On the 100th episode of High Noon, Emily Jashinsky is back on the pod to take a step back and think about some of the news items that have been firehosing the media for the last month. Emily and Inez discuss some of the positive and negative possibilities regarding Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News and what it might do to the media landscape. They also dive back into the uncynical world of the early 2000s, and wonder whether the same limitless impulse that put Americans on the moon and led MLK Jr. to his optimism about the “arc of history” bending towards justice might have met its end with the now-obvious naïveté of George W. Bush’s failed crusade to rid all cultures around the world of tyranny. Finally, the ladies make an attempt to have a real discussion — not another circular fight about gun control and “mental health” — about the school shooting phenomenon, why this particular outlet for “American Devils” is the curse of our particular couple decades, and what, if anything, can actually be done about it.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people, and at the end of every month, we do a wrap up episode for the month with Emily Jashinsky, culture editor over at the Federalist, senior fellow with us here at IWF, and also with YAF, teaching conservative journalists how not to get arrested. And she has a show over at Crystal and Saagar’s Breaking Points. It’s called Counterpoints, and it’s now on Wednesdays over there. So you probably catch Emily’s work. So she wears 20 million hats. This is her 21st million hat or I should say this hat is not worth a million hats in itself. So it’s a numbers game, but I feel like there has been so much that’s happened since the last time we talked, and I was just going back and checking because it feels like a lifetime ago.
Last time we did one of these episodes, Emily, Trump had not yet been arrested. He had been making noise on Truth Social about how he was potentially going to get arrested, and we thought that that was a political shell game, and turns out he actually did get arrested. So that happened. There’s a civil lawsuit in New York against him as well. Indictments likely to come in other states. And then on top of that, we have a major free speech case with Douglas Mackey, AKA Ricky Vaughn, getting convicted of essentially under a statute that prevents election interference for posting a meme, which is huge news in terms of free speech and the kind of hard tyranny that we have mostly thus far been able to avert with the First Amendment that’s specifically coming from government rather than collusion with private sector businesses. All of that to say, and then today, we’re recording on Monday, we have the double resignation or parting ways between Tucker Carlson and Fox News, and then Don Lemon over at MSNBC.
So I guess there’s a huge hodgepodge if you want to jump in anywhere. Oh, and Mitch McConnell, rumors about Mitch McConnell finally perhaps retiring. So all that hodgepodge of news, some of it quite old, several weeks old. But let’s start with the Tucker leaving Fox thing, which is breaking right now. What is your take on all of that? And then if you want to throw in stuff about the Trump arrests, we’ve talked about it on other platforms. That feels like a year ago. It’s unbelievable.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. Your recap of the last month just now is somewhat mind-blowing. It made me stressed to listen just to you running through everything that’s happened in the last month and just the last day, as you said, head of NBC Universal and Comcast also out, Don Lemon, Tucker Carlson, all in the span of 24 hours. And Tucker, everybody on the right has an opinion on this, and we don’t have all the information as we’re recording this right now, obviously because we’re in the very, very early hours of trying to understand what’s happened. The Fox spin machine has been saying that this had something to do… Los Angeles Times article was already out saying that this may have had something to do with a lawsuit that was filed by a former Fox staffer last week alleging antisemitism and sexism, and that, just combined with everything, made Fox and Tucker part ways.
We still don’t have any clarity on whether Fox initiated that or Tucker initiated that after realizing that things were untenable. There have also been some indications, perhaps it was because of leaked… Not leaked, but things that came out in discovery that Tucker Carlson had said about Fox management during the Dominion lawsuit. All that is to say, what we know is that what we already knew, basically, Tucker Carlson and Fox management doesn’t get along spectacularly well. They really never have, and they shouldn’t, frankly, a news division should never get along very well with the business division. That’s normal. A tale as old as time, but if Tucker Carlson was pushed out of Fox News, which we don’t know, but if he was, if that’s the case, they are, I think really moving in a bad direction.
Tucker obviously gave the address at Heritage’s 50th anniversary just a couple of days ago, and as I’m sure you’ve seen some stuff from this where he said… I just watched the whole thing, and one of the moments that struck me is when Kevin Roberts turned to him and said, “What do you think the biggest thing is over the last [inaudible 00:04:57] or time you want to choose? What is the biggest change?” And Tucker said, “The control of information.” It’s eerie in expressions that that was his answer. The control of information that it has, instead of being democratized, it’s been duopolized basically. It is totally just creepy almost to hear just a couple of days ago, not just from a business perspective, it’s silly on Fox’s behalf, but also just from a moral one.
I don’t know. We’re going to learn more about it, but I think it’s a really big loss. I think whatever he does on an independent basis, if he does do something on an independent basis or if maybe he works with Sirius XM like Megan Kelly has done, will be a runaway success. But there’s something really important about having specifically on Fox News, a populous voice, a sharp critic of the Republican Party, that will make the network less entertaining, but I think also less representative of a huge swath of the American public.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I agree with all of that. And equally, like you, don’t have any inside information about why this took place or the specifics. Had the understanding going in that there were some tensions between Tucker Carlson and the business guys and the top guys over at Fox. There’s also this whole succession style drama between… There’s a wing of the Murdoch family that wants to go in one direction and a wing that wants to go in a different direction. So that’s all background to this, but I was still really shocked by this, the fact that… He has the biggest show on cable news, and you would think that that alone would be able to give him the kind of autonomy that he wanted at a place like Fox, and apparently not.
And even though we don’t know exactly how that went down, I could add to your list of possibilities that, after the Dominion lawsuit, maybe they wanted him to say something on air and he wouldn’t. That’s another possibility of… And then of course, we don’t know what kind of contract he has, and there’s a really dicey existence of some of these contracts, these non-compete contracts. They do bump up against the First Amendment sometimes. So I don’t know how this is all going to shake out, but what I wanted to ask you about it, specifically, because you have written for, I think much before, a lot of people, I remember you writing about this five, six, seven years ago already, that independent media is potentially going to at some point eclipse the traditional media.
And my question is, if Tucker decides to go independent, which he could obviously join a bunch of different networks, but it’s not clear to me what mainstream corporate legacy media outlet would necessarily hire him. He could get hired anywhere on the right in these smaller networks, Daily Wire, OneAmerica, Newsmax, I’m sure they’re all looking at their bank accounts and seeing what they could offer. The Blaze has already made a public offer to Tucker. So I’m sure everybody would like on the right, in that ecosystem, would love to have Tucker, but I’m not sure that there would be another mainstream legacy corporate media outlet that would have him.
And the question is if he goes to one of these alternative sites or he goes independent and does it like the Megan Kelly podcast direction, how does that shake up structurally the… I guess how does it shake up the structure of media that we currently have? Because where you have this bleeding away from the mainstream networks and the success of independent networks, but this is a huge personality, the equivalent of Trump leaving Twitter and going to Truth Social or whatever, except potentially successful in a way that that act was not successful. Anything that Tucker starts will instantly be one of the most successful ventures in news, right?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, absolutely. And I do have some insight into this just from the Breaking Points vantage point… Breaking Points vantage point, oh, I didn’t mean to do that, but it’s important to remember that, I think, it’s really actually a lot easier to do all of this now from an independent perspective. Even the production quality of cable television can be replicated without the budget of cable television because a lot of this stuff is just frankly cheaper and easier. And so I think Tucker Carlson, if he wanted to, could… I mean, look what Glenn Greenwald’s doing on Rumble; it’s insane. His production quality is [inaudible 00:09:55]. His audience probably might not be the same as all of cable, and it’s definitely not, but it’s growing.
And so the stuff can be done in a way that it just never has been doable in the past. It’s the same thing with what Bari Weiss is doing on Substack. That’s something that is going to rival the reporting, and already has, of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. And so I think that process is in motion and if Tucker Carlson is collateral, I’m sure he’s more than happy to be that collateral damage because the process is a righteous one. And that doesn’t mean people won’t make mistakes along the way, and it doesn’t mean that these companies that have enormous power — we were talking about NBC Universal Comcast earlier, Disney, they own everything. But at a certain point, why is Bud Light freaking out and trying to get Gen Z to drink its beer? Well, because Gen Z isn’t drinking its beer. It’s not entirely different with traditional media. People don’t have the same muscle memory that was passed down from generations previously because there’s just so much more choice that’s exploded since the iPhone and social media. In about 2007, the world changed dramatically.
So it’s not just like MTV. It’s totally different than MTV arriving on the scene. It’s like there is no parallel, essentially. So this process is very much in motion. It’s going to sputter, it’s going to stop and start, and legacy media will try… Oh my gosh, wouldn’t it be wild if they swapped out Don Lemon for Tucker Carlson over at CNN? Tucker worked at CNN for a very long time. He is probably in the past best known for his work at CNN, but they’re not going to do that for some of the same reasons that I assume Fox no longer thinks it’s safe for their brand to be attached to Tucker Carlson, I imagine. And by the way, it should be noted there were massive advertiser boycotts that were organized by the left.
Inez Stepman:
That’s exactly the point. That’s exactly the point I was going to bring up is maybe the power of having the largest audience in cable news is substantially depleted within a media corporation like that. There’s a limit on the number of advertiser dollars you can get because of this kind of cultural boycotting, that probably does play into, at least some degree, these kinds of decisions that they’re making. Even though he has the best audience, he may not be bringing in the most actual revenue dollars. And that’s another thing that’s important about the independent model, that it isn’t as reliant on those advertisers who are somewhat easily pressured.
And you brought up another thing. So just all the stuff that’s happened this month is insane. So of course, we’ve had the Bud Light controversy and the blowback and substantial loss to their bottom line, and then we had the entire NATO leak episode. We had this guy in a [inaudible 00:13:10] leaking majorly classified and important documents, and then the media not covering a lot, extensively covering the way that they should have what was actually in those documents and essentially leading a witch hunt to find the leaker. They got to him before the FBI did. The Washington Post and The New York Times got to Sherra before the FBI did and before…
So all of that to say, and actually, to tie this all together, one of the things that potentially goes into this Tucker thing is he is apparently one of the few people who did uncritically broadcast the troop numbers and the casualty numbers that were in those documents. That was apparently the only part that was very clearly doctored. So that is some likely Russian propaganda attempt. They basically escalated the numbers of Ukrainian dead and underestimated the numbers of Russian dead. Lots of other important stuff in those leaks, including the line, the red line that U.S. intelligence service thinks will precipitate China’s involvement directly in that war; Zelensky being willing to strike deeper into Russia if he had the capabilities, which shed a lot of light, as I keep saying, I think in different platforms on… We had this whole conversation three or four months ago about offensive weapons versus defensive weapons. What does that mean? What’s the range? And it seemed like a highly technical conversation, but apparently it is a critical aspect of how we involve ourself in the war there and how far we want to push China on the flip side.
There’s the down plane in Belarus. There’s some unrelated things that are really fascinating, that apparently 5G is interfering generally, civilian 5G is interfering with military communications. What else is in there? Man, I feel like it’s a fire hose. I know that it sounds like listening to a fire hose to listen to us right now, but it has been a fire hose for the last month.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, I mean it’s crazy to just think about all of that. And the point, actually, the common thread through everything is what Tucker just told Kevin Roberts, that essentially the one thing that’s changed, and I think this is completely accurate, the biggest problem right now in the United States of America is the media. And because that’s such a huge problem, because there’s such a demand in the market, there are new products and alternatives that are being offered to the extent that they’re able to be offered, yes, that’s happening, but without the media blockage, we would have so much less discord. We would have so much less confusion, and we would have so much less actual ignorance because of disinformation, if the media were honest about the reporting that it’s doing, if they were honest about the report coming from one direction or the other.
Tucker uncritically reporting the casualty numbers is interesting. Although Tucker has outright said where he comes from on the question of the war in Ukraine. And so people, viewers, are smart enough to already be weighing. We know that because we’re all viewers, we’re already always weighing people’s perspectives with the information that they’re giving us. And so if the media would trust each other, if they would trust all of us as Americans, the public, to just consume information and not have to lie to the public in order to achieve their preferred social outcome, then we would just be in immediately a better place because we would be starting from a place of honesty and accuracy.
And without that, there’s really nothing that you can talk about because people are talking past each other, and that’s what’s really sad about Tucker leaving. But then on the other side, maybe it’s a really huge boon to independent media. Maybe it is the final nail in the corporate media coffin. I’m not optimistic about that because I think corporate media is still incredibly powerful, especially because the vast majority of people who are watching corporate media or can pay for subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post, to the extent that that’s really propping up their business models right now, and it is, those are older people anyway that might not be making the transition to independent media. So there’s more patience and slowness that’s needed along the way, but if he lands on an independent — and creates an independent platform or lands on an independent platform, man, I still think it’s a real loss. He’s not someone that…. I don’t think it’s ideal. I think it’s always ideal to have somebody like Tucker Carlson, just an [inaudible 00:18:12] unashamed, unabashed populist who is willing to question his own priors, willing to question his own ideological sides priors on a so-called mainstream platform. I think that’s good. But I don’t hate him going to an independent platform and bringing more and more viewers away from that legacy bubble either. We’ll have to see what happens.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I feel like that’s why we’ve transitioned to this era where trust in individual people has become so important. And in the cheap commercial sense, that’s like the influencer phenomenon, where it turns out that it’s a better advertisement than rather than creating an advertisement and putting it on people’s social feeds where they really mistrust it. If somebody that they trust and follow already says, “Hey, I like this product,” that turns out to be a much more effective way to advertise to people who frankly are cynical and disconnected and feel like they’re always being pitched a line. Right?
But I think that’s true in news, too. In terms of transparency… I feel like people are very okay with their trusted media figures making mistakes because they’re being transparent about it. Here I’m thinking about Taibbi, he made some overall relatively minor errors in this reporting on the Twitter files. Then it became a big story. And of course, the media were writing about it as a bigger story than the actual content of the Twitter files. But the fact that Taibbi does come out and say, “Well, okay, I made these three errors. Here’s how I made them,” he actually doesn’t lose a ton of credibility.
And then when you turn around and point to the massive and important underlying errors that legacy media outlets have made, just start with the Trump Russia hoax and go from there, most of the major narratives for the four years of the Trump presidency were false. In material content, not in like ‘I ideologically disagree with them,’ but in actual factual and material content, they were false. So I think that is the direction more generally, and that makes this very different than, say… I don’t know. Thinking about back to Fox News firing Bill O’Reilly for totally different reasons, obviously, for more personal reasons not like what’s happening to Don Lemon, I think; that’s a very different story.
Very clearly, Bill O’Reilly was the best performing show on Fox, but he needed Fox more than Fox needed him. And I’m not saying that Fox needs Tucker more than Tucker needs Fox. I don’t know that yet, but it’s certainly a question now in a way that it wasn’t, say, 10 years ago.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. No, can you imagine having this conversation 10 years ago? This stuff didn’t happen, not to bring it back to Trump, but this stuff didn’t happen until the media bubble completely cracked. There were cracks in the foundation, but Donald Trump’s election was such a wake-up call for consumers, and then the next three years after the Mueller report lands, and it doesn’t have anything that people were being told breathlessly night after night was going to be in it, in it. That just completely explodes. And obviously this technology, like Young Turks dates back, I don’t know, 20 years now. There are people who have been doing new shows on YouTube for a really long time, and the blogosphere of the OTs obviously existed, but where is Ezra Klein now? He’s at The New York Times. Where are a lot of those other bloggers? Some of them are on Substack, but some of them were swallowed up by legacy media.
But just the fact that Substack right now, Rumble right now. These are serious businesses. They’re not jokes at this point. They’re serious businesses that are offering alternatives. And I just think, as silly as it might look now to compare Glenn on Rumble or what Tucker was doing on one hour of Fox News and to say that this is groundbreaking, no, it is the breaking of the ground. The ground might not be broken, but the ground is breaking. It’s in the process. And so we’re at the early stages of something that will necessarily be transformational because, in a world where everything is niche and there is no monoculture, because broadcast licenses are not just restricted to three people on radio and TV. In a world where you have to appeal to niche audiences, that means the bar to entry is lower.
And so as that splintering keeps on happening and happening, you’re going to have more competition, which maybe we should just rename this the Milton Friedman appreciation episode because that’s great. That’s exactly what we want.
Inez Stepman:
That’d be a little awkward for me since I wrote a critique of Milton Friedman fairly recently.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, a good one.
Inez Stepman:
So I was just thinking as you were saying that, and we’ll move on from this topic in just a minute because I feel like it might be more fascinating to us being part of this media thing than lots of people, but I do think as, to your point and the point that Tucker made at the Heritage Foundation gala, this is a key part of the fabric of how the regime we currently operate under works. And this is one thing that actually, I think, obviously there are lots of ways in which the Soviet Union was worse than our current situation — you’re never going to hear me say otherwise. I think it’s actually one way in some degree where the Soviet Union was weirdly better because nobody… Everyone knew that Pravda was full of garbage, [inaudible 00:24:13] something else. But at least by the time you get to the later part of the Soviet Union, it’s not like people are actually… They don’t actually trust their media.
Here, I do think we can get a false impression, especially in our demographic, about how many people really do still trust the media. They’re not completely broken and cynical. And so I think to the extent that that trust continues to break and splinter, I actually think that’s a really positive thing. If we can get to the place where the Soviet Union was about Pravda with regard to cable news and legacy media, I think that would be a positive thing overall. Even though there are, as Trump would say, many fine people.
Emily Jashinsky:
And many such cases.
Inez Stepman:
But yeah, Tucker’s already on site. I looked it up. It’s 3.5 million, which is huge for biggest most-watched show on cable news. Rogan has 11 million listeners in his audience right now. It’s not a perfect comparison because Rogan also interviews… It’s not just a news show, it’s not politics. People don’t listen…. There’s an inherent, and as you are always pointing out, there’s this huge gap between even the most-watched political shows and, whatever, BoJack Horseman, or the entertainment world is just posting much, much bigger numbers. And Rogan splits the baby there and is halfway in-between in both worlds.
So maybe it’s not a fair comparison, but still, I do feel like you can build an audience of millions in an independent way. And if anyone in the news business can do that, it’s Tucker.
Emily Jashinsky:
Oh, yeah. I have nothing to add to that, although except for those numbers. Yeah, it’s an apples-to-oranges as you were pointing out. I can’t imagine what Tucker would post if he was doing a weekly podcast. I think it would be competitive with Rogan immediately. And Megan Kelly actually was able to do that. It took her maybe a year to lay that groundwork and start building, but it just was pretty quickly super successful. And she was, obviously, of course, with Sirius XM. There are other companies. It’s not going to be CNN or MSNBC, but there are other companies that might latch onto Tucker. Sirius XM is one example. Obviously they have Howard Stern, even though he’s less controversial, but there’s something afoot. We’ve talked about the vibe shift before. There’s something afoot that will allow somebody to make a lot of money off of the great work that Tucker Carlson does, whether it’s just Tucker or anybody else is the question.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I think honestly, I would love to see him just start a television news network. He would actually be competitive, I think. I don’t know anything about starting a news network, so maybe that’s a crazy idea, but I would think that, actually, an alternative network anchored by Tucker and where he actually poaches some talent from all these other people…. It seems like if anyone could do that, it would be him. That would be an incredible way for this to end. This is very much my next topic. It’s very much in the same vein. There’s this Pew Research Center poll that shows numbers on… So it’s percentage who have a blank opinion of each federal agency. It’s favorable versus unfavorable, and it just lists a bunch of federal agencies. Some of them you would expect having this partisan divide, like the CDC versus… is very unfavorable for Republicans, very favorable for Democrats. That makes perfect sense in the post-COVID era, or the Department of Education, probably a long-term split between Republicans and Democrats, but some of the agencies with the largest partisan split now in terms of Republicans versus Democrats and favorability ratings are the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security, all of which have more unfavorable ratings among Republicans.
That is something that’s, again, I know what we’re just talking about earlier, that there is a sea change happening here in terms of breaking with these kinds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies after the last five years that I think is really fascinating. If you think about, I don’t know, 2007, you’ve got to feel like those numbers would be reversed, right?
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. And in one sense it’s good and it’s not good. So it’s good because if opinions were going in the other direction, we would be in big trouble because that would be people are taking the exact wrong thing away from all that’s happened over the course of the last decade plus, but it’s not good in the sense, obviously, that having a low-trust society and low trust in law enforcement is a really bad state for a constitutional republic to be in. I think you can look at what you need in the recipe of a successful constitutional republic or democracy, broadly speaking, and trust in law enforcement authority is obviously… It doesn’t have to be a 100% trust, but some general trust in law enforcement and authorities is a really big part of that, of course.
So the left had some points I think the right is waking up to, points during the Bush years that the right is waking up to, because… It’s not just because the administrative state hadn’t turned on conservatives yet; I don’t necessarily think that’s what’s behind it. I think it’s more just that the growth of government, some of the stuff wasn’t clear because it was happening around us in the post-911 era. Things were happening so quickly that people weren’t able to catch their breath and really think through everything to the extent that it needed to be, especially when people were actually afraid. So yeah, you’re right. Trying to imagine what this would look like a decade ago. I think we know — there probably are numbers — it’s just a total reversal, but in a good direction.
Inez Stepman:
Well, I guess it doesn’t matter at this point, but it does… I wonder for how long these agencies have been as rotten as they clearly seem to me now. So in other words, I wonder if I was completely naive 10 years ago with regard to law enforcement, particularly federal law enforcement in this country, or if there was a tipping point in these institutions that just was brought forward at this point. Here, I’m thinking about, I don’t know, a tipping point. We see this happening all over, but let’s say just pick one to talk about the previous media example — clearly ousting that editor… Sorry, I always forget this guy’s name, but ousting the editor at The New York Times over the Cotton op-ed, and the complaints of younger staffers was a tipping point within that organization, where it went from merely left-wing liberal to completely controlled by a new ideology.
And I guess I’m wondering if the same dynamic exists in these other institutions, which are in some broad sense associated with the right, law and order, hierarchy, which is not to say that they were Republican institutions or staffed with conservatives, but there is something about enforcing order and prosecuting people and dealing with a violent global scene. I think that that does draw a certain kind of interest from the right and probably draws personnel more of a type of people who are at least moderate or right leaning. And I’m guessing my question — and I don’t know the answer to it — there’s two options here. One, I was just a naive idiot and didn’t realize how completely rotten these institutions were even, let’s say, 20 years ago.
Alternatively, what has happened to the personnel within those institutions that they have shifted so radically from a moderator, even conservative, at least personality type, of people who would staff those institutions to very clearly — and I guess I’m comparing this to… There’s a type to, for example, the kind of Republican that went left during the Trump era and didn’t just dislike Trump or whatever but has gone really and truly left. And I’m not just talking about some of the big names like David French or Bill Crystal, but I’m talking about the people that I know in real life. A lot of these upper-middle-class income, managerial type people with white collar jobs, sometimes agency jobs. I’m wondering if that managerial big divide economically, where you’re surrounded by the cultural left all the time, has played into what these agencies have become, or again, totally open to the possibility that I was just a naive idiot and didn’t realize how corrupt these agencies are.
Emily Jashinsky:
I think one is because of the other. I think we were naive because it wasn’t clear yet exactly how quickly the people in those positions, the people in charge of those agencies, it wasn’t clear how quickly they had been corrupted. So on the one hand, I think nobody, or no agency… Conservatives would agree, it’s not ideal — if you sat down with Paul Ryan and wrote all of this down on paper — I think everyone would agree it’s not the ideal state of American democracy to have the Patriot Act, but it was a necessary response to a new threat, new technological threat with air transportation and global communication, et cetera, et cetera.
But I think at the end of the day, it’s very clear that the power delegated was too much. On the other hand, though, I think there was a naivete or maybe a wishful thinking, or maybe even just a ‘90s early OTs, American optimism, the end of history optimism, that had us all fairly convinced we had landed on a healthy consensus and that consensus was safe, that we could undertake these large-scale projects of stability because we had landed on that end of history consensus of what an appropriate government looked like, of what the future looked like.
And so I think, to some extent, I think naivete is pejorative, and I don’t mean it in that sense…. And I think wishful thinking is the same thing. I actually think there’s some rational explanation for why the right largely, and I don’t want to take away from the Rand and Ron Pauls who were calling attention to some of these problems, but I don’t think… Why Liberalism Failed is not a book that was written in 2002, and that’s for a reason, and that was a conversation that honestly wasn’t happening on the right, period, because liberalism was still intertwined with Christianity. And a lot of that, the cultural right felt like it was well intertwined with liberalism and didn’t feel like it was fusionism. It didn’t feel like any of that had fully splintered.
And then I think it became very clear to us when the managerial class got power, maybe you could say that power corrupted absolutely, or maybe you could say it’s because liberalism, the inevitable arc of liberalism — and I don’t necessarily believe this, but that would be the argument — the inevitable arc of liberalism is secularism and militant secularism or hedonism, whatever. But when the acceleration of technology took off, it just laid bare how quickly a lot of people abandoned principles we thought held us together permanently, and we had been comforted by that.
Inez Stepman:
I had opportunity recently to go back and read Bush’s second inaugural — this is W — and obviously related to the wars after 911. This is still the beginning parts of these wars, which by the way, lest we forget, were supported overwhelmingly in the first several years of the war, that they were very popular wars initially. And like many of America’s wars, rightly or wrongly, that drag on, they became extremely unpopular over time, but this line really struck me: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
Emily Jashinsky:
Now, that’s naive.
Inez Stepman:
That sounded like an achievable goal in 2005.
Emily Jashinsky:
To the point where you would write it into an inaugural address.
Inez Stepman:
You would write it into an inaugural address.
Emily Jashinsky:
Without shame.
Inez Stepman:
So I think that goes the point you were making. I think the same point that, for example, Delth had made about looking backwards to the 1990s and 2000s saying what actually looked like… He says it more elegantly than I’m going to remember to repeat, but actually what looked like a strong tree turned out to be completely hollow, and the only reason it looked like a solid tree is because the winds were mild. In other words, this is pre-iPhone revolution, as you always like to point out. This is still in this post-Soviet collapse period for the United States, immediately after getting kicked in the teeth in 911, but still without that fundamental cynicism and resignation and distrust that I think is the hallmark of politics, I would say since 2016, but I think considerably before that. It’s just that that was the first obvious national expression of that kind of politics.
But yeah, just going back and reading that, that strikes me as… I wasn’t paying that much attention in 2005 in high school. I was paying some attention, but not intensely. But I probably would’ve thought that sounded reasonable.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, I think you’re right. No, I think you’re right, and that’s something… I was actually considering this the other day, that there’s so many younger people on the right who have very reasonable, impassioned arguments against the generation before them, and I would include us in that, Inez, but —
Inez Stepman:
[inaudible 00:40:14] more critiques.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah. But some of that really is that the context just… They didn’t know how the next chapters would go. And knowing how the next challenge obviously is hugely beneficial to avoiding making some of the same mistakes. But at that apex industry moment, not the end, but maybe as more years pass, we will look at the 90s and the early 2000s as maybe the peak of civilization, and then everything went downhill from there. But from that vantage point, there were a lot of things… My computer’s glitching, so excuse all of the beeps, but there were a lot of things that just totally… It was like we were at the top of a roller coaster and just completely started going down the drop after that. So I get it. Actually, that line is particularly, I think, ridiculous. Every nation, gosh, but it’s the flowery rhetoric of a time in which —
Inez Stepman:
“Ending tyranny in the world is the goal of the United States.”
Emily Jashinsky:
Every nation, ending tyranny in the world. I mean, that is just unthinkable today because we understand the human condition. And by the way, to —
Inez Stepman:
Or rather, I wouldn’t say that; we were kicked in the face and reminded of the human condition. It’s not like it’s a new thing to understand the human condition or at least understand as well as our sad attempts to understand it. I just want to say that’s not a new —
Emily Jashinsky:
Well, I actually think there’s this… and it bothers me a lot. I think there’s this strain of almost Rousseauian thought that creeps into evangelical conceptions of humanity sometimes, and probably especially back then. How often do we hear the line… This was, by the way, coined by a man of the cloth, Martin Luther King, Jr., that, “The moral arc of history is long and it bends towards justice.” That is not true because man is fundamentally fallen. If you are a Christian, if you are George W. Bush, born-again Christian, it’s absurd to say the goal of the United States is to end tyranny everywhere because tyranny will always be with us.
And that, I think talking about humanity in that way, really revealed a shortsightedness and a comfort that was false. And we allowed ourselves to be seduced by this very short time period of relative prosperity. And if you think about it, if you grew up like George W. Bush did in a time period after we had just triumphed in the Second World War and we feel like we’re just triumphing in the Cold War, people would put Vietnam aside because we still didn’t fully know the extent of institutional failure. We actually still probably don’t know the full extent of it, but that was probably very, very comforting. And their entire lives, they’d only known America ostensibly on that right side of history and the momentum going in one direction. And I think that lulled people into a false sense of security about how much we can control the human condition with modern democracy.
Inez Stepman:
That line about the arch of history being long and bending towards justice strikes me as the thing that could only be either imagined or said in the United States for better or for worse. We have to live with that. I think it’s the same impulse that took us across the continent to manifest destiny. It took us to the moon, but there’s an argument to be made. It’s the same impulse that it makes us imagine that men can become women and that we can clear the world of tyranny as a national goal.
For better or worse, that’s very American. And I’m not in the dean camp as you well know, but there does seem to be an… It’s interesting to me that what you call the Rousseauian, I think that’s a good term for it because it’s blended with this… I think that really took off in the 1960s in America, where you read materials from before 1968 or so, it’s not exact, obviously, but you don’t get this sense, but there is this real… It’s blended with the therapeutic idea. The idea of man is ultimately the… I think I should probably refine this thought further before I inflict it on anyone.
Emily Jashinsky:
Do it.
Inez Stepman:
No, but there is this sense of that there’s this self, that you have a decline of religion, you have a self that’s separate from the body. You have to create a new idea of the soul and then the self that you can self-construct, very connected to the idea of individual liberty. And that those souls somehow want the same things, they want the same type of liberty, the same type of prosperity, the same type of yearning to be free I think was the Bush line. We imagine that the children’s transitory needs, for example, transitory ideas about who and what they are, we imbue them with a special significance. All of this strikes me as particularly Rousseauian and, at root, this idea that there is something very, very good and free at the heart of the human person.
And that is, of course, in direct contradiction, not only with Christianity, with Judaism, but with the whole of the 20th century, I think, after which people had to reconsider such notions hopefully. But that there does seem to be something about that notion, utopian notion of what people ultimately are and want that returns and seems to be irresistible, and has its particular form in America as this optimism of remaking the world and ourselves, in part because America has done an incredible job of doing that better than any empire in history, I think, in terms of creating this prosperity and liberty.
Hell, in a country where you can put a man on the moon, why not? Right? There is that. But I think now that’s maybe the biggest difference. There’s such a sense of limitation, maybe a correct one. Maybe we’ve gone too far into the cynical, but there just feels being vibe shifts. There’s such a feel of limitation now that I have, and I don’t think I’m the only one in how I look at our politics, the world geopolitics as well, all of it. There’s such a sense of limitation. You go back and you read something from 2005 like this. You’re like, “Wow, you really felt like you could do anything.”
Emily Jashinsky:
Different language, yes. Your point about the MLK line is so interesting, that it could only be written — “the moral arc of the universe is long, and it bends towards justice” — that it could only be written in America. And by the way, at that, 1960s America is super interesting because it’s the same thing, I think, that’s… makes us a little bit myopic when it comes to technology is that because we’re at this hyper-novel rate of change, we don’t realize how quick the rate of change is. We’re just used to things changing really fast so that fastness almost… It’s like you’re spinning so fast that you can’t feel how quickly you’re spinning, the way that we are just on earth. You feel like you’re standing still, but you’re actually hurdling through time and space.
I think that phenomena applies to America and the West probably more generally in the last century, that it felt like, “progress,” in quotes, was the natural state of the human condition. When in fact, if you were living in the West on planet earth in the last 100 years, what you experienced during your lifetime is incredibly unique and has only happened to a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of humans who have ever walked on the earth.
Inez Stepman:
And on that note, I do want to touch on one more, I think, equally serious subject, not only because it involves tragedy, but because it’s so infrequently talked about in any kind of deep or serious way, despite all of the sound and fury we have around it. That is school shootings. So this month also includes, of course, this tragedy in Covenant Christian in Tennessee. There’s obviously political brouhaha afterwards with the Tennessee three. And I don’t know, it is frankly impressive how the left managed to turn a transgender shooter shooting up a Christian school into a conversation about how transgender community is suffering and there’s racism in Tennessee.
That is a standing oh moment for narrative control over legacy media, and that’s what we started with, but I wanted to have the deeper discussion of why this is such a phenomenon, particularly in the United States. So it is true that there are mass shootings in other countries, but this specific phenomenon of the school shooting, starting, I think, with Columbine in the 90s — and it’s defied because the way we talk about this, just to set it up and say what I’m dissatisfied with our current conversation on it, and then maybe we can build something, at least begin to think about this in a more deep and productive way, I hope. Because what happens is one of these terrible tragedies happens, and then depending on certain aspects of the person who did it, we go through a predictable series of conversations, whether that’s about gun control, domestic terrorism, earlier in the cycle, earlier — if we’re talking Columbine times, it was video games — and we try to come up with a reason why this particular notoriety is being sought by a particular category of people, and why they choose to inflict their notoriety on us in this particularly tragic way. And so there’s a great article over at IM-1776 called American Devils, I highly recommend on this, that really links this up and basically says each one of these phenomenon comes out of a particular moment in American culture. So 1970s, you had this rise of the violent cults. You had Jim Jones and Manson’s and all of that, and then it goes into serial killers. In the 80s and early 90s, the whole jam. Now we have this resurgent with the podcasts on it, but there was this media frenzy over serial killers, and there were a number of very prominent serial killers. We gave them names, there was coverage.
Every time there was a new murder, it became national news in speculation about whether that murder was connected to one of these serial killers. Have series of movies, The Silence of the Lambs, all around this concept that grew up the American imagination. There were real serial killers out there, but obviously school shootings still a very low-probability phenomenon, but nevertheless seemed to grip the media imagination. And now it seems to me that we’ve done two decades on school shootings and probably fueled them like we did serial killers with the media coverage and fascination.
But why is it that this is a uniquely American phenomenon? And I don’t expect you to give a pat answer to this, but I’m just tired of this conversation where it happens, we yell at each other about gun control, and obviously I think, correctly, the right says, “This has nothing to do with gun control.” And the left says, “It absolutely has to do with gun control. We have to ban assault weapons and you have to turn in your handguns this or is going to have blood on your hands,” whatever. There’s that discourse that goes on every time; I have strong opinions about it.
And then usually what ends up happening is that the right goes along with the left and sends another $100 million to woke school counselors and the guys of mental health. And then we don’t talk about it again until it happens again but two things: speculate why you think this particular phenomenon is connected to our particular moment and all the cynicism and everything that we’ve been talking about. Why it’s had this particular output. And also, how can we start a serious conversation about how to prevent it? Is there anything we can do to prevent it, or do we just have to live with this tragic phenomenon, which is something no one wants to say, but maybe is the truth? I don’t know.
Emily Jashinsky:
I think it’s actually a really simple answer, and there’s one variable to me that makes it clear. This is particularly related to the… I think if any country in the world had our media culture and our levels of social capital, so being low, then I think you would see the same thing over and over again in any other society. I think it’s very clear, Zadrilani wrote about this for Berkeley a number of years ago. It was very interesting, a survey that pretty much showed there’s a definitive link between media coverage of mass shootings and copycats. That’s not to say it’s the media’s fault for creating more mass shootings. No, it’s a broken culture’s fault. And in many cases, it’s negligent parents’ fault. In some cases, you can point to a million other things, as like the precipitating variable that absolutely caused this problem.
But when the media has covered these stories, and when you have an internet, democratized internet, where there are all of these Tumblrs and true crime intrigue pages, whatever it is, it just makes it a very attractive solution to a tiny… to what? Five people a year of all of the people who are suffering from fatherlessness and alienation. You get some five people a year, that it looks attractive to them as an escape hatch. And I really think it’s just a human thing, and if you placed any group of humans in the situation that America is, starting in 1995, 1990 maybe, you’re going to get the same thing over and over again.
As soon as Columbine happened, the horse was out of the barn, the can of worms had been opened because that became the romanticized escape hatch for people. And so, again, I really think it’s as simple as the can of worms was opened and with Columbine there are all kinds of issues that exist with other mass shooters too. So everything being constant, I think it’s just a way that human beings are going to react because they want to experience something similar.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I think that’s really similar to what this guy wrote. I’m trying to look up his name, he’s I Am 1776, but Benjamin Roberts, he wrote an incredible piece on this, really long, difficult, defies easy quotation, although I have a couple paragraphs here and that, I think, has made it so that it was… I think otherwise you would’ve seen this piece go completely viral in a way that every so often you see a piece that just hits on some important thing that nobody else is talking about. But to the extent that it’s quotable, I’ll give you a couple paragraphs which I think are quite similar to what you just said.
He writes that, “The dissolution of religious faith, family, collective identity, and the clandestine ghettoization of psychosis into cyberspace speaks to an immense sabotage of his support systems previously available to maladjusted individuals.” Here he uses a name of one of the shooters, my policy not to, so one of these shooters, “And others like him are the black-hearted bastards of atomization, and atomization is the inevitable fruit of liberalism which shreds civilizational standards and sucker in its rabid drive to liberate man from his body, his people, and the institutions that bind him. A mass shooter isn’t just out to commit suicide on a grand scale, however. Having been invisible his whole life, he commits the worst crime in hopes of airtime. The vision of his face finally having eyes laid upon it, even in horror by an entire nation, he hopes his visage will, for a glimmer of a moment, become the mask of pure sin, so frequently exchanged and worn on television screens today. He wants the undeniable celebrity of the devil.”
And I think that that really does describe something about this phenomenon. Look, there’s these mass consequences of atomization that we’ve discussed many times, this lack of meaning in a post-God-is-dead world. And particularly, we can talk about all the things that have accelerated that, you point to acceleration in technology, breakdown of family, all these things. Of course, most people who lack meaning are not murderous and not particularly horrible. In the category of murderous, this is a particularly horrible one. But it’s interesting that that small percentage of people that… What’s interesting, I guess, or challenging to us, is how the broader ills of our particular moment, why this particular form for that tiny percentage of people who probably would be cracked anyway, how they decide to crack or how they decide to take vengeance on the rest of the world seems to be somehow instructive about the society in which we live.
Emily Jashinsky:
Yeah, I agree with that. I think it’s very much that, and I think if you look at exactly the study that Zed points to out of Berkeley about causation from media coverage, I think it’s very evident that people are acting something out. They are casting themselves as X, Y, and Z. And again, I think we’re going to see a lot of different things happen like this, not necessarily mass shootings, but a lot more acting out. And it’s interesting that the Covenant shooter, obviously, had a non-binary or transgender identity because I think that’s another way that people are acting out their angst. It’s an expression of angst, and that’s obviously a much, much less violent expression of angst. But I think we are looking for meaning and purpose in a lot of different places.
And to your point, actually, just to bring things full circle about the security state and these institutions wielding their power, I think Columbine was a good wake-up call to everyone. It should have been a wake-up call to everyone. It should have been something that, like the silver lining is… I shouldn’t even say that. There is no silver lining, there is no good, but it should have been a takeaway that people are going to be searching for. As they’re groping for meaning and purpose, they’re going to land on horrible expressions to cope with it in a high-technology world where they can do a lot of damage with less effort, whatever it is, or with less even planning and more immediacy.
Man, that should’ve been very clear to us that the social fabric was tearing in ways that were going to interact with technology really painfully. But I don’t think there’s something that’s like… I don’t think this says anything bad about the average American person or about the American government. I think this is humans when placed into a society with the levels of freedom but also the levels of decadence that ours have, just inevitably that ours has, inevitably as a consequence of the really rapid innovations and technology that we ourselves came up with over the last 100 years that have really benefited people in many, many ways, new medicines, new many, many things, but it’s incredibly alienating and disorienting.
And for a while, that wasn’t clear to us, but it should have started to become clear to us with things like Columbine in the late 1990s or early 2000s. And I think now, the difference is we understand these things not as aberrations, but as patterns of expressions from… At least on the right, as expressions of the same pain that’s taking people in various directions, but as probably one of the most severe expressions and risks that comes with all of these changes.
Inez Stepman:
I guess it’s a version of the Warhol statement, right? In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Well, that was the future of maybe 2000. Now it’s everybody will be hated for 15 minutes and this is one way to make yourself the most hated of all, an apotheosis of the two-minutes hate that seems to turn on each of us in consequence or in series in this world. But I guess let’s wrap up with this. It seems a problem with this analysis that we’re doing, which I think holds a lot more weight and truth than some of the surface-level political conversation is that it doesn’t have an answer. There isn’t a bill that we can pass than to make the next murder of children in school less likely. And I think that’s very difficult for us to deal with.
Look, I think there are some things we can do around the edges. I do think we can harden schools in certain ways, whether or not that includes an armed guard. We saw that that’s not a silver bullet either, no pun intended. We had instances where those guards were totally ineffective. We can definitely try in a First Amendment society to encourage the media not to grant notoriety to the faces and names of these people and to only report on the facts, even the motives and so on of these shooters without giving them the kind of notoriety that comes with being named and pictured in every media outlet.
And I do think those things would do some good, but it seems to me that if somebody is determined to kill children to make themselves this American devil, there’s not a whole lot that any modicum of a free society can ultimately do to stop them.
Emily Jashinsky:
I think that’s completely true, and that’s probably one of the most difficult problems anyone could raise because it involves curtailing freedoms or it involves this nebulous… the opposite of death by a 1,000 cuts, success by a 1,000 bandages, whatever it is, that we start to vote in our personal lives the way that we all… You have the sense of awareness, and you don’t glamorize single motherhood and you don’t crave single motherhood and you don’t glamorize… As a society, we don’t allow Hollywood to get away with glamorizing those things, or we don’t allow the media to cover things in certain ways.
I wrote a story, actually, after Uvalde. It was exactly because of this question because I didn’t have answers to it. I think it was six or seven ways that could have been stopped by more social cohesion in the community. And then you can just extrapolate that to six or seven things you can do in your community to prevent anyone from falling through that, not government safety net, but that actual both government and social safety net, human safety net, private safety net. And I think, sadly, that’s probably the best solution because — it’s not to say there aren’t policy solutions, I agree with you — but sadly, unless as humans we decide to stop living so decadently, we make those decisions on our own, we make those decisions in the ballot, in the voting booth. So we make those decisions in our own personal lives. Man, if we don’t do that on individual terms, I just don’t think… The policy all stop short. So that’s why it’s tough because you hit that brick wall no matter what.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, on that note, I’m going to have to say something for our listeners, just before we wrap up, this is the 100th episode of this podcast. So thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening to us. I hope that these conversations are actually, in some degree, helpful for anyone. I think that they’re certainly helpful and sometimes enjoyable for Emily and I, but we really appreciate everybody who’s tuning in to listen to them, hoping that in some small way that we do affect the direction of this country that I love and Emily loves.
So we are all in this nation together, unless you’re a listener from another country, in which case we have nothing to say to you. No, I’m kidding. So that may sound like hubris, but I mean it in the exact opposite sense, just because I think it’s important to try to actually describe the sense that we all have of that we are living in the Chinese curse of interesting times, and the best we can do is to make sense of it as best we can and to talk to other people who are trying to make sense of it in an honest way as well. So thanks for tuning into 100 episodes of High Noon, and I guess we’ll see you next time. Be brave. We’ll see you next time on the 101st High Noon.
