Reason journalist Robby Soave has been writing about culture,
free speech, due process, and moral outrage on campus
since joining the magazine in 2014.
You need to get out!
That year he was one of the first reporters to question the veracity of a Rolling Stone article
that accused several fraternity brothers of a horrific gang rape at the University of Virginia —
— a story the magazine later retracted because of insufficient evidence.
Earlier this year, when a clip of MAGA hat-wearing high school students
appearing to intimidate a Native American man went viral,
Soave was one of the first journalists to carefully scrutinize the raw video,
discovering that the interaction was more complicated than the outraged mob had claimed.
Major media organizations later looped back to acknowledge that they had erred in their reporting.
I don't blame the kids.
So, many people admitted they made snap judgments before these other facts came in.
The 30-year-old Suave has just published his first book,
"Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump,"
which examines the ascendancy of what he calls,
"the intersectional left" and "the identitarian right" among young political activists.
I talked with Soave about his experience reporting and writing the book, today's political climate on campus,
and why he thinks college activists' emphasis on identity is misplaced.
So Robby, what is "Panic Attack" about?
"Panic Attack" is about problems that I've noticed on college campuses for the last couple years.
Threats to free speech, due process, and other values of classical liberals
that are often coming from the left,
from students who would describe themselves as progressives.
Even though progressives would have supported many of these things, like free speech and due process,
but now the students who call themselves progressive are shutting down speakers who they disagree with,
or who make someone on campus feel uncomfortable,
are calling for policies that have made it harder for people accused of misconduct to get a fair trial,
have done things that threaten certain liberal principles on campus.
And obviously they would like to export these practices to not just other campuses,
but also to the country at large,
to the firm, to social media companies, which are now making decisions like this for what kind of content is okay.
so it's interviews with student activists people who march in the street in d c--
berkeley other places who want social change and interviews with them about why they like these tactics and where their ideas come from and
These activists that you're examining are mostly on what you call the intersectional left
Although there's also an examination of the identitarian right near the end of the book as a libertarian
What is your interest in?
Exploring these ideologies sure. I mean, I was just so interested by over the last few years the changes I saw taking place
You know, it used to be that someone who's very progressive has like an ACLU approach to free speech that you know
Even if it's a crazy hateful person
shouting something
You know during military servicemembers funeral like that's the Westboro Baptist Supreme Court case
That we were gonna defend their right to do so and that was such an ironclad progressive value
But we have seen increasingly over the last couple years things like charles
Murray coming to speak at a number of universities and he's being shouted down by not all students. Not most students
but a small number of
activists who think that him being allowed to speak it's not just that they disagree with him, but it's that his words cause
emotional harm to certain people on campus and that is a form of violence and thus it's not only
Justified but necessary to protect people from the harm that his words caused
That was such a kind of new thing
I mean shutting down speakers is not new, but doing it for an explicit sort of safety ism
It was a trend that I saw developing so I became very interested in talking to the students about
Why they liked that strategy or think that strategy is so important a lot of the policies that we've seen play out on college
campuses things like trigger warnings or
microaggression databases
Safe spaces all the stuff you hear about are
Couched in that language of safety and words as violence or causing physical harm
I mean, where does that idea come from?
Were you able to discover like where the what the genesis of that was so first it's important to realize that this immense
Bureaucracy has grown on campuses over the last couple dozen years to now
Adjudicate these claims to now provide
Monitoring and reporting services, there's administrators
Who are paid very handsomely there's tons of them
They've their salaries and ranks have increased in the ways the faculties have not again over the last thirty years or so
So now there's this this bureaucracy to treat these concerns very seriously
They've also learned these concerns. I think a little bit from a philosophy that I described in the book is intersectionality
Which is something that came about in the 1980s out of a sociology this idea that there are different kinds of oppression
There's racism. There's sexism
Anti-gay animus on and on and on but they're related but they're separate and
They stack and the more and you have to be against all of them
It's not enough to just fight one of these things and that's become more influential for progressives
So now on campus where again we're talking about relatively privileged people
There's actually campus in the literal physical safety sense is safe than many other places. In fact, even the
sexual assault problem women of the same age as
Students who are not actually on campuses are in greater danger of sexual assault than female students
so they're the problems are not necessarily I think as large as many make them out to be but you have
But these grievances are there and they have a bureaucracy
that's dealing with them and they have a philosophy that all these things must be confronted at once and
No matter the big things from like racism sexism
- you know what pronouns you're being addressed with or do you have you know things like of that nature and if you're not fighting
All of them you are not in good standing in the progressive community. So that's driving a lot of this. Yes, we must oppose
Obviously fascism and Trump
but we also must oppose whoever else comes to speak and we will also fight even the ACLU if they come here because they
Support free speech rights, which is what happened at
William and Mary, uh
Within the last two years. They actually the progressives a
Protest did a speaker with the ACLU?
Because they rejected the idea that that free speech is a value that's on their side. Well, so if
Intersectionality is the ideology it you describe it as kind of stacking so
You might be a woman but also latina and also gay and those three things
Add up to a higher level of oppression. The logic does seem to make some sense. I mean, these are all different
marginalized groups
So it seems like compounding that would create
Possibly more problems more oppression for a given individual. So what's your critique of intersectionality?
And where do you think it actually gets things? Right, right
So I think it's true as you just said so I agree with it. I
Urea Slee, these are sources of real oppression in society and kimberlé crenshaw who is the sociologist who came up with it?
She was trying to say that you know
If you're you she wanted activists to not just fight racism without fighting sexism. That was like her goal
So I again the theory is fine as a tactical sort of framework for bringing about social change. I
Have some concerns about it and how it's being applied in particularly again, it's all well and good to fight sexism and racism
but as we've added again more and more and more grievances, I mean, you know
Most Americans many Americans you can get them to show up maybe to a March to fight
to the women's March for instance because of trumps appalling record on women because if people are fired up against anti sexism
But the activists I talked to again the far-left progressive activists. They said the women's March was no good
They deliberately avoided it because it wasn't intersectional by that they meant the people in charge of it were not trans women of color
Right, they were not people who satisfied multiple marginalized statuses
so my point of view is you're gonna require that every sort of activist thing you do or every
Attempt at social change, you know checks off all of these boxes. You're going to have a hard time doing anything
Hmm because you are you who you know believe that all these boxes must be checked off our few
Where you know all of Americans some might hold
You know progressive views on race and sex issues they may but maybe they're not forget or they are for gay marriage
But they, you know support Israel and the israel-palestine conflict or so
There's all these kinds of different, you know, people are different
You can't have a single issue coalition if you require everyone to be to agree on
Every single further more fringe thing a leftist progressive wants and it's produced
I mean
My book is a chronicle of oftentimes hilarious infighting based on these issues the the DSA the Democratic socialists of America
you know, they they put out sort of a plan for a medicare-for-all type thing and
that drew criticism from their disability working group because the disabilities issue people said, how dare you
You know come out with discharge without having consulted us for the marginalized group most affected by this
we should have been leading the charge only we have authority to
to lead this issue and there was infighting which was kind of ridiculous, but that's where a
militant adherence to intersectionality gets you and you see
Conservatives observing this with a sort of Glee because it's the left eating its own from their perspective
I mean, I'm it provides it provides moments of amusement for libertarians as well. But I mean, what is your attitude?
Towards seeing this all play out on the Left. I mean, is it something that we
should just kind of sit back and and let it happen or or
What are your concerns if any yeah
I think I write this exactly in the book that part of the reason I I'm so
Interested in where the left's going wrong is that occasionally I would like them to succeed
I criminal justice issues are one thing I talk about in the book
I have a chapter on sort of the black lives matter group, which I think and I think
The effect that black lives matter has had on the country and on policy is still being written
I think we absolutely don't know for sure
And now and it's a big group and it's had positive impacts in some places and probably negative impacts other places
It and it's confusing because Trump is in self
you know runs on this very law-and-order anti criminal justice kind of
Platform and then has one conversation with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West and is now suddenly interested in sentencing reform
But so my concern about something like like the the intersectional and the very identity
approached
approach of a black lives matter for instance, you know, they made this about about
the impact of these issues on a specific
Racial group and I worry that that made it less appealing to a brought to to getting more Americans on board with it
You know if I'm trying to get older conservatives on board with criminal justice reform
I'm not gonna say like you're complicit in racism
If you don't agree with me
I'm gonna talk about how this just cost too much money
And even police say you can't keep drugs out of jail for goodness sake, you know
You're gonna talk about those things. The intersectional approach is saying that we have to talk about how this is most
the this is most
horrible for this group of people and so on and so forth making it identity based because people in the country hate identity politics
I think can turn people off
And so that's my concern suave says the intersectional left has inadvertently empowered its mirror image the alt-right
members of which clashed with protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia in
2017 at that event one man ran over and killed a protester with his car
we're in a very bad moment in our politics for the kind of ideas that I like for classical liberalism or
Individual libertarianism on both sides. I mean, you know, I'm criticizing the left for kind of abandoning some of these
Individual liberty values that I hold in so much esteem
But of course the right has is going in in the same
But opposite direction in is more tribal is more populist is more nationalist
I mean there's a debate going on right now and conservative pundit circles about
Further retreating from sort of a Liberty a slightly libertarian framework into a more explicitly
Almost the ik Radek direction. And this is happening, you know everywhere this is happening in Europe
This is even further advanced in Europe between a kind of far left progressive socialist paradigm and a very national
conservative paradigm
If these two extremes, you know
They butt heads and then both feel more justified in going more the other direction
I mean, that's something I talk about the the people who start on the alt-right
Pathway are just making fun of leftist to begin with or they're making fun of you know
leftist political correctness overreach and
then they're saying horrible things just to trigger people on the left and then they're coming to actually believe these horrible things and they're its
Justifying their behavior and the same thing happens the other way, too
so I
am criticizing from my perspective of I would like to move both these groups back to
To having something of appreciation for values that in
not-so-distant
Times they had more interest in and yes
So you do cover the alt-right in the book or the identitarian, right?
What is the relationship there that you see between the intersectional left and the identitarian right?
How are they feeding off of each other? Yeah, I wanted to survey, you know
Activists young activist groups that have arisen in the Trump era and the old right?
you know while a
Still a small fringe group that I think maybe had its high water market
For in terms of how many people and how much we were talking about them with the Charlottesville a few years ago
And hopefully that's the high-water mark for them
I think we would all be happier if you never hear from them again
but they see themselves as a reaction to some degree to the left as an explicit or a
co-opting of identity politics, but for white people, I mean, this is how Richard Spencer
Described his movement when I interviewed him for the book
He said yeah, I mean he wants things like like a welfare state but for white people, he says, it's good
To derive meaning from your membership in a racial category
Which again this is the exact sort of opposite way
I think meaning drives for a meaning derives from you being an individual and we all as
Individuals have rights and it's not because you are
preordained into some racial group, but that's how this
very fringe
right movement sees themselves and you know and I do it's not fair I think to blame obviously the the
violence and the bad things the right has done is not somehow the left's fault is the fault of the people who did it without
Any question, but these fringe groups do feed on each other
I mean they fight each other online all the time, you know
They they see their the I think people adjacent to the alt-right and may be interested to some degree and all right ideas
Feel like man. Those people are right
Look look this person, you know who isn't even alright, they got kicked out of campus or kicked off social media or whatever
They're being censored
So then they'll it looks the the kind of conspiracy people seem right all along to them when Provocateur milo gianopolous
Accepted the invitation of a conservative student group to speak at UC Berkeley the campus erupted
Masked protesters associated with the leftist group and Tifa threw Molotov
Cocktails at the police and tossed barricades through windows to protest gianopolous
Presence when riesen visited campus a year later students were ambivalent about what had occurred
The speech can be considered violence
inviting people like milo innopolis creates an unsafe environment for the people that he is speaking against
What do people say is the proper role of political violence within these movements? Yes, certainly
We've seen violence in all these places Portland as well has a lot of anti fire activity going on
Certainly, the activists we're talking about and again, this is not most people there's not most students
I'm talking about a small number of activists, but they absolutely
see political violence as legitimate
I mean an tyfa is an organization with a history going back to Europe in the 1930s the a the
anti-fascists, and they
Mark, Bray who's written a book called the the anti fahan book about the movement
You know makes it explicit that they are not a liberal movement. They do not believe in free speech
They believe in free speech if it's being harnessed by an tyfa
But we're not they're not about defending the rights of people who pollute achill motives they disagree with
So they're not saying I don't think that we're all always and automatically going to use violence
But there they are there's nothing violence is not off the table for them
They are certainly prepared to use violence in situations
And I mean, I guess I saw this in the research I was doing for the book
I saw some violence at Michigan when I saw Charles Marie speak. I saw some at Berkeley when I visited
I saw some at Columbia when they had a controversial far-right speaker come to speak and again, you know
There's no one in there. There was a few people in the audience. This person was giving remarks in like a basement
It was fine, there's nothing very important happening there and you go okay
I don't know what the big deal was and then you go outside and there's just you know
there are dozens and dozens and dozens of people in masks and black hoods and
they're attacking each other and they're talking about how we'd like need to overthrow the entire university and
We'd like all of Western capitalism or something and it's just and it's like really fringe crazy stuff
it was just this one guy speaking you could have ignored him and
That would have been probably
You know, he's probably wants the protesters there to feel like he had some effect
Do you just ignore some of these people?
That would be a better tactic than what an tyfa and and even the other protesters do in so many of these cases
yeah, I'm curious about all of this as spectacle because
you talk about these incidents with charles murray or we mentioned miley annapolis and these get
widespread media coverage when they happen but some people have argued that that's
disproportionate to the actual problem that this is a pretty
Small group of people and it's not really widespread on college campuses for instance
How widespread a problem is it in your estimation? Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that argument
Certainly, these things are over covered in a way that may make them seem like they're getting worse. I mean
you know if you wrote if you're a student and you wrote some kind of bad or
easily mocked
progressive
Article for your student newspaper, you know when I was in college in the arts
You would have written it you might have been mocked on campus, but then it would that would've been it
It wouldn't forgotten. Now, you might have you know, it could be a cable news segment about it
So there's a there's a way that these problems are may be blown up. It's very difficult to quantify
Qualify what we're talking about. I mean it's the case that in it probably many probably most universities
Especially we're talking in community colleges as well
Smaller schools that are not as much under the national spotlight they'll have speakers come and there's no big deal
You know, this is a bigger problem at
better-known
loftier institutions your Harvard's your Yale's
Oberlin read prestigious liberal arts colleges somewhat to some degree the UC system
So I never I'm always cautious because I I don't I don't want to overstate the problem I don't want to scare people
That's the opposite of what I'm trying to do
and
again, most students are not like this and I don't even think the number of students who do these kinds of things has increased I
just think it's this it's so it's
Still the same small number of students
They're just started getting their way from like 2012 and on a bit more than they did before
There was a reluctance among
The rest of the people on campus to challenge them when they stand up and they shout down whoever it is
Yeah, there was more willingness on their part to do so and there was less willingness on the part of others to condemn them
I mean professors on campuses who are very far left, but again in a more sort of
ACLU mo mold
They are afraid to
To criticize these students they're afraid to teach these students things
They might not agree with I mean, that's an important change and I've talked to a lot of professors
For this book and off the record who again are progressive people who are just terrified of their students
I think that is a big problem
I I don't and again I don't want to say that's every classroom or you know
The whole system is about to come crashing down, but it is a problem
If you know even some subset of professors are not teaching the law relating to sexual assault anymore
Which is something that's happening because they're afraid of triggering someone's trauma in the classroom and you'll have fewer lawyers
Who are educated about the nuances of the laws pertaining to this subject? I mean Harvard just
They did this they they fired a faculty Dean who?
Ron Sullivan who is an expert on criminal justice reform who advised President Obama or when he was Senator Obama who has helped free
Wrongfully incarcerated people who has represented accused terrorists and accused murderers because that's what you do if you believe in due process
but he had joined Harvey Weinstein's legal team and some of the 50 student activists said
campus is unsafe for women because you did that and
Harvard listened and they fired the person I think that's pretty terrible
Even if that's even if we're talking about a handful of incidents rather than a broad trend, I still think that's pretty bad
Yeah, you're seeing them actually cave to the demands where you're saying in the past
That was more likely to be this loud small contingent
Possibly just ignored mostly the most dramatic example I can think of as what played out at Evergreen
College with Brett Weinstein where you see an entire
Group of students swarming the head of the college and he's basically sitting there taking it
I think they even tell him to shut up and sit down at one point
And they had them have them like barricaded in a library. They essentially hold him hostage. It's like it's kind of crazy stuff. Yeah, so
What's changed?
There is it this
administrative apparatus
that is
Enabling this or is it just the tide has turned?
and the power
Dynamics have switched somewhat. I think the power dynamics switched somewhat I think for a couple reasons
I mean one of them is if we're talking specifically about activism
Relating to sexual misconduct on campus the title nine change. So title nine is the statute that forbids
gender-based discrimination
In all in all schools that received federal funding there was a change to that statute
I mean not technically the statute remained the same but how it was interpreted by the Obama administration in
2011 they broadened what they considered sexual
discrimination
to be kind of all sexual misconduct and they said the the definition for whether this would be reasonable or is basically
You know in the eyes of the beholder so universities got really spooked that if they didn't
very vigorously
Police sexual misconduct, they could be losing federal funding. So this has a speech
component because again as I was saying about professors teaching the law as it relates to sexual assault if you make someone in your class
Feel uncomfortable for a sex or gender-based reason well now there's this bureaucracy saying you've possibly violated federal law and you could put the entire
university at risk for funding so there's a lot of self censoring there was a lot of
Professors who stood up to this like Laura Kipnis is someone who I know you've interviewed a reason has interviewed
About this ordeal she went through when she wrote an essay
Criticizing title nine essentially and her students filed a complaint against her for having written this essay and she was investigated again
This is just like throwing academic freedom the First Amendment the a climate of free expression on campus all of that going out the window
To comply with this overly broad interpretation of a statute. I mean there are activists who got that numeral nine tattooed to their ankles
Because it was that important to their activism
So that's an example of actually an explicit government policy change
Having a big impact it took
It took I think maybe like two or three years for activists to really understand that we have this tool now
For for going after people for these reasons and that is the one thing that has actually changed since I finished the book
the education secretary Betsy DeVos
Rescinded that new definition I think much to her credit. So you will have a
Sort of less craziness around that although the people they hired
The title 9 coordinators on campus to still kind of follow those rules
They're still there
You know mission creep and bureaucracies expand and they contract even when they they get told you don't have to do this anymore
I don't know. Yeah, and this topic is
one of the cultural hot buttons right now and
People who talk about it and write about it are often viewed with suspicion
and sometimes rightly so because there's a whole version of this where it's just people
Trying to make college students look stupid to score points for their political side. I don't think your book is that I
think it's a sincere attempt like you were saying to
Improve the tactics of the left to succeed in areas that we as libertarians would want to see them succeed
But what would your advice be to people who are talking about this and trying to do it in that smart?
more nuanced way without falling into the more
Parody version of this. Absolutely. I think it's so important to call out
The right as well when they are threatening free speech even I mean even on college campuses they are there are all there are Republican
Legislators trying to pass bills that are even sometimes designed as free speech bills
But would actually just make it sort of hard to protest
I mean you could the students can protest the speaker's they should protest the speakers
They just can't shut them down or exercise violence against them, but there is speech relating to sort of pro-palestinian
Speech on campuses is often something that
Conservatives have have said well, we're gonna kind of crush this
So so I try to I try to defend you know
A professor's right to not write a letter of recommendation for someone who wants to study abroad in Israel
That was something that happened at Michigan. That's a free speech issue. There are a freedom of association issue
So I think it's just so important to make sure we're calling out both sides. I don't think
Conservatives. I don't think Trump is especially a big defender of freedom of speech even if he maybe says things I occasionally agree with about
Speech on campuses, particularly
So it's just I mean he wants to expand libel laws
He said that so I think some of the criticisms
coming at people who fixate on campus free speech issues is
Sometimes there are people who make it look like that's the only thing going on and you know
If we only if we got rid of political correctness, everything would be great
Our only mission is to is to stop this sort of campus social justice warrior
So I'm here saying campus social justice for years occasionally doing some bad stuff
We should be aware of this is not made up
This is a real story but there are a lot other stories - about speech and about other things where we're the people of authority
Are our people who are hurting the free speech rights of the left as well?
I mean, this is my plea to activist that if we empower
Authorities to take - to quash free speech I mean whose speech are they coming for first?
I mean it's there's gonna be anti-war speech is gonna be offensive or triggering for for members of the military community
Auntie Polly criminal justice reform is gonna be speech that you know impugns are cops. Yeah
I've always seen the blue lives matter meme. So that's one example
Exactly, that's exactly things like that. So I'm just you're saying we got to defend
Broad sort of free speech classical liberal principles and we have to defend them from the left, but certainly from the right as well
So if you're arguing that
Intersectionality is ultimately self-defeating and empowering people
Like on the alt right and to some degree Trump himself
What would a course correction look like in your mind? Like what I guess is kind of a best-case scenario
To move beyond this I would like to see some of the performative
intersectionality dialed down
particularly on social media
Like there have been efforts lately
undertaken by sort of far left young adult book reviewers to destroy every young adult novel that has something they
Perceive as problematic in it
Even if it's not really problematic when you look at it, like I mean there was a book written, you know
This is a fantasy book about kind of the anastasia myth in russia, but like with magic and vampires and things like that
yeah, but the
Criticism was and it's an it's an asian author
But their slavery in the book and the criticism was well slavery something that happened in the american south
How dare you culturally appropriating this story of slavery, of course slavery is something that has happened everywhere including in Russia
So it's ridiculous, but they got they got this author to cancel this book
Despite having gotten a five hundred thousand dollar advance now, she's publishing it but she's changed all the problematic parts something like that
anyway
this kind of just purely performative burned the which canceled culture that is anime by and by
intersectionality and a sort of militant paying attention to small grievances
Is having negative effects on our culture, I think depending on the firm
I mean your companies are gonna take less sort of creative or culturally interesting moves
If you have to satisfy these just very unreasonable woek
demands
so I'm
Trying to explain why I do think that's bad and self-defeating and it just and then it it drives the the right
I mean this animates so much criticism of
Progressivism when some of progressivism is good and I would agree with it
So I would like them to dial back
The the the kind of all the going overboard you do
Not not necessarily because of the theory but the theory has has helped push them in that direction
What do you hope that libertarian-leaning people learn from reading this book? I think the most important point
I want to hammer home is that you know, there's this idea that
professors are sort of like brainwashing students or something and in the the
Academy is evil because like education itself is evil or something like that. I don't quite think that's what's been going on here
I think most of these students who have learned tactics. We don't like are actually learning them from each other
I think the faculty could be our allies in this kind of struggle
I mean they when they talk to me, they're very concerned about these things because they are the ones we're gonna get in trouble
So I would like to see a dialing down of the rhetoric on how like professors are brainwashing their students or something like that
because I don't think that's quite the case and and many professors even though we don't agree with them on everything do
Represent or do have respect for individual liberty and in some cases and might have respect for individual liberty
Even in even more cases if we if we come to their defense
And and and we're their protectors here rather than we want to dismiss them because we think this is their fault
So if it's not their fault
where is it coming from because there is the theory that this is all you know cultural Marxism being taught by the
professor's so is it
something more
Structural is it back to that administrative bloat?
The administrative bloat is certainly part of the story, but I think the students are really just learning it from each other
Because of the way social media is and they're in facebook groups and the they can learn
you know activists at one college can see what activists at another have done, you know, they're sharing like
You know quotes from from famous sort of activist
figures of your they're seeing what worked at other colleges there is a there is
There are some academic
Disciplines where this is taught a little bit and it's really more activism being taught than anything approaching scholarship
Yeah, that's a kind of small
Part of academia. So if they're learning from each other then this is in a way
technological because it seems like you're saying it's social media, essentially that is at least
Accelerating well technology makes it very easy for people across wide Geographic distances to cluster around
Causes or ideas. Yeah, I mean the alt-right and this is not technology. This is a good thing as well the, you know technology
Allows us to connect to like-minded people and identify them and interact with them and it's broadly a good thing but something like the alt-right
would not have been possible before this because you know
you can have a couple a
Small number of racist people spread out all over the country and they would think they were alone and they would never express their views
out of fear of social stigma now
They can find each other and they can create kind of enclaves for them to to express their ideas
Well, if the technological change was part of the problem or at least an accelerant to the problem
Can it be part of the solution? Is there any way to leverage technology?
to
Course-correct in some way. Yeah. It's a difficult question
and it's one that technology companies are really grappling with them with themselves right now because they're trying to decide do how much
Policing of this content should we do if we do it do we look hypocritical when we don't get rid of all problematic content?
I mean it's impossible to do
These are giant networks
And who have made, you know sort of implicit free speech, you know, we're platforms
So this is kind of like the public square. This is something Facebook has said no, you know, this is a place where
We're we're not gonna police you for what you say
But it turns any the public in the truly in the public square. You can say really awful vile things and that's okay. That's
Constitutional that's protected under the first amendment. Are we really giving that much license now? They're saying well, wait a minute
Maybe we didn't intend to do that and I actually tend to think
heavy-handed
attempts to ban the bad people
Just will not work or make the platform look
Look very hypocritical and actually just make people angry or even dried this under further underground
But the companies can do what they want. You know, I'm not one of those
Libertarians who has suddenly decided not libertarian or anti anti social justice warrior people who has suddenly decided that government intervention
Into into this sector is not only justified, but absolutely necessary. My principles were
Ready to collapse that easily, which is something unfortunately
I see many other people who talk about these issues have suddenly decided Facebook should be broken up by the government
Because it was mean to some conservative once which is which is pretty frustrating
How was your experience?
Writing and researching this book affected your view of American politics and where things might be headed next
That's interesting certainly over the course of time that I was writing this book
politics became even more
polarized
part of the issue is that
Trump
C's has made the media
His enemy his is the rival team and the media
Plays into it to some degree it partly because they're just doing their job of criticizing Trump others
Take it a bit farther than that, but they are the opposition team. So they're not like like the the
Mediators in it in a dispute between Democrats and Republicans that used to be their old position Republicans complain
They were too much too affiliated with Democrats. But now it's like Trump versus media
Yeah
so everything that happens and
Because Trump owns the new cycle and there's nothing that can happen that does not relate to Trump in some way
There's this need to fit it into that lens of Trump versus media. So like went like when the Covington
The kids on the Lincoln Memorial that's something I wrote a lot about saying that the media had gotten the story wrong
But I'm not saying that because I'm like defending Trump at but that's they tried to you know
People seeing me writing about it or like well
Are you on the side of the media or are you saying Trump is good and right I was saying neither of those things
But it's so it's it's hard. It's become harder. Yeah to be a person
Who's talking about issues who sometimes thinks the media is right. Sometimes thinks the characterization is correct
Sometimes defense try and just be not in either of those sides. There's the constant
Which tribe are you in? It doesn't make sense to people anymore. Yeah that you wouldn't be in one or the other
Yeah, how do you get around that? How do you get out of that situation?
You can't get out of the situation
The hard part is making sure then you don't put one foot in one camp because you're being pushed to get into one of those
Bryce that's and I as a libertarian. I don't want to be in either of those camps
I don't think libertarians should want to be in either of those camps
We should you know maintain our ability to to make situational alliances but to call out, you know
Big government and violations of our values wherever they occur
But the the nature of the political conversation is really trying to push you in one direction
So it's I'm you're just standing on a platform in the sea trying not to fall into the waves or something
Yeah
and do you think that sea is just going to continue to get choppier or is there any
Hope of you know calmer waters
Initially, I don't see any reason why there would be calmer waters at least in the immediate future
if
Trump were to lose the election. Maybe we'll have a different paradigm. It could very well be that
this
Continues because you'll replace Trump with something else and it will be the exact same dynamic or we won't replace him at all. Who knows?
Certainly the kind of call out
Cancel II stuff I talk about is going to get worse as more. I think activists type people move from
campus into the workplace again
It's not
Most young people but it only needs one at a major media
Institution or social media company who is changing the culture from within by saying that if you're doing this or you're doing that it violates
Harassment law. It's a form of your traumatizing me. You're making the workplace unsafe
This is why Kevin Williamson can't work at the Atlantic because he holds views that made some people on staff
It wasn't literally that they disagree with his views. This is
Writer for The Atlantic briefly for a week. It was his views
made certain employees feel unsafe so that kind of again that's different than
Disagreement that's taking it to a level that we're going to see happen
In in firm or in situation after situation
That's going to really change America over the next ten years. Okay, we've got choppier waters ahead. Hold on to your flotation devices Robbie
Thank you very much for talking to us. My pleasure
