This week on High Noon, Twitter-banned sensation and former What’s Left Cast co-host Aimee Terese joins the podcast to talk about the psychology of the left and how our representatives and institutions understand victimhood and power. Aimee also explains why, despite coming from the left originally, she doesn’t feel the need to reflexively condemn “both sides” and the necessity of being strong enough to disappoint people.
High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. The podcast features interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future. Hosted by Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
A note for High Noon listeners: before we get to this week’s episode, we try our best here at Independent Women’s Forum to get crystal-clear audio to you, but sometimes technology just doesn’t cooperate with us, and this episode is one of those times where there can be some audio hiccups. I know as a listener how annoying that can be, but I really think this discussion with Aimee Terese on the psychology of the Left and how our representatives and institutions understand victimhood and power is definitely worth powering through that annoyance. On that note, if you have kids listening to High Noon, first of all, I love that, but second, I did want to warn you that this episode does contain some language you might want to avoid them repeating. But with that, I hope you really enjoy this episode with Aimee Terese as much as I enjoyed talking with her.
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. And nobody is more interesting than my guest this week, Aimee Terese. She is half of, formerly what was known as the What’s Left Podcast, she has a new podcast launching upcoming this year. She’s a writer with Return, and other magazines of dissidence against the leftist regime. And she is constantly banned on Twitter, you might have seen her takes on Twitter but she’s constantly getting kicked off. There seems to be an entire team at Twitter headquarters dedicated to making sure that Aimee Terese never gets to share her opinion on Twitter. So the first question I’m going to ask you, Aimee, is, why do you think you’re so constantly getting booted off of Twitter for saying things that literally… I mean, you say them very well and eloquently, but tons of people say the same substance and don’t get banned, they just really hate you.
Aimee Terese:
I was chatting about this yesterday with Anna Cachin and her theory is that it’s this whole, they hate you more if you’re a traitor than if you were like never one of them. And so her thesis is that like anyone who’s ever had anything to do with the left is basically like on their shit list for life if they dare to leave, like if they dare to walk away. And so it sort of puts you in the crosshairs, all these little weirdos who will automatically get all of your Tweets parked into their little Slack chats for spying on naughty tweeters. And so I just think it’s got a lot to do with the fact that I was once a leftist or left-adjacent, I think once you’re in their crosshairs it’s very hard to step out of them.
Inez Stepman:
To be released from your personal living hell.
Aimee Terese:
Seriously, it’s so dumb, it’s so dumb. I never say anything that actually violates the rules, but we know that’s now how it works anyway, so whatever.
Inez Stepman:
Actually one of the things that’s remarkable about you for somebody who did come over from the left is that you don’t seem to have this, to me, very obnoxious tic that a lot of people in the center-left, or like IDW sort of connected space, or even some of the former dirtbag leftists or whatever, they have this sort of inability to prevent themselves from separating from the really bad people. I think the quintessential thing of this genre was that free speech letter signed by a bunch of people, including like Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose work I really like.
Aimee Terese:
Oh yes, yeah, yeah, that one.
Inez Stepman:
But you know, it spent three-quarters of the letter denouncing Trump. And we’re like, “We know the left isn’t this bad, but it’s still bad, right?” And you don’t have any of that impulse, why do you think you don’t submit to that?
Aimee Terese:
Oh, yeah, no, those people want leftism to be its best self, like they want better leftism. They want it without the excesses, without the parts that make it a little bit gauche, the parts that are a little bit too far. I’m under no illusions, I think that that kind of going too far and then having sort of moderate leftists pretend that leftism itself is salvageable, and good, and noble. But they just went a little bit too far this time. I think that’s sort of the prevailing ethos with a lot of those people, but I think it’s all kind of one and the same. I find that sort of lily-livered, unwilling… Like a total unwillingness to just defend a principle on the basis of the principle, irrespective of who you happen to find in your camp as a result.
That to me is just ridiculous, you don’t need to degrade anyone, or put anyone down, or mark out who the bad people are to defend something as basic as freedom of expression. Like you don’t need to sort of have this brownie point system where it’s like, “Oh, you can defend free speech, but only if you spend half the thing denouncing the naughty people on the right” or whatever. It’s just like, it’s stupid, the whole point of something like freedom of expression is that it needs to be to a large extent content-independent, and you want to be defending the speech of the people that you find most obnoxious, not like parsing out whether someone’s gone a little bit too far to be granted their freedom of expression.
It’s just like all this middling nonsense, like no, just back the principle and then it’s easy, then you don’t have to worry about parsing out all these silly little situations or people or whatever.
Inez Stepman:
What happened to the left after Bernie’s failure? Because you’re saying like, there’s not… It seems like a lot of people went down this path of, they had some critiques of the rising part of the left, which is, I don’t want to use the word woke only because I keep repeating it on this podcast. But I use the word woke because there’s no better word, but it’s so imprecise that it bothers me every time, and I feel like…
Aimee Terese:
Yeah, I know that feeling. I have the same reservation about [inaudible 00:06:09].
Inez Stepman:
But there’s just no better word for it.
Aimee Terese:
Totally.
Inez Stepman:
There were a lot of folks in that position in 2016 who, it seems like in 2015 a lot of them saw the problems, especially class-based problems with the direction of the left. When Bernie sort of took a run at the crown and failed they just completely folded on a lot of their objections, and it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a dissent anymore. Like even some of those figures like Bernie himself or even whatever, it seems like they’ve just changed their positions to be in line with the dominant woke left and not… I don’t know, how much resistance do you think there even is to any of this in any substantive form on the left?
Aimee Terese:
I think the left is like in the most sort of conformist… Actually very, very rigid political orientation, and there is no dissent, there is nobody that is allowed to disagree on anything. And they have this totalizing kind of set of policing mechanisms that sort of act laterally and horizontally that keep everyone in line. And I think a huge part of what made my account sort of grow and people take notice of me during primary, the Democrat primary in 2019-2020, is that I was the only one saying the bleeding obvious in terms of the fact that post-Bernie, and Elizabeth Warren, we’re competing for the same factions of voters, and we’re also running on a fairly similar left, sort of progressive, like somewhat economic populist sort of platform.
And the fact is that they can’t both be the nominee, and so it’s kind of ridiculous that they’re going throughout the primary refusing to criticize one another, this is crazy to me. And I was saying the whole time like, “Liz Warren is going to eat Bernie’s lunch,” like, “I don’t understand why you’re all ignoring her, this is so obvious, what’s wrong with you?” Anyway, they all called me crazy for the better part of a year, tried to de-platform me. And then it turns out that yep, that’s exactly what happened. Liz Warren went from like a 5% at the very beginning of the primary to like 32% or whatever, and she also shivved Bernie in terms of like calling him sexist and all that type of absolute nonsense.
And I just think that ultimately the way… What looks like internal competition within the party, and sort of… It really does look like dissent, and it looks like [inaudible 00:09:19] vibrancy within the party is actually just sort of like mutually constitutive factions of the same kind of electoral machine. Because the way I sort of look at it is that Sanders never criticized Warren, not even one time throughout the primary, and that to me is crazy. So they weren’t competing, what they were doing is attracting the votes of slightly different factions of the Democrat base. And then what that means is that even when they drop out of the actual race, they’ll then sheepdog their specific portion of the base into voting for Joe Biden in the general.
And I think that actually it’s like, it’s a very team-oriented thing, even though it seems like there’s a lot of competition in the party. Do you remember a couple years ago on, I think it’s just after Super Tuesday where they basically all dropped out in rapid succession to give Biden the ground?
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I remember that.
Aimee Terese:
Yeah. I think that purpose was that Bernie would be able to collect this massive faction of basically Millennials that someone like a Joe Biden could never energize, but once Bernie, and the sort of influencers, and the people that are in the Bernie world, once they got all their people sort of excited throughout the primary then it was only a hop, skip and a jump to get them to follow through to the general. Whereas if Sanders didn’t run, then none of those Millennials would have given a shit about that primary really.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, he’s given them a reason now with student loan forgiveness, I really think that’s like the [inaudible 00:11:16] for Democrats being able to turn out young voters in the midterms, is really just a direct bribe in some sense.
Aimee Terese:
Yes, it literally is. And it’s so funny, because I would argue with them about this, and it turned out to be such an obvious tell. Because on the one hand these people are pushing so-called working-class politics, and I did some pretty basic calculations. And it’s not rocket science, this is blatantly a wealth transfer from the lower-middle class to the upper-upper-middle class, and that to me is repulsive. Like, if you’re pretending that what you’re doing is something that’s meant to be sort of like for the average Joe, why should a mechanic be paying for Nathan Robinson’s third Ivy League degree? That’s crazy. That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I like about how you think about these issues is that you were one of the best parsers, I think, of power, and sort of power dynamics in sort of concert with psychology, right?
Aimee Terese:
Oh, thanks.
Inez Stepman:
So the way you just described the primary, which is like, “Okay, this is a sort of false competition in order to psychologically invest young voters who-
Aimee Terese:
Yeah, that’s it, yeah.
Inez Stepman:
“… have certain leftist impulses,” you’re really good at parsing that.
Aimee Terese:
Thanks.
Inez Stepman:
This is something I think is just like a huge deficit on the right, we don’t think about power, and we don’t think about psychology almost at all I feel like. And there’s some exceptions obviously, but…
Aimee Terese:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that’s changing, I think there’s kind of [inaudible 00:13:03] who are like much better at that than some of the sort of old hat types.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, there are definitely exceptions, and more and more. But it’s so powerful because it’s a good way of looking at the world. Because one of the things that really kind of, I don’t know, cemented in my head that the way that you’re looking at these things is almost always correct, was the AOC trauma kind of incident where she was talking about how she was sexually assaulted, and therefore this was traumatizing her. But she’s a person in a position of power, essentially victimizing herself, or passing herself as a victim of people who don’t have anywhere near her level of power.
Aimee Terese:
Yeah, I find it so disturbing. It’s just like, incredibly popular tendency very much on the left, but I imagine it won’t stay confined to the left, nothing ever does. Where it’s like, these people in positions of very real power who traditionally, the obligation that they have in view of the position that they’re in is to exercise their power responsibly, to perform a public duty, or public service, or whatever their job may be. But there’s so many of these people who just spend much of their time in public life crying, and pretending to be victims, and acting as if they’re oppressed when they’re in positions of real power. And I think that’s just such an alarming asymmetry, because if you as a person in power are [inaudible 00:15:00] to be powerless and victimized, how do we hold you accountable for the power that you wield?
Because when you are wielding power, if anyone tries to hold you accountable you start crying and pretending that the person is sexist or racist or whatever. It’s just like this totally Teflon inability to hold someone accountable, if that’s the way they’re going to conduct themselves. It’s crazy to me.
Inez Stepman:
Do you think that… I mean, it seems to be a really successful mode of politics, right? The success of AOC in the Democratic Party, but I think you’re right, there’s no way this is going to be confined just to the left. Eventually what works will be adopted, but I mean, what are the consequences of politics where the people in power are able to cast themselves as victims of… Let’s say in a democracy, representatives are able to cast themselves as victims traumatized by voters?
Aimee Terese:
Well, I think first of all it allows them to basically act as if their opponents in the House are actually not just enemies of the Democratic Party but enemies of humanity, and whatever it is that they stand for is actually metaphysically evil, and the battle is not against Josh Hawley of Missouri, it’s against these Confederate white men who are damaging our democracy or whatever. They just basically cast everything, these totally Marvel Cinematic Universe terms with these incredibly binary comic book villains and heroes, and this sort of thing. And I don’t know, I think it does sort of have some troubling implications if the people who… I mean, I think it has really troubling implications if you can sort of conflate your political opponents with these sort of metaphysical forms of evil, and act as if… There are these incredibly grand narratives to which you’re just this damsel in distress, and anything that your opponent does is just totally not just like mobilizing sort of opposition to you, but mobilizing something illegitimate against all people like yourself, if that makes sense. So I remember a couple of years ago in relation to AOC, there was that time where I believe it was Ted Yoho called AOC a bitch on the stairs outside Congress. Which is, obviously that’s not an appropriate thing to call one of your colleagues, it’s a momentary slip, you fucked up.
You should not speak to colleagues that way, I don’t care what sex or gender or whatever they are, it’s just rude and unnecessary and he should have said sorry. Like, he made a mistake, which is… These things happen. But it sort of stunned me at least that this is with whom AOC works on a day-to-day basis, and rather than sort of giving him any kind of dignity, allowing him to say sorry, allowing him to sort of attempt to make up for doing something wrong, she had to pounce on it immediately and commodify it into this massive speech wherein she could sort of tie the sort of emotions of everyone in the country, every woman in the country, like just every girlboss in the country. She could sort of like recruit all of their emotions, all of their sort of animosity towards men, all of their sort of like, “Yeah, girl power,” or whatever, whatever.
And just turn it into this ongoing sort of speech that she could sort of build this sort of victim capital from. And it’s just like, I don’t know, I can imagine that that’s not the kind of environment in which people are going to be capable of working together. It’s just like, anything you do can be blown up instantly into just this trauma credibility rather than just sort of giving someone a chance to say sorry, having a bit of humility, giving someone a chance. At the end of the day, again, I’m not excusing that. But you probably have antagonized your colleagues pretty badly to get a fellow House member to call you a bitch, which again, doesn’t justify it. But the inability to sort of look at your own behavior in any way and just instantly do this whole binary victim antagonist nonsense, it just seems to me so antithetical to actually getting anything done for anyone other than yourself. It just seems such a promotional, car seller move, as opposed to being something that actually does anything for anyone else.
Inez Stepman:
Okay, you know, Yuval Levin has made this point in like a much less sort of internal, psychological way, about how institutions are just platforms for individuals now. Like, there is no sense of accountability, responsibility, subsuming yourself to an office, or like any way through which you could actually responsibly wield power and be held accountable for the decisions that you make. That’s all sort of done, right? It’s now like, Congress is now a platform for AOC, and this guy losing his cool with her over some unrelated thing is now her next platform to make herself-
Aimee Terese:
Yeah, to leverage off, yeah.
Inez Stepman:
… a victim, and to take all the… Ironically to sort of sap in all that power that comes with that. Because as you say, it’s just identifying herself with this very much larger group, and every woman who’s ever been done wrong by a man, you know what I mean?
Aimee Terese:
Mm-hmm.
Inez Stepman:
It has nothing to do… They were probably arguing over whether the government should do X or Y, right?
Aimee Terese:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
That should not be a matter of sort of psychological terrorism.
Aimee Terese:
It’s got nothing to do with gender. Like, she was being a bitch, and he shouldn’t have called her a bitch, but she was being a bitch. Maybe she could think about her own behavior, like you have to… For one of your colleagues to call you a name like that, you have to have done something to be bloody annoying. And sure, they’re still in the wrong, they still shouldn’t do that. But have enough humility and grace to be willing to sort of recognize that if someone’s getting mad or really frustrated, you’ve done whatever it is to frustrate them. Try to treat other people with decency, instead of just looking at them as like a potential commodity, a potential moment that you can leverage into yeah, even more of this victimhood capital.
Inez Stepman:
Yep. Well the worst part about it is that it makes the exercise of power covert, right?
Aimee Terese:
Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Inez Stepman:
It completely eliminates… In some sense it’s better, even if there are for example tyrannical laws being passed, it’s kind of clear and in the open. And I do think that bureaucracy and technocracy have a lot to do with sort of obscuring the sources of power, but just on a pure individual and sort of again psychological level, it’s like this gaslighting thing where somebody’s exercising power over you, but they’re saying like, “Ow, ow, you’re hurting me,” right? It’s obviously-
Aimee Terese:
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Inez Stepman:
… way worse, I don’t remember which congressman this was, but it was obviously way worse for him to have like this episode blasted out to the world than it was for her to hear him call her that.
Aimee Terese:
Oh, it’s so humiliating, it’s so unnecessary. It was so unnecessary for her to do that, like it just was… It seemed to me such a tyrannical, manipulative and unnecessary abuse of power. Like your colleague made a mistake, he fucked up, you don’t need to humiliate him, you don’t need to do this, just stop. And the other thing that was crazy is that this is during the pandemic, and part of the genesis of the argument had been something to do with some kind of feeding… Maybe it was a school lunch program, or something to do with some kind of charitable food project, some kind, whatever. This congressman, Ted Yoho, had actually been on the board of a charity that did some kind of… I can’t remember, it was like feeding homeless people or something to do with homeless youth, something like this.
He’d been on the board of that charity for like 20 years, and had done a lot of work with… Actually put his money where his mouth is, and was being like a good citizen. And that particular charity fired him from the board because of the dishonor associated with his calling AOC a name.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, is there any way to actually stop this kind of sort of jujitsu from constantly happening? Because it seems like-
Aimee Terese:
Yes, yes, you have to-
Inez Stepman:
… whoever does this holds the [inaudible 00:25:53].
Aimee Terese:
You have to laugh at these people, they need to be mocked to their face immediately, because they’re always lying. And the moment that somebody is prepared to laugh at it instead of giving it any reverence, then it collapses. Like these people aren’t [inaudible 00:26:11] they should be laughed at. And I think the incredibly conspicuous increase in the amount of policing of comedy that has gone on over the last few years is not an accident, I think so much of this nonsense is so pompous, ridiculous, and all it takes is somebody sort of mocking it, even just slightly, and it falls apart. And that’s why these people need to silence everyone that criticizes them and anyone who calls anything into question.
By the same token, part of sort of what started my getting exiled from the left eventually was like when MeToo happened. It was so obvious to me instantly that this wasn’t some kind of anti-oppression movement, it was like for the streets, like some kind of oppressed group fighting for their rights or whatever. This is just like angry career women who are just spitefully lashing out at men that had jobs they wanted. I know that there were a couple at the outset that had real merit, and I don’t want to pretend it’s all… Who was the first one? Weinstein was obviously awful, and there were a few others. But it sort of got to a point where it [inaudible 00:27:42] rolling witch hunt that went on and on and on and on forever.
It’s just like, well it’s pretty clear what’s going on here, is that any enterprising young woman who wants to make a name for herself in New York liberal media just has to come along and cry about some middle-aged white guy who did something wrong one time, allegedly, and she’ll have like a golden ticket handed to her. And that’s such a contemptible and illegitimate way to… You shouldn’t be rewarding things like that. If it is actually assault, that’s awful and I’m so sorry, but go to the police, or sue the person. You don’t go to the media and tell these salacious stories, that’s what you do when it doesn’t pass muster with police or courts or anyone else. It’s so obvious that what they’re seeking from all of these things is just victim capital, like the ability to pretend to be somebody who’s downtrodden, somebody who’s oppressed or whatever. So that they can berate people, and abuse their power, and demand things that they wouldn’t otherwise be granted.
Inez Stepman:
Do you think there are real instances of fragility in this? Because I go back and forth on this. So clearly somebody like AOC is very calculated about how she puts on this performance, right? It’s very clearly to advance her own profile and power. But especially the really younger set of Gen Z, [inaudible 00:29:28]-
Aimee Terese:
You know, I actually even think-
Inez Stepman:
… wondering if they’re that fragile for real.
Aimee Terese:
I think somebody like AOC actually ironically… Sure, the machine infrastructure, the party infrastructure around her is very deliberate, blah blah blah. But I think that people like AOC, she’s just like a glib narcissist. She’s actually relatively sincere, she believes her own bullshit, I think. I don’t think it’s as insincere as we would like to believe, I think it’s not as calculated. It’s not calculated as such, it’s that she… Basically people like her are always flying by the seat of their pants in terms of protecting their ego, that’s always the number one thing that they need to do. They need to sort of inflate their own ego with this grandiose rhetoric and bullshit, they need to get attention, and they need to sort of afford themselves some kind of like moral or political sort of power or entitlement.
They sort of have these fantasies, like grandiose fantasies of a kind of entitlement, and specialness, and uniqueness, and blah blah blah. But I don’t think she’s faking as such, I think she just has a very shallow commitment to the things that she says. So people like her will say something this week and then say the opposite in like three weeks’ time, and she won’t relate the two to each other, or feel as if she’s contradicted herself in any way. It’s like, she’s just seeking that sort of ego validation at all times. So that’s basically like the continuity throughout it.
Inez Stepman:
What is it about our society or about our culture that creates so many more of these kinds of people? Whether they’re narcissists, or-
Aimee Terese:
They’re [inaudible 00:31:40] psychos. I mean, this is just my sort of rough and tumble thesis. I think it is attachment difficulty, I think it is attachment problems, and kind of emotionally unavailable, or engulfing parents. I think that this sort of helicopter parenting and all that sort of obsessive planning of your kids’ life, and time, and extracurricular activities, all that nonsense. So sure, you seem like an attentive parent. But actually what most kids need for most of their childhood is sort of like space and time to play and explore things, and sort of grow and figure things out. They don’t need sort of like an incredibly regimented series of extracurriculars, and an inability to ever have any time away from mum or other people that are sort of telling them what to do.
Like, kids need to be able to play and explore and that sort of thing. And I think an inability to sort of explore the world on your own terms, in your own time, with other people your age, I think that does enormous damage to kids. And I also think that parents who are too focused on their own bullshit, and on imagining their child as an extension of their own ego rather than a small and growing person who will someday be independent of them. You really need to equip your kids to think for themselves and develop personality, and you need to validate them for them, not validate them for stupid achievements with school, whatever. I don’t know, I just think that there’s a lot of objectification that goes on, like parents will sort of reward and punish their children according to their ability to kind of live up to mum or dad’s fantasies rather than sort of giving your kids a space to sort of become people in their own right.
And I think that does incredible damage, because if you don’t have very healthy [inaudible 00:34:22] as a kid, if you feel like you need to constantly protect yourself from shame, or fear, or danger in the home, whether it be emotional danger or actual physical violence, whatever, whatever. If you don’t get really secure… If you don’t have very secure attachment to your primary caregivers, that just plays out in a million retarded ways later on in life. It means that you’re constantly going to be looking for this shallow ego validation rather than having the ability to sort of regulate your own emotions, and value certain things more than the sort of immediate gratification that ego validation provides.
Inez Stepman:
Well, I think another way of framing what you just said might be that there’s no status or reward for parents for… Just in the culture at large, for raising just a virtuous, stable person, right?
Aimee Terese:
Yeah.
Inez Stepman:
There’s no reward for character or virtue, like if you raise a solid human being who doesn’t do sort of amazing in school, or go to the best college, but grows up and gets a job, and works hard, and marries, and has children of their own, there’s no status, or reward, or at least not from the larger culture. That person is viewed as a failure, and you’re viewed as a failure as a parent in a lot of circles. I mean, I grew up in Palo Alto, and you’d be viewed as a failure for raising a child like that if he or she didn’t have a bunch of other academic or sort of financial or whatever achievements that go alongside of that. But it seems like that’s the most endangered kind of person now, is just raising…
If you have somebody who’s a wreck, like a narcissistic wreck who can’t form decent relationships, can’t take responsibility for their actions, can’t… That’s the failure, not somebody who didn’t go to Harvard. But there’s not a lot of recognition, especially in elite circles I think, of America. But what’s actually a failure as a parent is if you can’t launch your child into an independent and stable life, right?
Aimee Terese:
Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, I agree, I think there is… And I mean, I’m really apprehensive about how do you frame what I’m about to say. Because I do imagine that at every moment throughout history people attempted to sort of say, “Oh, there’s something quite novel happening in our particular moment in history.” So look, I’m aware that maybe it’s not novel, maybe it’s always been this way. But it does feel to me at least a lot like so many of the institutions in whether it be Australia or the United States, so many of the institutions of countries that I… I love Australia, I love the States too, been there a bunch. I actually like my country, I don’t want to feel as though all of the institutions that govern my country are basically rewarding this incredibly shameless, spineless, back-stabbing, sniping, horrible behavior, and will elevate the worst people on Earth for doing horrible things.
And will punish and shun and ostracize good and decent people with moral integrity. Again, [inaudible 00:38:13] living in the Ecuadorian Embassy or getting asylum in Russia or whatever, you know what I mean? It seems like an incredibly weird time where some of the most ridiculous people in society are being sort of propped up and given all these accolades. And I don’t know, I feel like at any point does this stop, or does it just keep getting sillier? Because it feels pretty silly. Like the last few years have felt very weird.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I mean… On the one hand it’s a comfort that things that can’t go on forever won’t. I don’t think you can continually be this silly, and-
Aimee Terese:
I think so too, I hope so. That sort of remains my fighting kind of… You know, yeah.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, but it’s not that much of a comfort because usually the way that those things end is by some other society coming in, and collapsing yours, and just taking over. Or in the case of the Soviet Union… You can stay silly a long time, right? And especially because America’s so rich, and Australia’s also like a very rich country by the standards of the world, right? If you’re really rich you can continue to be silly for a long time before everything comes crashing down. But it does feel that way, like even this week the FAA had to ground all the flights, they just screwed up on such a monumental level that they had to ground all flights in America for hours. And obviously this screwed up a ton of-
Aimee Terese:
No kidding.
Inez Stepman:
… [inaudible 00:39:54]. It seems like we can’t perform basic functions anymore.
Aimee Terese:
Right, yeah, it’s [inaudible 00:40:02].
Inez Stepman:
There’s just a pervasive sense that nothing works, that everything is broken, nothing actually functions.
Aimee Terese:
Yeah, like I’ve never been fully persuaded by that sort of singularity nonsense. But I do think there’s something to be said for the fact that as increased… Sort of as cognitive skills that most citizens in an educated Western country would have developed automatically in the 20th century, these sort of… We no longer develop them because we can sort of outsource them to the iPhone in our pocket or whatever, and apply that to a whole bunch of other forms of technology that basically do a whole bunch of things for us that previously we would have had to do for ourselves. Like, it does seem rather sort of strange to me at least. Increasingly I realized how so many of my Millennial peers literally cannot do basic math.
They can’t spell, they can’t do sort of like problem solving, like basic sort of lateral thinking, basic problem solving. And it seems to me that no matter how… To whatever extent technology can take over a bunch of different functions or things on behalf of us, there will still always be human beings running the systems. And if we don’t know how to think critically, or don’t have the balls to say, “Hang on, I think something is wrong here,” and be willing to stand up and say that like the moment when it’s salient rather than 2, 6, 12 months later, I don’t know, it seems like these fairly basic ideas about what it means to be like a decent person, having some moral integrity, being honest, not being sort of like a backstabbing, disloyal rat.
It just seems crazy to me that all these very basic things seem to be sort of actively selected against in a lot of our institutions. It seems like that’s not something that is sustainable in any way.
Inez Stepman:
I was looking today that the AI singularity might be going the other way. I don’t know if this is like completely crazy, but-
Aimee Terese:
Just, everything crashing all the time.
Inez Stepman:
No, but that we’re becoming more like AI. I was watching, and this is reminiscent of some… I think it was in the New York Times maybe a year ago or something, but it was like, “How to break up with your friend,” or “How to tell your friend-“
Aimee Terese:
Oh my God, those bits, yes.
Inez Stepman:
“… that you don’t have any bandwidth for them right now, and you-“
Aimee Terese:
Oh my gosh, yes, that, yes.
Inez Stepman:
“… can’t handle it.” It’s like training people to speak to each other like AIs, and it ties back to the whole AOC thing where she just took that and turned it into a marketable sort of internet moment. But people are doing that, even people who don’t have the incentive for power or platform that AOC has. It’s like, [inaudible 00:43:09] in AI.
Aimee Terese:
It’s like, these people lack basic social skills, like they literally lack basic social and communicative skills. They don’t know how to ask for what they want, and to say yes, or turn something down when they don’t want something. That’s sort of again like, to throw back to MeToo, it seemed to me so much of the sort of crybaby discourse surrounding that sort of amounted to these pieces where women were effectively… Essentially felt confronted by the fact that midway through some kind of encounter they’d realize they didn’t want to go further, and rather than just sort of explicitly sort of calling it off, or leaving, they seemed to sort of get increasingly resentful as the other party, the guy, couldn’t read their mind.
It’s just like, “Honey, you need to be capable of disappointing somebody if you’re not interested in them.” Like, you can’t go along with somebody’s advances on you, and then sort of change your mind, and not communicate that, and then hold it against them. Like, you need to be capable of actually taking the initial… Like sort of being assertive, and being capable of sort of disappointing people sometimes too. It just seems so much of this is just like a sort of inability to, or unwillingness to sort of disappoint people and to say no in sort of basic social interactions. It’s just like-
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, but it’s a really good-
Aimee Terese:
… another one of those… The one that I saw, and I think you saw when I posted it, it’s like these girls who were writing these scripts by which men were allowed to talk to them in a bar. Like, a guy is supposed to come up and say like, “I’m so sorry if this is weird, but may I please flirt with you?” Stuff like this.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, it’s just it-
Aimee Terese:
“And I will leave right away if you are not interested.” It’s like, you don’t need to ask somebody that, you flirt with them and then they can turn you down, they can make it apparent that they’re not interested. It’s sort of like what social discourse is to these women, like set up all these insane hoops for people to jump through so that they don’t have to sort of reject someone, basically. It’s just like, “No honey, part of being an adult is that sometimes you have to disappoint other people if you’re not as interested in them as they are in you.” And that doesn’t feel good, and you should try to do it gently, and kindly, but that’s what it is to be an adult. You can’t just stay quiet, or pretend to be interested in someone, make out with them, and then sort of decide that you don’t want to do that anymore but not make that outwardly apparent to the other person.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, there’s such a good example of exactly what you’re talking about. There was one of these cases, a Title IX case on college campus, and this is several years ago, where a girl was hooking up with a guy, got completely naked, got into his bed, and then she accused him of sexually assaulting her when she was just like, “Oh, it felt less awkward to just let it continue.” Well I mean, sure, I mean, I bet it is pretty awkward once you’re naked and in bed with someone, [inaudible 00:46:51]-
Aimee Terese:
You are naked in his bed, is this a joke?
Inez Stepman:
… but that’s your job, you know? If you’re not into the interaction, either that or you have to live with it.
Aimee Terese:
But what did you think you were doing when you took your clothes off and got into his bed naked? This is a-
Inez Stepman:
I totally believe it’s more awkward to say no at that point, but still, that’s your… Women have a tremendous amount of power, I guess most guys are good men, and they certainly don’t want to force a woman against her will. But it’s your responsibility then to just tough it up and be awkward.
Aimee Terese:
No, they’re all psy-opped into that awful… Most guys, not even silly beta males or whatever, even just normal guys these days are so affirmative consenty. Just this idea of patriarchy rape culture is preposterous, definitely not the case. It is difficult though to change your mind in the midst of something, and then to sort of basically have to reckon with… It is a moral quandary, and you yourself have to decide like whether you’d rather suck it up and sort of do something that you don’t want to do, perceive a… Rather than sort of go through some kind of awkward situation in order to leave that environment or end that encounter. But that’s what it means to be a girl, you need to make decisions and reckon with the implications that flow from them. This is pretty basic stuff.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, so much of what you say is just basic, it’s things that would be readily accepted and obvious. Which, it’s funny why you keep getting banned for saying it. But these are things that would be accepted as obvious, I mean, even for sure 10 years ago, or maybe five years ago, right?
Aimee Terese:
Yeah, yeah. You say anything prudent, like I don’t know, “Maybe don’t get like shitfaced drunk when going out, or make sure that you sort of don’t put yourself into situations that are sort of dangerous, or where you’ll be vulnerable, or where your decision-making capacity is sort of compromised below a level that you can feel good about. These sorts of things that are just like sensible advice, obviously, are so quickly framed as like, “Oh, you’re victim blaming, you’re a rape apologist.” It’s like, nobody thinks that rape is okay, and if they actually think that they’re not the ones talking about this particular issue. They’ll stay quiet about it because they know that they’re the outlier, do you know what I mean?
It’s like, all this sort of nonsense, Orwellian language policing, and binary framing of things. But is it impossible to just be sensible and normal in the way that you talk about certain things? And it just has all these toxic flow on effects, I don’t know. I’m quite troubled by some of the Title IX stuff, especially there were a few years ago certain cases are starting to basically move from the sort of kangaroo courts set up on the universities through to being actually litigated in courts of law. And it just seems like a terrible thing to me, that totally non-transparent, shadowy sort of process that takes place on the universities. For that to then be transported into the proper adversary legal system, it’s pretty troubling.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, fortunately still in the legal system, there’s been a lot of successes of mostly men who have sued in the federal courts, and-
Aimee Terese:
Yes, that’s good.
Inez Stepman:
… won under denial of due process. But it all operates I mean very much in what you’ve described as covert power, it all operates in a space between the formal courts and the sort of court of public opinion, where it’s kind of like being accused of a crime but not really. And so therefore they can hide behind the notion that, oh, actually nothing’s really happening to you if you’re-
Aimee Terese:
Yeah, nothing’s happening [inaudible 00:51:05] you’re just imagining things.
Inez Stepman:
… smeared in the public as a rapist, you know? They pretend that basically they’re not doing anything to you, all the while you get expelled from school, you lose your ability to get a job, your entire social circle is pretty much required to shun you right? And all the while there’s these people saying, “Well, we’re not doing anything to you, because you’re not going to jail,” right?
Aimee Terese:
Of course you are, it’s a social death, you’re destroying somebody, destroying somebody’s reputation is like a heinous thing to do. And that again with the sort of media, and the women doing these sort of traumatized crybaby nonsense. It’s like, we have court of law for a reason, that’s because it preserves the presumption of innocence. Like whatever sort of claims you’re making should be subject to rule of evidence. Like, I don’t want the fucking BuzzFeed intern to be the person who decides whether or not this seems like a legitimate case, you know what I mean? It’s like, anyone could sell kind of a story arc. But that’s not how we do things in a decent society. Even if you hate men, all these men that you accuse illegitimately of sexual assault and whose lives you destroyed, they have mothers, and daughters, and wives, and sisters.
The impact of this shit is massive, and it just seems really brutal that these women could do that kind of thing in such a cavalier manner, and all these sort of legacy media outlets, and then some of the online ones too. They’ll all just go along with it and sort of yell and shriek at anyone who dares question anything, or dares even question sort of the internal logic of the quote unquote, “Movement.” It’s like, I’m not even calling any specific person a liar, it’s just that any system that would involve airing accusations against specific people through a sort of mediatized discourse that has very real rewards for the person casting the accusations, very real cost for the accused, and then basically no procedural fairness, no due process, nothing.
It just seems like a terrible thing to want to kind of normalize, like you should want to kind of reject that way of doing quote unquote, “Justice.” Even if it’s in the public square you should want it to be not brutal like that. I don’t know, I’ve dealt with… I think most women have either had some kind of traumatic sexual assault experience, or may know a friend, or a friend of a friend who has. This is not something entirely remote to all of us, and that’s why it seems to me like it’s incumbent on us to not whittle those really… That it’s really serious to make claims of sexual assault against somebody, that’s not something you should do flippantly. And again, in my personal experience the desire to want to go to the media and expose all this nonsense to the media just seems to me like antithetical to what people who’ve actually reckoned with any kind of brutal assault… People want to deal with it and move on, they don’t want to go and sort of bask in the limelight of all these stupid liberal papers or outlets or whatever.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I feel like the circle has come back here, I’m going to let you go in a minute since our hour is up. But I really feel like the theme of everything you’ve said, and I could add a bunch of other examples not just in the sexual assault context, but I mean, even Yoel Roth at Twitter, right? Or the group [inaudible 00:55:23] are focused on making sure that Aimee Terese doesn’t get to say these things, right? It’s an exercise of power completely outside of democratic or even any other kind of accountability here.
Aimee Terese:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And it’s like, I mean, even to some extent the sort of old school libertarianism of a kind, especially even people like… I don’t know if you know the psychologist Thomas Szasz? Even libertarian [inaudible 00:55:58] in the 20th Century people who didn’t want sort of overbearing state control, blah blah blah, like regulation et cetera, they had like a sense of personal propriety. Sure, they may not want this over-weaning nanny state, but by the same token they knew that meant you had to exercise responsibility for yourself and sort of be a decent human being in sort of the public square in order for that to be a functional system. Whereas it just seems now that it just, no matter where a lot of these people sort of land on the…
Anywhere from like the liberal to far left, whatever, there just seems to be a total hostility or just rejection of any kind of sense of transcendent moral principles of any kind. It just seems like everything’s relative, like do whatever you want, the ends justify the means. Just, yeah, I don’t know, I really hope that that’s something that can start to shift in the forthcoming years. Because that seems to me like a pretty scary, scary prospect if it goes on the way it’s going.
Inez Stepman:
Well, people can get more of Aimee Terese by… I mean, I would say following her on Twitter, except she has a Substack, “A Spectre Haunting Leftism,” which is an appropriate name. So you can subscribe to her thoughts over there, hopefully she’ll be back on Twitter soon. She seems to be caught in a constant… She’s like Schrodinger’s Twitter account, you know? Constantly caught in between.
Aimee Terese:
Yeah, I’ll be back, don’t worry. It’s’ never permanent.
Inez Stepman:
And then you can catch her podcast when it does launch. Do you have any idea when that might launch?
Aimee Terese:
Yeah, my co-host is going overseas during February, so probably March, early March.
Inez Stepman:
So you can catch her there finally, and hopefully she won’t get banned from Apple Podcasts immediately.
Aimee Terese:
Oh yeah, no, I’ve remained safe on most other platforms, so they haven’t given me the full Alex Jones treatment yet. So fingers crossed.
Inez Stepman:
Well, thank you. You’ll never get that treatment here, so thanks, thanks for coming on Aimee.
Aimee Terese:
Oh, thank you. Oh, my pleasure, thank you for having me.
