This was really interesting and inspired me to learn more about Ms. Kasparian.
We've all heard the saying " a conservative is a liberal that got mugged (or tried to start a business) and a liberal is a conservative who got arrested" and while she's clearly not a conservative, it's refreshing to hear someone own up to this.
I think how Ana discussed her sexual assault incident (is that what you would call it?) was truly incredible. If I had a daughter that is exactly the kind of role model I would want her to see. (I have two sons)
She discussed it like someone who had felt and processed her emotions like an adult. It was clear that she was very disturbed by it at the time and it affected how she sees the world. But she also gives the impression that she’s moved through it and doesn’t allow it to define her in any way.
She wasn’t melodramatic about it nor did she downplay it, she spoke with authority and resolve. She could easily wallow in being victimized but doesn’t. Really great stuff there.
(* I’m not a fan of her work really on any level, but to me this shines through whatever I didn’t like about her)
Very interesting that Ana cites Blocked & Reported as changing her perspective and also talks about Breaking Points. It seems that her ideological evolution was similar to mine. I used to watch TYT back during the 2016 election, considered Trump an inexplicable demon, and agreed with almost everything Ana said on that show back them.
Her story is very believable to me. A lot of us who held those views back in 2016 have figured out that they are increasingly unhelpful in describing the world, and we have noticed that many who cling to that ideology have become fanatical and intolerant in the effort to maintain their belief.
I wasn't of those beliefs in 2016, but I certainly remember when the Duke Lacrosse case happened, my first reaction was that I believed it. I believed that there was some hostile, backwards territory called the Deep South where racists lived, I believed that frat boys routinely committed rape, and I hated Duke for various specific reasons. I was wrong. A lot of people were wrong.
What's striking is that the Duke faculty who signed some initial position statement never reversed it, even when the case fell apart, even when the prosecutor was correctly disbarred. People who know they're wrong and keep going are alien to me. Obviously, people have defense mechanisms against feeling the shame of being wrong, but the Duke lacrosse case truthers are living in an alternate reality.
One that is now far more routine, for so many issues.
One thing I’ve never understood: What is everyone’s problem with Dave Rubin? He “switched sides…” So what? If we’re going to allow Ana to “evolve” now (as we should), what did he do so wrong?
He created incredible (and meaningful) content in the 2015-2018 era and truly moved the cultural needle in a good way. I’m not as into what he’s creating now, but I certainly don’t get the animosity towards him.
He touched a nerve with the older liberal crowd… what was it?
He and I were close friends. I hung out with him and his now husband every weekend. He always complained about how he wasn’t making enough money, which I empathized with. But suddenly he quit TYT and did this weird media tour where he started trashing us without warning. First time (that I know about) was on Rogan. I reached out and asked why he would do that to a friend, and he didn’t really have an answer. It would take me two years to finally address it publicly to our audience because. I don’t know what his political views really are, and honestly I don’t care either way. If he’s sincerely conservative now I’m ok with that. It was how he threw our friendship under the bus for his rebrand that genuinely hurt me.
Thank you for your perspective. I was actually wondering about it more broadly among the left leaning liberal types, not to you personally. But your perspective certainly is valuable.
It strikes me as weird because I also know him personally a little bit and, back then, he was definitely hesitant at first to criticize TYT. Later on he started criticizing Cenk and TYT, but I never heard him speak on you personally.
Of course, I haven’t watched everything he’s ever done, but that doesn’t stick out at all.
Ms. Kasparian, before seeing this interview, I was inclined to hate you, on general principles. Having seen it, I did not feel a visceral dislike of you. I would have enjoyed a bit more substance -- specifically where have you changed your mind in response to arguments and ideas on "the right," and where are you still on "the left?" However, you seemed personable and reasonable. I plan to dig up your discussion with Ben Shapiro, just to see the interaction. Maybe you will become a libertarian yet.
I know that Cenk has recanted on his denial of the Armenian Genocide, and his reason for disbelief in it (that was what he learned in school) actually struck me as being fair. Most of us don't interrogate what we learned in school in great detail, assuming what we got was true and fair. However, I do think that "The Young Turks" is an unfortunate name, given their role in the Armenian Genocide. Perhaps a rebranding is in order?
It seems to me that he is a case study in the distinction between having thoughtful heterodox views and simply saying the opposite of whatever the big media monoculture is saying.
The thing is, by saying the opposite of whatever is coming out of the big institutions, you can often sound like a pretty good thinker. And doing that could also-in your words-move the needle simply because there is so little viewpoint diversity now.
I remember one of the first outwardly "heterodox" things I did was to join the likely large group of people who wrote in when he opened up submissions for his show, trying to get an airing of their views. The media landscape was starving for an alternative view, and still is, but I'm kind of glad I didn't end up on there.
“Luxury beliefs” is a bad concept. The point of conspicuous consumption is that it’s a signal of having the wealth to buy status goods - that is, it’s exclusive. But anyone can profess a belief for free - there’s no exclusionary mechanism. Rob Henderson says that poorer people will suffer if they put these beliefs into practice, but he also claims the richer people who profess “luxury beliefs” don’t actually put them into practice, so there’s an obvious contradiction there. Why can’t everyone spout “luxury beliefs” and then surreptitiously live differently? Also, what is the mechanism that determines which beliefs become luxury in the first place?
I'm not sure that anyone can actually speak the language required; so much of academia is purposefully obfuscatory jargon that's always changing.
And status signals often rely on subtle insider cues like that. There are plenty of "new money" people who buy expensive things, perhaps thinking that it will help them fit in, but they don't buy the right things and they still don't fit in with the old money people. Similarly, many people are striving to be recognized as elite based on luxury beliefs, but not quite getting it right.
Most of the “luxury beliefs” Henderson cites are simplistic sentiments that anyone can express. His go-to examples include “criminals are victims”, “all family structures are valid”, and “success comes from inherited privilege rather hard work”.
I suppose so. If you take the simplest catchphrases that are comprehensible, I can walk around any affluent suburb and see one of those insipid "in this house we believe" signs with a bunch of those catchphrases, but do the people living in the house with the sign understand or agree with what it says? I doubt it. These are empty, performative "beliefs" to people who are actually in the elite.
I agree the signs are insipid, but they’re hardly a status signal. Anyone can put one up. There’s nothing “luxury” about them. “Luxury beliefs” is catching on because it’s a clever-seeming way to mock woke elites, but if you look closely it doesn’t actually make sense.
I totally agree that the race to dinner episode was the juiciest and best! Megan and Sarah, I know it was tough with the technical difficulties, but as an audience member, it didn’t matter so much and was still really great. More debates please! :)
Dave Rubin was one of the first heterodox people I started watching on youtube. At first I was entranced, then I realized he didn't seem to have any actual opinions or beliefs... he just disagreed with everyone on everything. I found it kind of sketchy and opportunistic. So I thought Ana's comment about not knowing what he actually believed quite funny. Even people who know him in real life don't know!
This was definitely not the criticism of Rubin at the time. The criticism was that he was not tough enough of an interviewer on anyone, not that he just disagreed with everyone.
I definitely know where he stands, he’s made it quite clear. I part ways with him on some issues, but it’s quite clear.
There was a brief mention of Christina Hoff Sommers. She could be a good guest, but I think she’s in a comfortable retirement now, not sure, but I’d love to hear her.
yes. CHS' Factual Feminist series was my first dip-my-toe outside the mainstream feminist victim-ology outlook. when the gender stuff exploded, I wondered where her voice went
It has always been curious to me why there are so many educated elites who are "allergic" to being perceived as right wing. I have always considered myself conservative even in high school, mostly because I never believed the left wings economic outlook which defied what I felt were my own observations about human nature, observations which are reflected best in thinkers of the free market like Milton Friedman/Thomas Sowell. They were just "obvious" to me, in the same way that many woman and men behave differently than each other. I always felt that "liberals" (not classic liberals) intended well, but seemed stymied by the unintended consequences of policies they advocated. Its like the more educated they got. the less they understand humans and their behaviors. I rarely saw them as evil (except those such as Stalin, Mao, etc), just misguided by their own ego to explain and control what they cannot.
I frankly just describe myself as right wing because as Razib Khan has written- where the left stands, I am not.
I am glad that people like Ana K have gotten out of their bubble, so they can at least see that their fellow citizens, as Douglas Murray has said, may be on to something.
This was like hearing my own journey narrated back to me. Ana, if you're still reading comments, one thing I ask you to consider is for TYT to phase out the interviews of unhinged MAGA supporters for the reasons I write about here (https://ericaetelson.substack.com/p/the-jordan-klepper-problem). TYT's interviewer is more respectful than Klepper but I assume the clips are cherry-picked to appeal to liberal confirmation bias, and then given a polarizing clickbait headline like "MAGA Super Karen RAGES About Being Deplatformed" and "We've Found The 4 Craziest Trump Supporters!" I truly believe these interviews do more harm than good and inflame the polarization you've grown to despise.
I hate it when women talk about "#metoo" (and yes of course maybe women hate men talking about certain things). Sure, the hashtag might have taken off recently, but the underlying issues go much farther back. The Dear Colleague Letter that made Title IX a criminal prosecution statute came out in 2012, and Robert Shibley catalogues all the judicial and administrative decisions that undergirded this in "Twisting Title IX", going back several decades.
I was recommended (by a woman) a book called Heterophobia which came out in 2000, by one of the few feminists who took this issue on, where she clearly describes a horrifying bureaucracy around sex and sexuality that existed well before Title IX and DEI. There was an excellent Aaron Sibarium podcast on how antidiscimination laws subtly changed in the early 1990's in ways that have completely gone off the rails.
And it does just boggle my mind when someone looks at a shadow bureaucracy that polices your every move without pesky limits like jurisdiction or statutes of limitations on one hand, and freely available pictures of naked women on the other hand, and concludes that porn is the problem. What sane young man reads the media coverage around Brett Kavanaugh and thinks "Tonight is the night! I'm going to ask Suzy out on that date"? Who knows how that request is going to be perceived thirty years from now? Another trenchant work is KC Johnson's book, which reaches a pretty sober conclusion that young men just shouldn't date on college campuses. And that was in 2007, when a certain sort of person said that campus craziness was just that, and it would never affect the real world.
This is not a deficit of social skills, it's a deficit of civil rights.
Oh yeah! That *was* Evangelista who said that! I don't know why I always thought it was Naomi Campbell. I really thought my '90s supermodel knowledge was better than that. Always learning something with this show!
I feel like I heard that somewhere but it's not verified and I shouldn't have said it. File that under "popped out of my mouth" and consider it retracted until further notice.
I honestly don't know much about Eric but if he is as arrogant as his brother comes across on air, it's easy to imagine a rift. I listen to Bret and Heather if they're not droning on about Covid and the related vaccines.
But from whence came the idea that just because a couple of people went off the rails over Covid that the IDW is dead or dying? I would think the rapid success of the Free Press indicates just the opposite. And people like Sullivan, Taibbi, Greenwald, Yglesias, seem to be as popular as always. At a slightly lower tier of popularity, Glenn Loury/John McWhorter, Blocked and Reported, Lex Fridman, Yascha Mounk, The Fifth Column, Reason magazine, put out solid content on a regular basis.
Yes, we could dispense with the silly IDW moniker but I'm waiting for a better one.
It's funny how the IDW label shifts and changes. I think it was an attempt to label the heterodox phenomenon, really, but it's less of a useful term, and heterodox seems to have stuck better. It also got far more wound up in a more select group of people.
This was really interesting and inspired me to learn more about Ms. Kasparian.
We've all heard the saying " a conservative is a liberal that got mugged (or tried to start a business) and a liberal is a conservative who got arrested" and while she's clearly not a conservative, it's refreshing to hear someone own up to this.
I think how Ana discussed her sexual assault incident (is that what you would call it?) was truly incredible. If I had a daughter that is exactly the kind of role model I would want her to see. (I have two sons)
She discussed it like someone who had felt and processed her emotions like an adult. It was clear that she was very disturbed by it at the time and it affected how she sees the world. But she also gives the impression that she’s moved through it and doesn’t allow it to define her in any way.
She wasn’t melodramatic about it nor did she downplay it, she spoke with authority and resolve. She could easily wallow in being victimized but doesn’t. Really great stuff there.
(* I’m not a fan of her work really on any level, but to me this shines through whatever I didn’t like about her)
Very interesting that Ana cites Blocked & Reported as changing her perspective and also talks about Breaking Points. It seems that her ideological evolution was similar to mine. I used to watch TYT back during the 2016 election, considered Trump an inexplicable demon, and agreed with almost everything Ana said on that show back them.
Her story is very believable to me. A lot of us who held those views back in 2016 have figured out that they are increasingly unhelpful in describing the world, and we have noticed that many who cling to that ideology have become fanatical and intolerant in the effort to maintain their belief.
I wasn't of those beliefs in 2016, but I certainly remember when the Duke Lacrosse case happened, my first reaction was that I believed it. I believed that there was some hostile, backwards territory called the Deep South where racists lived, I believed that frat boys routinely committed rape, and I hated Duke for various specific reasons. I was wrong. A lot of people were wrong.
What's striking is that the Duke faculty who signed some initial position statement never reversed it, even when the case fell apart, even when the prosecutor was correctly disbarred. People who know they're wrong and keep going are alien to me. Obviously, people have defense mechanisms against feeling the shame of being wrong, but the Duke lacrosse case truthers are living in an alternate reality.
One that is now far more routine, for so many issues.
One thing I’ve never understood: What is everyone’s problem with Dave Rubin? He “switched sides…” So what? If we’re going to allow Ana to “evolve” now (as we should), what did he do so wrong?
He created incredible (and meaningful) content in the 2015-2018 era and truly moved the cultural needle in a good way. I’m not as into what he’s creating now, but I certainly don’t get the animosity towards him.
He touched a nerve with the older liberal crowd… what was it?
He and I were close friends. I hung out with him and his now husband every weekend. He always complained about how he wasn’t making enough money, which I empathized with. But suddenly he quit TYT and did this weird media tour where he started trashing us without warning. First time (that I know about) was on Rogan. I reached out and asked why he would do that to a friend, and he didn’t really have an answer. It would take me two years to finally address it publicly to our audience because. I don’t know what his political views really are, and honestly I don’t care either way. If he’s sincerely conservative now I’m ok with that. It was how he threw our friendship under the bus for his rebrand that genuinely hurt me.
Thank you for your perspective. I was actually wondering about it more broadly among the left leaning liberal types, not to you personally. But your perspective certainly is valuable.
It strikes me as weird because I also know him personally a little bit and, back then, he was definitely hesitant at first to criticize TYT. Later on he started criticizing Cenk and TYT, but I never heard him speak on you personally.
Of course, I haven’t watched everything he’s ever done, but that doesn’t stick out at all.
Ms. Kasparian, before seeing this interview, I was inclined to hate you, on general principles. Having seen it, I did not feel a visceral dislike of you. I would have enjoyed a bit more substance -- specifically where have you changed your mind in response to arguments and ideas on "the right," and where are you still on "the left?" However, you seemed personable and reasonable. I plan to dig up your discussion with Ben Shapiro, just to see the interaction. Maybe you will become a libertarian yet.
I know that Cenk has recanted on his denial of the Armenian Genocide, and his reason for disbelief in it (that was what he learned in school) actually struck me as being fair. Most of us don't interrogate what we learned in school in great detail, assuming what we got was true and fair. However, I do think that "The Young Turks" is an unfortunate name, given their role in the Armenian Genocide. Perhaps a rebranding is in order?
It seems to me that he is a case study in the distinction between having thoughtful heterodox views and simply saying the opposite of whatever the big media monoculture is saying.
The thing is, by saying the opposite of whatever is coming out of the big institutions, you can often sound like a pretty good thinker. And doing that could also-in your words-move the needle simply because there is so little viewpoint diversity now.
I remember one of the first outwardly "heterodox" things I did was to join the likely large group of people who wrote in when he opened up submissions for his show, trying to get an airing of their views. The media landscape was starving for an alternative view, and still is, but I'm kind of glad I didn't end up on there.
Great guest. Great episode!
“Luxury beliefs” is a bad concept. The point of conspicuous consumption is that it’s a signal of having the wealth to buy status goods - that is, it’s exclusive. But anyone can profess a belief for free - there’s no exclusionary mechanism. Rob Henderson says that poorer people will suffer if they put these beliefs into practice, but he also claims the richer people who profess “luxury beliefs” don’t actually put them into practice, so there’s an obvious contradiction there. Why can’t everyone spout “luxury beliefs” and then surreptitiously live differently? Also, what is the mechanism that determines which beliefs become luxury in the first place?
I'm not sure that anyone can actually speak the language required; so much of academia is purposefully obfuscatory jargon that's always changing.
And status signals often rely on subtle insider cues like that. There are plenty of "new money" people who buy expensive things, perhaps thinking that it will help them fit in, but they don't buy the right things and they still don't fit in with the old money people. Similarly, many people are striving to be recognized as elite based on luxury beliefs, but not quite getting it right.
Most of the “luxury beliefs” Henderson cites are simplistic sentiments that anyone can express. His go-to examples include “criminals are victims”, “all family structures are valid”, and “success comes from inherited privilege rather hard work”.
That may be true, but his simplistic phrasings are novel to him as far as I can tell, and serve as a translation of academic gobbledygook.
In that case, wouldn’t it be more precise to call it “luxury terminology”?
I suppose so. If you take the simplest catchphrases that are comprehensible, I can walk around any affluent suburb and see one of those insipid "in this house we believe" signs with a bunch of those catchphrases, but do the people living in the house with the sign understand or agree with what it says? I doubt it. These are empty, performative "beliefs" to people who are actually in the elite.
I agree the signs are insipid, but they’re hardly a status signal. Anyone can put one up. There’s nothing “luxury” about them. “Luxury beliefs” is catching on because it’s a clever-seeming way to mock woke elites, but if you look closely it doesn’t actually make sense.
I totally agree that the race to dinner episode was the juiciest and best! Megan and Sarah, I know it was tough with the technical difficulties, but as an audience member, it didn’t matter so much and was still really great. More debates please! :)
Dave Rubin was one of the first heterodox people I started watching on youtube. At first I was entranced, then I realized he didn't seem to have any actual opinions or beliefs... he just disagreed with everyone on everything. I found it kind of sketchy and opportunistic. So I thought Ana's comment about not knowing what he actually believed quite funny. Even people who know him in real life don't know!
This was definitely not the criticism of Rubin at the time. The criticism was that he was not tough enough of an interviewer on anyone, not that he just disagreed with everyone.
I definitely know where he stands, he’s made it quite clear. I part ways with him on some issues, but it’s quite clear.
Definitely thought the guest was Anna Khachiyan for a split second and that would also have been very interesting!
There was a brief mention of Christina Hoff Sommers. She could be a good guest, but I think she’s in a comfortable retirement now, not sure, but I’d love to hear her.
Sommers retired right as wokeness and gender ideology took off. I would also love to hear her take on the current moment.
yes. CHS' Factual Feminist series was my first dip-my-toe outside the mainstream feminist victim-ology outlook. when the gender stuff exploded, I wondered where her voice went
First!
SECOND!
and i saw you saw me looking at me outside the event in LA last september anna!
It has always been curious to me why there are so many educated elites who are "allergic" to being perceived as right wing. I have always considered myself conservative even in high school, mostly because I never believed the left wings economic outlook which defied what I felt were my own observations about human nature, observations which are reflected best in thinkers of the free market like Milton Friedman/Thomas Sowell. They were just "obvious" to me, in the same way that many woman and men behave differently than each other. I always felt that "liberals" (not classic liberals) intended well, but seemed stymied by the unintended consequences of policies they advocated. Its like the more educated they got. the less they understand humans and their behaviors. I rarely saw them as evil (except those such as Stalin, Mao, etc), just misguided by their own ego to explain and control what they cannot.
I frankly just describe myself as right wing because as Razib Khan has written- where the left stands, I am not.
I am glad that people like Ana K have gotten out of their bubble, so they can at least see that their fellow citizens, as Douglas Murray has said, may be on to something.
This was like hearing my own journey narrated back to me. Ana, if you're still reading comments, one thing I ask you to consider is for TYT to phase out the interviews of unhinged MAGA supporters for the reasons I write about here (https://ericaetelson.substack.com/p/the-jordan-klepper-problem). TYT's interviewer is more respectful than Klepper but I assume the clips are cherry-picked to appeal to liberal confirmation bias, and then given a polarizing clickbait headline like "MAGA Super Karen RAGES About Being Deplatformed" and "We've Found The 4 Craziest Trump Supporters!" I truly believe these interviews do more harm than good and inflame the polarization you've grown to despise.
I hate it when women talk about "#metoo" (and yes of course maybe women hate men talking about certain things). Sure, the hashtag might have taken off recently, but the underlying issues go much farther back. The Dear Colleague Letter that made Title IX a criminal prosecution statute came out in 2012, and Robert Shibley catalogues all the judicial and administrative decisions that undergirded this in "Twisting Title IX", going back several decades.
I was recommended (by a woman) a book called Heterophobia which came out in 2000, by one of the few feminists who took this issue on, where she clearly describes a horrifying bureaucracy around sex and sexuality that existed well before Title IX and DEI. There was an excellent Aaron Sibarium podcast on how antidiscimination laws subtly changed in the early 1990's in ways that have completely gone off the rails.
And it does just boggle my mind when someone looks at a shadow bureaucracy that polices your every move without pesky limits like jurisdiction or statutes of limitations on one hand, and freely available pictures of naked women on the other hand, and concludes that porn is the problem. What sane young man reads the media coverage around Brett Kavanaugh and thinks "Tonight is the night! I'm going to ask Suzy out on that date"? Who knows how that request is going to be perceived thirty years from now? Another trenchant work is KC Johnson's book, which reaches a pretty sober conclusion that young men just shouldn't date on college campuses. And that was in 2007, when a certain sort of person said that campus craziness was just that, and it would never affect the real world.
This is not a deficit of social skills, it's a deficit of civil rights.
Oh yeah! That *was* Evangelista who said that! I don't know why I always thought it was Naomi Campbell. I really thought my '90s supermodel knowledge was better than that. Always learning something with this show!
Eric doesn't speak with Bret now, Meghan? Big if true.
I feel like I heard that somewhere but it's not verified and I shouldn't have said it. File that under "popped out of my mouth" and consider it retracted until further notice.
All is forgiven. You should issue a disclaimer like Michael Rapaport, who always announces that there is no fact-checking on his podcast
I honestly don't know much about Eric but if he is as arrogant as his brother comes across on air, it's easy to imagine a rift. I listen to Bret and Heather if they're not droning on about Covid and the related vaccines.
But from whence came the idea that just because a couple of people went off the rails over Covid that the IDW is dead or dying? I would think the rapid success of the Free Press indicates just the opposite. And people like Sullivan, Taibbi, Greenwald, Yglesias, seem to be as popular as always. At a slightly lower tier of popularity, Glenn Loury/John McWhorter, Blocked and Reported, Lex Fridman, Yascha Mounk, The Fifth Column, Reason magazine, put out solid content on a regular basis.
Yes, we could dispense with the silly IDW moniker but I'm waiting for a better one.
It's funny how the IDW label shifts and changes. I think it was an attempt to label the heterodox phenomenon, really, but it's less of a useful term, and heterodox seems to have stuck better. It also got far more wound up in a more select group of people.