by Meghan Daum
Best of all, Free Speech YouTube wasted less time with the “to be sure” disclaimers that now clogged just about any expression of not-perfectly-woke opinion. “To be sure, sexual assault is a terrible crime . . .”; “Of course, as a white person I can’t understand the experience of any person of color . . .” Whereas newspaper op-eds and magazine think pieces seemed to devote three-quarters of their word counts to anticipatory self-inoculations from criticism, Free Speech YouTube generally dispensed with these catechisms. People just said what they had to say. They roamed fearlessly among my favorite subject: the problem with everything.
Just as often, though, the assortment of pills would make me slightly queasy. For every Free Speech YouTuber who had me cheering at my computer screen, there was another who I wished would just go away. The conservative journalist Ben Shapiro, for instance, struck me as little more than a run-of-the-mill right-winger who just happened to be willing to have respectful dialogues with his ideological opponents. Why exactly was he in the club? There was the problem, too, of Jordan Peterson’s growing presence. Riding the wave of a public controversy over a piece of Canadian legislation related to transgender rights, Peterson had come into public view primarily as an abrasive critic of identity politics. That won him fans among alt-right types and other critics of political correctness and landed him in lots of montage videos in which he is billed as “owning” or “destroying” feminists or social justice warriors. His more thoughtful sides, though, earned him a place among the Free Speech YouTubers, some of whom became obsessed with him and talked about him constantly. In turn, my obsession with and constant talk about the Free Speech YouTubers put me in the position of defending Peterson—if not his ideas (many of which seem perfectly reasonable once you get past his bluster), then at least his right to exist. Not that I had any idea what either he or I was talking about half the time.
Within the year, Peterson’s hybrid persona of philosopher king/anti-PC edgelord would make him about as famous as it’s possible to be while still being a cult hero. By the spring of 2018 he was selling out large venues on international tours and netting $80,000 a month on Patreon. His best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, functioned as a sort of New and Improved Testament for the purpose-lacking young person (often but not always male) for whom tough love directives like “Clean up your room!” went down a lot easier when dispensed with a Jungian, evo-psych panache.
But what was Peterson, exactly? A self-help guru? A men’s rights champion? A grandstanding transphobe? Was he deserving of David Brooks’s characterization as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now”? (More precisely, Brooks had quoted economist Tyler Cowan saying this about Peterson.) Or was he, as one headline put it, “the stupid man’s smart person”?
He’s all of these things and none of these things, I said. People are paying attention to the wrong parts of him. Not that he isn’t calling attention to the wrong parts of himself. I don’t know! Stop asking me! But keep asking me! Don’t ask the people who understand him even less than I do!
I was going a little crazy. My opinions about the different members of Free Speech YouTube ran the gamut. But they still felt like an obscure rock band I’d known about before anyone else and, as such, I was a superfan. And as often happens to superfans, I became not just the band’s follower but its protector. It’s not this album that matters, it’s that one. Forget the hit single and listen to this. No, it’s not reggae, it’s ska! There’s a difference! By the summer of 2017 I had managed to delete most other conversational topics from my brain in order to clear space for Free Speech YouTube. I did not care about the Wonder Woman movie or the solar eclipse or Cardi B. I cared about The Rubin Report interview with Bret and Eric Weinstein. I sent the video link to anyone I thought might be remotely interested (this included my ex-husband, though he was only marginally interested) along with detailed viewing instructions: I know this is two hours and forty-seven minutes but it flies by, I swear. Skip the first three minutes. Pay extra close attention around the 128:23 mark when Eric says that it’s possible we can squeeze another three hundred years out of this world “by repeatedly getting lucky” but that he thinks we’re unlikely to make it that far. So intense!
One spring night in 2018, on the cusp of a late-season snowstorm, I went to a real-life meeting for people who were interested in Free Speech YouTube. The gathering had grown out of Quillette, an online magazine that billed itself as “a platform for free thought” and that I had probably discovered within minutes of its launch in 2015. I looked forward to the meeting for weeks, hoping I didn’t run into a scheduling conflict, even vaguely planning what I would wear. The RSVP list suggested there would be a disproportionate number of very young men in attendance, many of them Jordan Peterson acolytes exhibiting rather alarming levels of worship. But that didn’t bother me. I wanted to connect and learn. I wanted, as I said when I introduced myself, “to really dig into things” with people who cared about this stuff as much as I did.
It turned out that I had dug further than just about anyone. There were at least a couple dozen people at the meeting, most of them exhibiting high levels of Free Speech YouTube literacy. But for all their familiarity with the guests on The Rubin Report and Harris’s podcast, I suspected my mastery had them beat tenfold. Their knowledge may have been thorough, but mine was granular. For every name they cited as “someone whose ideas really interest me,” I could have hit back with ten more. For every Free Speech YouTube channel invoked, I could rattle off several no one had ever heard of. Eventually I got the feeling that I was talking too much, so I headed home.
The sky was heavy with waiting snow that night. I left the meeting and walked up lower Fifth Avenue in the darkness. There were few people on the street save a handful of last-minute shoppers gathering rations before the storm. School had already been canceled for the next day, street cleaning suspended, offices closed. It had been, I realized, more than three years since I’d hunkered down for the snowpocalypse in that little apartment, watching Bloggingheads and grieving over my soon-to-be-decided-on divorce. Amid this thought came a terrible realization: over these years, I’d weaned myself off the long conversation of my marriage by switching over to the conversations of Free Speech YouTube. It wasn’t just political loneliness I’d felt; it was the loneliness of a partnership ended, a dialogue converted to an interior monologue. Having lost my human intellectual ally, I’d tried to rig up a new ally—or a whole group of allies—via internet videos.
I also wondered this: maybe my bloodlust for left-on-left warfare wasn’t just a petty indulgence but a substitute for the warfare of my marriage itself. My husband had been at once the best thing about my life and the worst thing. He kept me sane yet drove me crazy. I wasn’t so far gone as to draw a literal comparison between my marriage and my relationship with Free Speech YouTube, but there were ways that they were mirrors of one another. My Free Speech YouTube friends functioned as intellectual allies, yet they disappointed me as often as they bolstered me. Much as I was energized by some of the quieter voices in the movement, like McWhorter, Heying, and even science historian Alice Dreger, who left academia over censorship issues and had been embraced by intellectual-dark-web types even as she eschewed membership, I was growing weary of the self-conscious clubbiness of the whole thing. It was as if some of them were having the experience of high school geeks who’d suddenly been let into the popular club. They couldn’t quite believe their luck, so they got matching T-shirts and wore them every day.
“It seems kind of, um, contradictory to consider us as a group, since the point is we are all bad at groupthink,” Dreger wrote on her blog by way of explaining why she chose not to participate in the Times article. “If the idea is that I piss people off by being disloyal to my likely tribes, well, I don’t think that makes me unusual. I think it just makes me a good intellectual.”
A good intellectual, maybe. But being a public intellectual—or what passes fo
r such a thing today—now demands sticking with viewpoints that can be represented by hashtags and squeezed snugly into nine-hundred-word op-eds or hot takes. It almost made me wonder if there was merit in becoming a public anti-intellectual.
“You’re really on the right side of things.”
Twenty-five years later, I can still see that man at the writers conference with the floppy silver hair. I can still see the woman with the jangling silver bracelets and the agent eagerly handing me a business card. (So much flopping and jangling! So much silver!) It was all so easy. It was a little intoxicating. It was also a lie.
If there’s anything I’ve learned in twenty-five years, it’s that the more honest you are about what you think, the more you have to sit in solitude with your own thoughts. If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last four years, it’s that being in a club doesn’t guarantee satisfaction any more than being in a marriage does. Just as you can’t fight Trumpism with tribalism, you can’t fight tribalism with a tribe. All you can do is read and think and listen. And if you’re lucky, eventually there will come that rousing, fleeting moment when you hear someone say the thing that makes you feel less alone.
CHAPTER 7 We’re Not Joking: Humor, in Memoriam
I was alone on election night of 2016. I watched the tragedy unfold while sitting on my sofa with my Saint Bernard. Other than the handful of text messages I exchanged with my not-yet-ex-husband, I didn’t communicate with anyone that night. And absolutely that night was a tragedy. Even in my allergy to hyperbole, I have no problem putting it that way. I went to bed before the election was called, hoping that somehow the situation would have sorted itself out while I slept. The next day, I got on the New York City subway and found myself in a car that was almost completely silent. Grim faces avoided eye contact; a few people were crying.
Less than twenty-four hours earlier, on November 8, I had ridden this same train and felt like I was at the biggest New Year’s Eve party in history. People were smiling at one another, giving up their seats even for the not so elderly, practically twirling around the poles like children at a May Day fair. On November 9, it was like the bottom had dropped out of the entire city. I realize that’s the kind of statement that makes a lot of people hate urban coastal types. I’m making it anyway.
For some reason on the night of November 9, I sat up late listening to Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys album all the way through. The word “album” sounds strange to describe something you’ve clicked up on iTunes, but Good Old Boys, released in 1974, is a classic concept album, one of the most critically lauded of that era. The satire is so relentlessly dry it can leave your mouth feeling chalky at times. A blunt yet deceptively refined exegesis of southern bigotry, it’s really about the hypocrisies of northern “tolerance.” If you’re familiar with Newman, it might be for his schmaltzy and sweeping film scores. He wrote the music for Awakenings and The Natural and a ton of Pixar films, including all the Toy Story movies. He wrote that awful song “I Love to See You Smile” from the movie Parenthood.
But these are Newman’s day jobs. His real songwriting, which has a far smaller, if devoted, fan base, might be described as ragtime meets Tom Waits meets battery acid. His melodies can be hauntingly sweet, but his lyrics take no prisoners. In Good Old Boys, which was first performed by the Atlanta Symphony with Newman conducting (I mention this by way of conveying the ambition of the project), Newman speaks from the point of view of a number of Deep South characters of his creation. Those characters use the n-word and refer to white people as crackers.
The album opens with “Rednecks,” told from the perspective of a slick yokel who opens the song with a defense of legendary segregationist Lester Maddox, the governor of Georgia in the late 1960s, who famously stormed off the stage of The Dick Cavett Show when Cavett referred to Maddox’s voters as bigots. Tellingly, the narrator mistakes the effete yet fundamentally midwestern Cavett for a “smart-ass New York Jew.” Maddox “may be a fool but he’s our fool,” says the narrator, who goes on to proudly describe his cronies who are “too dumb to make it in no northern town” and “keeping the [n-words] down.”
Pointing out that “the northern [n-word] is a negro . . . who’s got his dignity,” the narrator admits that “down here we’re too ignorant to realize that the north has set the [n-word] free.” He then offers a laundry list of impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods in northern cities—Harlem in New York City, Hough in Cleveland, Roxbury in Boston, Fillmore in San Francisco—where this negro “is free to be put in a cage.”
That’s just the first track. There are also songs about the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and the polarizing Louisiana Democratic governor Huey Long. In “A Wedding in Cherokee County,” a bridegroom pays homage to his bride: “Her papa was a midget / Her mother was a whore / Her granddad was a newsboy ’til he was eighty-four.” You get the idea.
When I sat up that night of November 9, 2016, listening to Good Old Boys through earbuds on my laptop, I was trying to build a wall around my brain. I was trying to have some sort of immersive psychological experience, kind of like how in college I used to sit in the dark, the room glowing blue from the stereo lights, and smoke cigarettes while listening to Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson’s “Excellent Birds” so I wouldn’t have to think about my sociology exam or how lonely I was. I was trying to put a soundtrack to my life, thereby turning it all into a movie.
I’m still not sure what kind of movie I was attempting to place myself in that evening of November 9. I do remember feeling like I wanted to experience whatever I was experiencing as though it were in past tense. I wanted to have the sensation of looking at a screen image of myself sitting at that desk and knowing that what I was seeing was historical in some way. I wanted to take the time capsule into which I was already trying to stuff the emotional detritus of my failed marriage and throw in this film footage for good measure. I wanted to seal off the whole world and open it up again at a later, unspecified date.
I went to Iowa a few months later. I spent a week settling into the splendid 1900s American Foursquare house I was renting and the cold 1960s university building that contained my classrooms and office. Then I went about the arduous task faced by most professors, at least most writing professors: playing the part of a professor and hoping my students would buy my act.
My students, like all the best students, were equal parts invigorating and exasperating. They were dazzlingly well read but sometimes dismally clueless about how the world actually worked (which, let’s face it, is a perfectly natural form of dismalness when you’re a twenty-four-year-old). One day the term “gaslighting” came up. We heard it all the time. But what does it mean, exactly? we wondered in class.
“It’s that thing men do to women,” a young female student said.
Gaslighting is a reference to the 1944 film Gaslight (originally a 1938 play by British playwright Patrick Hamilton), in which Charles Boyer plays a sociopathic man who manipulates and plays tricks on his wife, played by Ingrid Bergman, to the point that she believes she is going insane. The term was commonly seen in psychotherapeutic contexts over the last several decades, but now the word was suddenly all over the place, a steady fixture in online conversations about how Republican lawmakers are hoodwinking the American people or how the mainstream media is normalizing the aberrant behavior of the Trump administration. It’s also a staple of the feminist lexicon. To some women, the man who is offering up his point of view is automatically denying a woman her perspective—or “lived experience,” as we now say—and therefore gaslighting her. Never mind that, in my lived experience, women’s gaslighting skills generally far exceed those of most men.
I explained to my class about the film and the play it was adapted from. I did not admit that the only reason I had this information was that I’d googled “gaslighting” a few months earlier. I did not admit that up until then I’d thought gaslighting had to do with exacerbating an already volatile situation by adding to the controversy somehow
. I thought of it as pouring gas on things and striking a match. My first encounter with the word had come on Twitter two years before, when I’d written a newspaper column about the tragic story of a transgender girl who’d killed herself by walking in front of a truck. An angry Twitter user accused me of “gaslighting the trans community.” The sender of the tweet didn’t elaborate from there, and in hindsight I wonder if the person didn’t know what the word meant either, because for all the quibbles someone might have with what I wrote I couldn’t see how any of it could be construed as making trans people feel like they were going insane.
But here we were. And as I gently suggested to my student that gaslighting wasn’t something men did to women but rather an equal-opportunity form of bad relationship behavior, it occurred to me that I probably talked about this stuff way too much.
Why, exactly, did I care so much? Was I unconsciously perceiving my students’ unrelenting wokeness as somehow an affront to me or my work? I had, after all, made a professional name for myself, such as it was, by testing the limits of propriety and skating on the edge of satire. Did I have some sort of personal stake in their abilities to develop a sense of humor and appreciation of irony? Or was I just taking advantage of the fact that my status as an as-far-off-the-tenure-track-as-is-humanly-possible visiting professor meant I couldn’t be penalized, let alone fired, if anyone complained about me? Milling around the copy machines in the English Department office one day, I’d asked a professor of twentieth-century American literature if he still taught Lolita. “It’s just not worth the risk,” he told me. So maybe on some level I felt duty bound to give them what other instructors could not.