of a sudden they didn't have any economic opportunities. They couldn't actualize themselves in the world. And so identity became a kind of proxy for how you could actualize yourself.

[00:18:24] And it kind of, you know, and then of course social media was just the huge accelerant. And all these things kind of like swirled around into a lot of the trends that we see. A lot of people attribute this to, you know, all sorts of 20th century like postmodernist philosophy and stuff. You know, that all played a role and it was there. But I don't think it would have taken off the way it did without all those other trends converging. I agree.

[00:18:49] I also just think politically rather than saying, I think that we should remove this statue for XYZ reasons and have a political debate about it. It's easier if you can get away with it by saying it makes me feel unsafe because then there's not really a conversation to be had about something that's ultimately a political argument. Yeah. I mean, whether it was safety or lived experience, there were all sorts of rhetorical moves that became common during those years.

[00:19:16] It was to shift things that affected public policy or, you know, just a community or group to justifications that stemmed from subjective and unfalsifiable, you know, reasons where, well, we can't do this because I feel a certain way. And you can't tell me how I'm supposed to feel. And my feelings are sacrosanct. So it's just like the ultimate trump card. And I don't think it's gone away. Right. Well, this is the I mean, you know, the 50 cent word for this. Right.

[00:19:42] It's, you know, kind of standpoint epistemology kind of kind of comes to the comes to the fore and in a lot of progressive cosmopolitan cultural spaces. Right. And therefore, like, you know, my truth. Right. Right. Is my truth. And there's no objective truth. So my truth has to you have to accept my truth. If I if I say particularly if I'm coming from a space of being, you know, making a claim to being marginalized or oppressed in some way. You've got to honor my my view of this.

[00:20:11] But we had in a previous episode of BCB, we had on David Reif, who's a, you know, public intellectual cultural critic. He's the son of Susan Sontag and a very, very anti-woke guy. And and his dad, Philip Reif famously wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Right. It's a kind of kind of famous. I don't know when it was written, David, but back in the 60s, probably.

[00:20:39] And David was telling us he wants to write his next book is going to be he wants to call it a building on his dad's work, the triumph of the traumatic. Right. And this whole concept of trauma that rose up in that period to become a kind of. You know, cultural or, you know, it was invested in this kind of cultural power. Right.

[00:21:04] To say such and such is these words are literally causing me harm or violence. So anyway, Jamie, speak to that. Right. The the the therapeutic, the traumatic, the subjective, the you know, the the emotional. Right. There's no platonic truth here. We're all just living in kind of a world of of feelings. Right. The only thing that really matters is feelings. Yeah.

[00:21:31] I mean, there was this inversion where all of these things that previously were considered negative things that you didn't want to share. And if you were suffering from them, you wanted to try to overcome or cure. And it all became bound up in both power and identity where disability became part of your identity. This is something, you know, I'm going to be covering on a future archive.

[00:21:53] But, you know, the fact that disability went from being something you tried to cure to something that it was ableist to suggest that it wasn't already perfect and that you could want to cure it. And so, too, with trauma, it went from something that was, you know, reserved for like the victims of sexual assault or people who were in war to something where, you know, you disagreed with someone that caused you trauma.

[00:22:16] And the trauma was then a source of power that you could then shut them down, at least within spaces where everyone bought into those ideas. So it was definitely cynically used. And like so many other concepts, like white supremacy, you know, it just kind of underwent this linguistic hyperinflation where it just stopped meaning anything.

[00:22:36] One of the explanations I recently encountered is somebody who is saying that the progressive left has a kind of nostalgia for a period when there was more moral clarity. So during the civil rights movement, we knew who the good guys and the bad guys were. We knew who the heroes were and who the racist patriarchal villains were.

[00:22:56] But in the 2014 period, we start almost inventing or reusing language in a new way to kind of invent that kind of moral clarity by saying language now causes violence. Statues make me feel unsafe when, of course, like we're using language now in a way that makes no sense to anybody outside of academia. So it's kind of useless strategically.

[00:23:22] But it does have the virtue, if that's what the goal is, to reanimate that kind of moral clarity that really did exist during the civil rights movement. But it's and it's also one of those things that I think is really worth thinking about, because I don't think we've moved on from that kind of thinking hardly at all in some ways, even if we're not policing language to the same degree. I don't think that underlying epistemology, Sandeep calls it, is something we've moved on for.

[00:23:51] And moreover, Sandeep, you know, when you think about it, Stephen Colbert was freaking mocking that kind of epistemology on the right before the left started adopting it. So it's you know, if we think about this stuff historically, it's not just on the left. A lot of this stuff is also on the right. It does seem that in the last 15 years, a lot of people's need to be activists certainly outstrips the need for activism, certainly activism at the caliber that they're trying to deliver it.

[00:24:19] You know, there's a lot of people, especially in the U.S., more so than in other societies, as far as I've observed, that I've called meaning junkies, people who just appear to need much more meaning than they're getting from their lives. These aren't I mean, a lot of people on the right think this is tied into the decline of religion. But progressives were never a particularly religious cohort. It's not like these people would be going to church if they weren't social justice activists.

[00:24:45] I just think there's something, you know, there's elements about modern life that are not fulfilling a lot of young people specifically, highly educated young people. And they're looking for meaning in these kinds of like glorious existential good versus evil crusades. It's an itch that it's kind of like a rash. The more you scratch it, the more it just spreads. There's nothing fundamentally fulfilling about the progressive activist vision for the world.

[00:25:13] Because even though it's been likened to a religion, unlike religion, there is no redemption in it. There's no end goal in it. It's just it's just endless deconstruction and endless improvement. And everything is, you know, the sky is always falling. Society is always corrupted in need of being torn down. And no matter how and the better things get objectively, the worse they're decried as being. So it's just this doom loop that just goes down forever into the abyss.

[00:25:42] Yeah, that's that's really interesting. And there is a you know, there is a kind of a lot of psychological despair on the left. Right. We see it. Yeah. The stats about, you know, people. But the rise, you know, anxiety, levels of anxiety and mental illness and all of that kind of stuff. Um, so let's talk about race. Right.

[00:26:04] I mean, one of the things you point out in in in the series in this series of articles you write is that the fixations of the progressive left over the course of this decade really changes a lot. Right. Early in the kind of 2014, 2015 period. It's women's issues. It's me, too. It's stuff like that. By 2020, it's all about the, you know, kind of racialization of everything under the sun. Right. It's a whole different set of things.

[00:26:33] And particularly on the race stuff. That that particularly bothered me. Right. And it bothered me because I'm an immigrant to this country. Right. I grew up in the 1970s and all white conservative, you know, kind of border south in the D.C. suburbs.

[00:26:50] So I had a very particular experience of race and what it was to be an Indian kid and the only Indian kid, you know, anywhere in the vicinity. And, you know, and my experience of race was I experienced a lot of, you know, what we would call the little stuff, the microaggressions, all of that stuff.

[00:27:20] That was a common feature of me growing up as a kid, but also like overt racism and stuff like that. But the story of race in America, as I understood it as a liberal, was a story of genuine, slow but genuine improvement over time. By the time we were at, you know, kind of Obama getting elected president in 2008 and in that kind of 2010 era. Not that racism has gone away. Not that we didn't have a long way to go.

[00:27:45] But compared to my experience in the 1970s, it was just we were no question in my mind that America was a much less overtly racist country. Right. But that whole narrative of liberal progress on race, that the social project of American liberalism had actually, you know, been able to make advances towards the goal of a colorblind society was erased by woke, which moved to kind of re-racialize the entire public sphere.

[00:28:13] And to say that we actually needed differential treatment of people in the public sphere based on their race to ameliorate for, you know, kind of historical injustices and inequities. And it's that erasure of all of that progress that I think has led now to a really bad place where things are worse on race in America right now. But anyway, Jamie, Jamie, wait, wait, wait on this, because the race piece of this in particular maddens me.

[00:28:40] It's one of the most tragic aspects of the era, because if you look at polling in 2010, perceptions of race relations were very high, you know, including across racial groups. And if you revisit the polling in 2020, Americans largely became jaded and pessimistic. And, you know, black Americans went from mostly thinking that Martin Luther King Jr.'s, you know, vision for the future had mostly been achieved to thinking that they were unequal citizens and would always be unequal citizens.

[00:29:10] So, you know, now, does anyone really think America objectively got more racist over the course of the 2010s? No. If anything, it got a little bit less racist. But the perception, it really is everything. And it totally poisoned, poisoned race relations.

[00:29:27] And it, you know, it it led to all of these ideas and policies that just straightforwardly reverted race relations back to a much more kind of like horseshoe around to the right wing area. You know what I mean? Mm hmm. Yeah. And just to follow up on this, I mean, I do think now.

[00:29:47] I mean, look, we had Trump gets elected in 2016, you know, and he's coming down the escalator talking about Mexican rapists or whatever, you know, his comment was at the time and stuff. And I do feel like now we are in a much worse place in terms of including. In this Trumpist era, the right has been, you know, unleashed in some time that they're allowed to let their kind of, you know, inner racist freak flag fly.

[00:30:16] If I if I post something on X right now that that conservatives don't like, I almost always get somebody telling me to go back to India or or, you know, something more explicitly kind of racist and worse. And so that was not something I would have experienced in the 2010 era. That does seem manifestly worse to me. But the question is, why? Right. Why did that happen?

[00:30:42] And I think your argument, Jamie, and one I really agree with is that this move by the left in the 2010s to sort of, again, what I would call re-racializing a public sphere that we were committed to de-racializing for 50 years. Right. Right.

[00:30:59] Has allowed the rise of, at least on the right, a legitimate white identity politics with its own sort of grievance and and oppression narrative and and and allowed them to kind of be openly. You know, to move into kind of openly racist ways.

[00:31:18] So anyway, you know, I yeah, I mean, yeah, for for a solid decade, you know, old school liberals were warning that if you keep making identity politics so salient, eventually white people are going to decide we want to have our own identity politics. Now, progressives will say, well, they've always been doing that and they'll cite the Southern strategy and this, that and the other thing. But, you know, whatever low grade racism was present in the Republican Party in like the 1990s is not comparable to what we're seeing now.

[00:31:46] If you, you know, move among MAGA. I mean, it is categorically different. And it was enabled because the norms around colorblindness, the norms around individualism, the norms around, you know, treating people by, you know, the way that they behave rather than their group identity were eroded. And not only that, but then, you know, you also get the right just simply reacting against the left.

[00:32:13] So you also have the polarization spiral effect of it. And those two things basically enabled the current moment. I might disagree with both of you all a little bit there. I mean, I think like, yes, but Trump getting elected. I mean, I don't know what you're saying exactly, but it wasn't just a reaction to the left. You know, and Trump's racism that unleashes that kind of racism.

[00:32:37] I mean, I was reporting in Seattle at the time in 2016, and we suddenly see all kinds of hate crimes just popping up. People just like attacking somebody, you know, dressed with a bed scarf at a bus stop or whatever. All kinds of stuff that didn't even get reported at the time. It just gets kind of unleashed globally with the rise of the populist right. And yeah, these two things are interplaying with one another, but we're not blaming the progressive left for all of that. Right. I mean, that seems a little far fetched to me.

[00:33:04] No, I mean, in my pontifications there, I definitely ran roughshod over some of the factors. But for sure, Trump has been a singular driver of so many bad things. And basically every negative trend that has occurred during the Trump era, he has found some way to try to make it worse and usually succeeded. Yeah. Look, yeah. I mean, obviously, the right has its own internal dynamics that are and toxicities and problems. And that's obviously true.

[00:33:34] I mean, I remember when Trump first came on the scene politically when he starts running in 2015, 2016. And and he would talk and like, you know, David, I mean, you and I both lived in New York City. Right. I graduated from college in 1989 in Portland, Oregon, and I moved to New York City. I lived there in the early 90s. Right. And when I moved to New York. I was really struck at the time by what a racially aware city it was in that like, like block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood.

[00:34:04] Like there was a kind of like this is a Puerto Rican block or a Puerto Rican neighborhood. And this is Italian. And they were like these invisible boundaries and codes, you know, by which the city operated. And there was this kind of way people thought about race in New York City at the time that I think Trump really exemplified. That sort of it's kind of a penny anti racism. You know, he would you use his language. Oh, the blacks are like this and the Jews are like that. And, you know, the Puerto Ricans are like.

[00:34:32] And, you know, that was sort of Trump. Right. You know, he comes in with I think he's a kind of unreconstructed old school Queens, you know, white, you know, white. I mean, obviously he comes from money, but he he exemplifies some of those kind of kind of attitudes. So, yeah, that that dynamic exists. More than that, though. It wasn't just racial awareness on Trump's part.

[00:34:56] It was it was explicitly racist like policies, you know, in his business and stuff like that. So so, yeah, there's there's the racial awareness piece, but there's also the like racism, which is different. Yes. And look, I mean, you know, we all know you couldn't walk in certain neighborhoods if you were black. You know, I mean, there was real racism. Like people got killed and shit. Right. Right. Right. Right.

[00:35:18] Like, you know, it wasn't all like, yeah, I'm not trying to minimize the the the the the really negative aspects of that. But what happened in the 2010s, though, I do think. Over the course of the 2010 where we are now, I do think it's sort of qualitatively different in in in that I really does feel to me that both sides of the political divide.

[00:35:46] have abandoned the idea, the goal of, you know, trying to minimize racial difference. Right. In ways that I think is a mistake. You know, if we want to talk about racial harmony and social cohesion, I think, you know, I'm ultimately I'm not a separatist. I'm an integrationist. Right.

[00:36:11] You know, that was my experience of, you know, when I was a kid, I just want to be treated like everybody else. Right. I didn't want people to affirm my Indian identity. I just didn't want to be treated like some kind of freak and other. Right. And that very much. Created my visceral reaction when when woke racial ideas first rose. Yeah. I was like, this is wrong and counterproductive. And it really maddens me as a bunch of white people that are pushing a lot of these ideas. Right. Yeah. Anyway. So.

[00:36:40] Well, let me let me let me ask you, Jamie, if you could take it to another one of your entries here. They're not all authored by you, but this one was political violence, which is one of those things. If you bring it up today in all seriousness in a city like Seattle and you say, oh, there's you know, what about political violence on the left? No, people are gonna be like, what are you even talking about? Right. And boy, one of the virtues of this undertaking on your part is there's a lot of evidence.

[00:37:10] There's a lot of hot links in here. If anybody's wondering, this is an incredible resource to to to go back and take a look at. But I wonder if you could just speak about some of maybe the places that you see kind of problematic political violence, not just on the right, but also on the left. Yeah. I actually did author all of these pieces. Oh, you did. I periodically publish stuff by, you know, contributing writers, but not as part of this series. Oh, OK.

[00:37:38] Yeah. So the Pacific Northwest does factor highly into the political violence section here. You know, there's all sorts of stuff just you know, I'm just scrolling through it right now because there's there's like too many things off the top of my head.

[00:37:54] But, you know, Portland and Portland and Seattle in particular and in Seattle, of course, there was that whole autonomous zone that it was like a six block section of the city that for like a month or a month and a half, maybe was just a complete anarchist lawless zone that the police had withdrawn from. And there were all sorts of assaults and sexual assaults, stabbings, people were shot.

[00:38:20] So a teenager was killed. It just became I mean, it it just became what every old stodgy conservative like has ever caricatured left wing anarchism as being. You know what I mean? Yeah. Oh, it devolved really quick. I mean, it did start. I mean, we were I was front row seat to this. I mean, it did start in this kind of very touchy feely that the mayor at the time famously and infamously for her.

[00:38:47] I think it became a real anchor for her called it the summer of love right at the beginning because it was and it did have that atmosphere. It was like these there was all this stuff set up, these booths set up in a park and it was kind of, you know, the the the it was it was this kind of kind of hippie idealism. And, oh, we're going to have these conversations and we're going to do these things.

[00:39:12] But it devolved with with astonishing rapidity and what you describe, which was like basically a kind of rampant open air drug market and encampment and then violent armed people, you know, kind of acting in mob sort of ways. Right. Which led led to violence and people getting killed. Yeah. And and as wild as the situation was in Seattle, it was it was even worse in Portland.

[00:39:40] Yes. They rioted for more than 170 days. They were decapitating pigs and setting their bodies on fire. There were just I mean, there were some videos. I think I linked some of them in the piece that were just some of the most brutal street assaults that I've ever seen. And, you know, it really just it just devolved in ways that really were were optically damaging and just morally awful. And yet, I mean, you do that that you have a video image.

[00:40:08] I think you put in that piece of a man in Portland and a pickup truck. He gets pulled out of his pickup by the mob and then someone runs up and kicks him in the head like like like like he's somebody like kicking a field goal. Right. Like runs up and just like full force kicks the dude in the head, knocks him unconscious. And, you know, that's that's Portland on the streets of 2020.

[00:40:32] And yet the media coverage of of that era and that time, both in Seattle to a large extent in Portland, was these are peaceful protesters taking on the jackbooted thugs of the authoritarian fascist police state.

[00:40:51] Like there was this very simplistic neighborhood, you know, narrative of peaceful protesters fighting for justice against an oppressive authoritarian power system. And what the hell is that about? Yeah, I mean, one of the stats that was cited over and over was a study that found that seven percent of the of all of the protests turned violent, which amounted to hundreds of protests.

[00:41:20] But the media constantly reported the flip side, saying that ninety three percent were peaceful. But of course, if you apply that to the police themselves, that would make the protesters like two and a half times or three times more violent than the police. And that was the instigating, you know, offense in all of these protests to begin with. So, you know, that same logic, they would never have accepted if the police said, well, you know, we're peaceful. Ninety three percent of the time. Right. Yeah.

[00:41:48] Yeah. I mean, it's kind of interesting to see how speaking of kind of memory holing like the the no kings movement is very, very self-consciously anti violence, anti, you know, and kind of about absurdity and fun and dressing like frogs and singing and dancing. And kind of a sort of a more fun take on the old nonviolent protest movement in a lot of ways.

[00:42:15] But clearly there's an implicit recognition recognition that a lot of this shit just kind of didn't work. Whereas during that 2014 to 2023 period and sort of beyond, there was kind of a glorification of late 60s radical politics that you talk about in an effort to try to rewrite, you know, the legacy of Martin Luther King style nonviolence and make it seem like it's more radical than it sometimes was.

[00:42:43] Right. You know, you know, you know, you were taking the war, you know, you were trying to depict the 50swny race Malcolm X像 and put on the text » often thing you see würden身 quicker than – you were trying to write about English widespread – you know, the night formula was correct Tack Scotland family. And, obviously, it was watching a theater than Michigan reference, out of England which I had seen in this video that there weren't people looking at.

[00:43:13] conservative political power followed that previous era, you know, from Reagan on through, you know, Clinton, who was, you know, not the most left wing of Democrats through the George W. Bush years. And this ties into a broader theme, I think, which is that liberal values, you know, I think the DNA of America has a lot of liberalism baked into it. It also has a lot of puritanism.

[00:43:40] Um, but in the last number of decades, liberalism has become almost transactional. It's become something that each side adopts and drapes themselves in the mantle of when they're not in power. So the side that's not in power suddenly becomes pro free speech, pro civil liberties, pro nonviolence. And then when the shoe's on the other foot, they just do whatever they want and justify it with whatever, you know, ideological arguments or partisan appeals that that they

[00:44:09] feel like. And, you know, might makes right. Well, let's talk about that authoritarian term, because that is, it seems to me, one of the key sort of themes that runs through the decade of, of progressive cultural ascendancy, right? So the issue makes changes. We've talked about that a little bit, but there is this real authoritarian term, um, in the kind of heyday of, you know,

[00:44:35] left Twitter and social media, um, that manifests as, you know, cancellations, as deep platformings, as just straight up silence, you know, abusing and silencing people who deviate from, from orthodoxies. There is a real sense that, um, that we can, um, we can kind of force the culture in a certain

[00:45:00] direction and anybody who doesn't comply is, you know, either needs to be crushed or silenced. Right. And, um, to talk about, you know, that seems like a very, very illiberal idea. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that part of that is just a universal human tendency that is in most people to some degree or another. The difference is in the early 2010s, it started to become tolerated and

[00:45:26] defended. And once it was defended and once, you know, the cultural left kind of grabbed the, the reins of power among institutions and largely among, you know, uh, political power as well, it just became a kind of snowball effect where people were indulging in all of their basest impulses, you know, uh, what Huxley called like the most delicious of moral treats, you know, uh,

[00:45:50] righteous hatred and, and mistreating people for a good cause. Um, and they did it because they could do it and they got away with it because it worked. And it was only once there was, it was only once the backlash got to a certain point that they were paying a price for it. Did we see any of it recede? I was asked to write a piece by, um, the magazine Persuasion a few months ago, you know, exploring how

[00:46:16] trans activism in particular got so radical. And, um, a lot of people think it's because of ideology or it's because of the, you know, these institutional pivots where, you know, when, when the fight for same-sex marriage was won, it then, you know, all that, all that, um, energy was redirected into trans and those are all part of it. But the over, you know, the overarching reason I think is psychological. People will behave poorly if they are allowed to and if they're rewarded for it. And if

[00:46:46] it works. So the incentive and reward structure became, became such that, yeah. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that, about, uh, trans rights, because I know that's something that you support. Uh, what, what is there a liberal, um, version of supporting trans rights look like? Like kind of where are we and where do we need to go? Right. And just to preface this, cause there's clearly we're in the midst of like a kind of alarming

[00:47:15] backlash, right? Uh, you know, when you look at the polling data on how people, that, that seems to be bleeding over even to things like we thought were settled, like gay marriage or LGBTQ rights, right? Or, or. Right. And just, and just to frame it, like, I think, you know, in progressive spaces and in places like Seattle, you know, among friends of mine, frankly, like good friends, close friends of mine,

[00:47:38] I feel uncomfortable saying something like, I'm not sure it's fair if trans women compete in, uh, female sports. Just saying that like on the left right now is still pretty politically risky thing to do. I'm not sure you're going to be the nominee of the democratic party in 2028. If that's something you, you say very strongly, uh, I guess we'll see, you know, but, um, and in, in cities like Seattle,

[00:48:04] I don't know what Sandeep thinks, but I don't think you run for city council or even the state legislature, uh, saying something like that, or, you know, like not even, I think this, but I think that might be the case or can we talk about it? You know, is, is, is still, that's a bridge too far, you know, on the one hand and on the other hand, this like horrific far right backlash. Well, just to set the scene, the backlash against, you know, the trans community and

[00:48:29] trans activism has absolutely been ferocious and it has spread to LGBT people as a whole. And it's also spread to sexual freedom more broadly. If you look at polling, the, uh, opinions about a woman's right to choose about, um, premarital sex, uh, about, you know, divorce, um, surrogacy, uh, gay adoption, all of these things have declined in the last number of years. So, you know, it has,

[00:48:55] it has translated into a broader backlash that really affects everyone, not just people in these specific cohorts. Um, and in terms of, in terms of what a liberal trans activism looks like, there are the core elements that you have to, you have to stand firm by, which is equality under the law, uh, the freedom of adults to do whatever they want to with their bodies, um, and the universal

[00:49:21] liberal ideal of treating everyone with respect and dignity. Uh, where trans activism went off the rails is when they became empowered to kind of just run roughshod over, you know, the majority of society by pushing deeply unpopular policies and basically enforcing any dissent, you know, with authoritarian means. So those, we need to go back to the drawing board on all of the contentious edge

[00:49:49] cases and do what the trans activist community should have done from the get-go, which is persuade people. So for the time being, that, in my opinion, would entail conceding some of those issues and conceding youth gender medicine, conceding trans sports and going back to trying to establish in the public mind that a, it is possible to be trans, that trans, that, uh, gender identity is a

[00:50:14] valid concept, that trans people are people just like anyone else and do the work that all of the other minority groups have done over time. The long and painstaking winning hearts and minds that is the foundation upon which lasting progress has to be made. Yeah. And I, I, I will say, I do find the way the right talks about trans people nowadays to be odious, you know, and, and, and,

[00:50:40] and to be a denial of, of people's sort of basic humanity and their, and their, uh, and their, their, their self-conception. And, um, uh, you know, and so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm cross-buffeted by this stuff, right. About, uh, by, by the cultural tides on this stuff. But I will say, look, there are, I don't know, three, four States now that this November are going to have trans girls in sports

[00:51:06] ballot measures on the ballot in, um, where the voters are going to decide on these issues, including. And that's just another way of banning them because to put those on the ballot is to ban them. Right. Well, I, I think we're going to see that Washington's look, Maine is a kind of purplish blue to purplish state and, you know, Nevada or whatever, but Washington state where we live is a very blue state. It's on the ballot this year. And if I'm, unless I'm very much mistaken, that measure is going to pass by really significant margin.

[00:51:34] And I have to say that the people that are, that are, that are backing it, um, many of them are evil fuckers. You know, they're using that issue, but they've got a much bigger agenda. I think when it comes to, as you were saying earlier, rolling back LGBTQ rights more generally, and this is the wedge issue that they're able to use. And it pisses me off that they're able to do that. You know, it should, it should upset us that they're able to do that because as you say, Jamie, we haven't

[00:52:02] thought enough strategically on the left about how to, how to counter this, you know, politics is about chess and we have to play better chess than we've been playing in part. Right. Yeah. There was a period during the 2010s where a lot of people on the left thought that they didn't need to play by the old rules, which were you convince people, you change hearts and minds, you build the foundation, and then you build a top that they thought they could build a third story

[00:52:27] where there was no first or second story. Um, and it just came crashing down because, you know, this isn't Looney Tunes. Um, so now we're in this position where we have to win back trust. You know, I say we, because even though, uh, I consider myself an independent and a moderate, I still do vote for Democrats because there really is no other viable option. It, you know, if you want the left to come back, if you want the left to recapture its old liberal ideals,

[00:52:57] um, it's going to require rebuilding trust and it's going to require, um, abandoning the, this notion that you could just force things through and just crush anyone who, who disagrees with you. Yeah. I mean, I was, I had a front row seat to, to watch the, the, the sort of gay rights and gay marriage movement evolve in Seattle in the, in the aughts. I was, uh, writing for the stranger, the alt weekly here in town, which, you know, it was a very gay paper, right? It was edited by Dan

[00:53:26] Savage. Um, it was directly editing at the time. And, um, you know, we used to kind of joke that it was, that stranger was quote unquote too gay. Right. I mean, that was our, our, our, our running gag, but, but, um, uh, but, and I wrote as a news writer, I was writing about sort of the, the, the efforts that were going on in the Washington state legislature on, on gay rights issues. And the first issue for 30 years, there have been a build a bar, just basic discrimination and housing,

[00:53:52] banking, stuff like that against gay people that failed every year in the Washington state legislature. It finally passes in 2006. And then there's an effort to like, okay, well, let's bring people along incrementally. Let's do civil unions in Washington state. Right. And, and let's get people used to the idea that, you know, gay people might form lasting, legally binding unions. And, uh, and, and there's, you know, legislative champions and they work on it for a couple of years and they

[00:54:21] get that passed. And it's not till 2012 after this long period of, of persuasion, right? That, that there's a gay marriage initiative on the ballot. I think it was a 2012 in Washington state that, that, that, that passes. Right. And, and the whole premise of that was just asking, appealing to people's better natures as human beings to just treat gay people just like everybody else. Right. And to give them the same rights. The trans movement, it seems to me has gone way

[00:54:50] beyond that. Right. If you, if, if it was about just treating trans people, you know, uh, with, with, with decency and humanity, that's a very winning argument, I think even today. But if it's about saying you have to say that there aren't two sexes anymore, you can't say the word woman, or you have to say that men can, you know, have babies, right? That's, that's a much farther cultural leap you're asking people to make. One of the big differences between the two movements

[00:55:18] in the way that they approached it is the one movement made its case around, we're not asking you to give up anything. And the other movement framed its rights as being zero sum with that. We can't have our freedoms unless you, you know, uh, bend on this and that, and the other thing where these were highly contested issues. Um, and like you said that the, the starting point that you should have, that people should have begun at would have been just the, you know, establishing

[00:55:47] the legal protections, establishing that, you know, uh, universal dignity, uh, and build the foundation from there. Yeah. Just to close on this, cause we've, we've, we've touched on it and danced around it a bit, but you know, we should more explicitly just talk about the rise of what looks to me to be now a kind of, now that the right is in the cultural ascendancy, there seems to be an equal

[00:56:13] kind of extremism we're seeing on the right. And we're seeing it in the backlash that we were just talking about, about LGBTQ stuff, but also all over the place. Look at the, the wave of right-wing cancellations that happened in the wake of, um, Charlie Kirk's, um, you know, uh, death, right. And killing. Um, and you know, I mean, just to put it crudely, like we've seemed to have whipsawed from an era of

[00:56:41] sort of cultural neo-totalitarianism and the left ascendancy to a era of the cultural neo-fascism almost. Right. And, and I don't know, but Jamie, what about the right here? I know in your violence piece you bring up, like, there's a lot of support for political violence on the right as well. Maybe even more so than on the left. Yeah. Uh, that was the one archive where even though this series is, you know, ostensibly

[00:57:07] about the left, you couldn't really cover political violence in just a one-sided way because that is totally bipartisan. And what we're seeing on the right is worse than everything that we're seeing on the left, which is why it's so important that the left corrects themselves because ultimately when the left screws up, it just ends up empowering the right. Um, so, you know, we can't control what other people do, but we can control not pouring gasoline on the fire by accident, uh, or,

[00:57:35] you know, uh, misguidedly intentionally. But what we're seeing on the right is, you know, it's, it's everything that we saw with wokeness, but carried out with the full force of the federal government, you know, uh, Yeah. With the FCC, et cetera. Right. Yeah. So it's like, it's not just, you know, campus activists and people in institutions and social media platforms, uh, and, you know, corporate boardrooms,

[00:58:00] but it's people using the full force of the government to prosecute what basically are culture war hobby horses. Um, and they are sowing the seeds of their own backlash. Um, I'm not sure exactly when that's going to happen. I mean, the Democrats are surely going to do well in the midterms, but that's simply, um, just because educated people who are almost exclusively left wing participate much more in midterm elections, but we'll see if it really manifests the true backlash

[00:58:28] in 2028. I mean, this shouldn't serve, uh, surprise us in a way. Cause if you think historically, I mean, people are going to look back on this era and talk about what was happening in America culturally, and they're not going to be emphasizing sort of hyper partisan differences that we're feeling as much as we're feeling right now, probably, although they'll kind of would get into that. But I mean, it sort of makes sense, right? These are, these are all kind of cultural trends and we're not living in, I mean, as much as we're living in, in media vacuums and social media

[00:58:57] vacuums, we're not completely living in vacuums. We're all kind of living through this moment and, uh, making the same mistakes, you know, not just here, but kind of all over the world and we're fucked. I'm sorry. That's the lesson of this podcast, right? Right. No, I'm going to push back on that a little bit. I don't know. I mean, I, it is a, maybe it's just an article of faith of mine, but I still fundamentally believe that there is a universe of, I don't know what you want to call them, normie Americans that just in a good faith way

[00:59:27] would like to like get along with other people, including people they disagree with. Right. And, and, and actually believe in the kind of liberal ideals that Jamie, you were, you were mentioning equal treatment under the law and, um, uh, you know, uh, you know, uh, uh, pluralism and rationality and all those kinds of, you know, old school liberal enlightenment kind of, kind of values,

[00:59:50] free speech, um, um, open inquiry, you know, uh, uh, rational discourse. Right. And that, I think that still exists. It's just that our politics has become people in power. In other words, all the people who have power is often looney tunes land. Right. But I still think that there's a, a, a, a universe of people that with the right, um, incentives, right. We'll, we'll come

[01:00:16] back to, to, uh, uh, a better place for the country, right. In the Republic. But anyway, but maybe that's, that's religion on my part. I don't know. Maybe I'm in denial. I mean, I am a naturally optimistic person too. So I do see a path out of this. Um, and I think the path is just through burnout. I mean, you can only go back to the same well so many times and then, you know, get food poisoning from it before you realize you have to look somewhere else. And, you know, Churchill said

[01:00:44] that Americans can be relied upon to do the right thing after all the wrong things have been exhausted, something to that nature. I mean, you know, my hope is that something like that happens, that Americans get burned enough by the failures of, uh, you know, the far left and of right-wing populism enough that hopefully at some point soon there will be, you know, and it may have to be ushered in by some Obama-like figure in the center, uh, that hopefully can recapture people's, you know, uh,

[01:01:12] wonder and love with, uh, you know, the ideals that really made this country great. Yeah. I guess I just have one foot still in sort of post-war, uh, intellectual culture where things can always get worse. But anyway, um, we ended on both optimistic and pessimistic notes here, uh, on this edition of blue city blues, Jamie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Yeah. Jamie, thank you. Great conversation. Really enjoyed it.

[01:01:38] Yeah. Check out his sub stack. I can't say enough good things about it. It's American dreaming dot sub stack.com. He's Sandeep Kaushik. I'm David Hyde. Thanks everybody so much for listening.