Episode 65 -- "So Long, Pamela Paul" with Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri

You can't just retreat into yourself and be like, eh, I don't want to deal with this.

Like, we all don't want to deal with this, Pamela.

But you have to actually, especially as a journalist, you have to have the capacity to look at the conditions in the country and think about what is necessary and look at like previous historical periods.

What has worked to resist fascism?

What has not worked?

Like, you have to be an adult, Pamela.

You can't just retreat.

I mean, you even see this among like elected Democrats, right?

You had Chuck Schumer this week saying, like, well, you know, once you get on the treadmill next to these Republicans, it turns out they're not so bad.

And we can come to an agreement.

It's like, you want that to be true.

I get why people want that to be true.

It's not true anymore, though.

And at a certain point, you just have to grow up and accept that we don't have a country where you can do this like kumbaya.

We're all going to come together and Republicans are going to be normal.

It's just not going to happen.

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moore Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.

So, Adrian, today we are talking about the iconic, the singular,

well, the

uniquely

typical frenemy of the show, one Pamela Paul.

Pamela Paul.

So what do you know about Pamela Paul?

Who is this woman?

So I know of her.

I am familiar with her work.

It appears weekly in the New York Times and it resembles itself quite a bit over time.

But I have to say that I don't know nearly enough about Pamela Paul.

They are veritable paulologists out there.

They are a small group.

They have their own t-shirts and handshakes.

And we invited them onto the pod to talk with us about this puzzling person who just ended her tenure, her reign of terror, her reign of very, very milquetoast takes.

And that's Peter Shamshree and Michael Hobbs from If Books Could Kill.

Woohoo!

We are such super fans.

I'm really grateful to you guys for being here.

I feel kind of reclamped and starstruck.

So I'm really glad that we got a a little bit of Peter and Michael's time here to discuss the most annoying figurehead of the New York Times opinion section, Miss Pamela Paul.

I'm very confused by this interaction.

When somebody asks, Are you familiar with Pamela Paul?

The other person is supposed to say, All I know is, and then make a joke, and then the music kicks out.

Yeah, sorry.

Don't you guys know the secret to podcast?

Oh, we're going to infringe copyright right in front of you.

So, the occasion for this podcast is that Miss Paul has just exited the New York Times opinion section.

She seems to have been let go amid a series of downsizing and layoffs, the perennial media cuts that happen at the end of every fiscal quarter seem to have taken Miss Paul with them.

But I think her exit represents sort of the end of an era, not just for Miss Paul, but for a certain kind of like media commentary and intellectual trend that is now going the way of the dinosaurs as we enter the Trump 2.0 era.

She's also a challenge to me and Adrian's rule that you cannot be too stupid as a reactionary centrist to lose your job.

It turns out you actually can.

It has happened once.

Yeah.

I want to know what the column was that put her over the line because other people on that op-ed page are like constantly lying.

They're misrepresenting various campus anecdotes.

Something Pamela did was too much.

And I want to know so bad.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's an interesting moment, right?

She obviously matters as a representative of a bunch of things, but definitely one of the the things she represents is this kind of reactionary centrist racket.

And she was kind of the worst at it, it seems to me.

Like there was a kind of straightforwardness.

Yes.

And as you say, just like a kind of shallowness to it.

And I guess she came to it pretty late too.

Like some of these other folks have been honing that craft since their college days.

That doesn't appear to be the case with her, or at least she hadn't done it in a weekly column.

And so she is in some way, if there was anyone who was going to eventually get called into the principal's office and be like, turns out none of this happened and this doesn't matter uh it was gonna be her yeah i don't know if we need the 43rd column on what's going on on campuses pamela i love your optimism that that's why they would cut pamela paul uh she definitely just asked for like 1.3 a year and they were like sorry we're

you're just over what we were looking for and we have to let you go it's not the content it's not the thought yeah you're right yeah like the rage clicks have gone down pamela you've been put, you've been turned into glue.

She's also such a kind of moment in this, the weird interregnum period that we just had, right?

After four years of Trump, we then get Joe Biden.

Pamela Paul starts at the op-ed page in February of 2021.

So like right when Joe Biden takes over.

She's then basically fired or whatever, right when Trump is re-elected, essentially.

So she is this sort of moment in time of like, what were intellectual elites doing during these four years when like we kind of had a chance to like really put Trump behind us, right?

We could have laid the groundwork for a better world, for a future in which this kind of fucking guy cannot return.

And instead, due to, I would say, all of the mistakes of these people,

we have this guy again.

The thing that had been prevented is coming back and even worse.

I think in historical memory, we're going to look back and be like, wait, what was going on in these four years?

Like, what were institutions doing in these four years that laid the groundwork for this to happen again and worse?

And I think she's such a perfect little emblem of what they were preoccupied with.

Michael, I think it's even briefer.

I think she joined the Times opinion section in April 2022.

Am I wrong about that?

Oh, did I get the year wrong?

It was like, it was very brief.

She was there for under three years.

And I think you're right, Michael, that it was like a kind of transition period, right?

So you guys alluded to this, but Pamela Paul really had like a specific beat.

Many, many of her columns, of which there were over 200.

And I read so many of them.

You guys, I literally fell asleep at the dining room table.

I was like, I'm just going to like lower my head down onto my elbow.

And then I was like, I'm just going to rest my eyes because these things are so repetitive.

Yeah.

And she dealt a lot with excesses of the left, particularly on social issues, right?

Or like.

the embarrassing earnestness and like moral self-seriousness of the left, right?

So she wrote a ton about campus politics.

She wrote a a ton about like the kind of broad uh wokeness or cancel culture beat which we have discussed a lot in which adrienne is an expert uh literally wrote the book on it the cancel culture panic we buy it where books are sold and then she also wrote a ton about like language and like the words that were being used.

And so largely, I think what we're seeing from Paul is a fixation on the internet, right?

It is like the way that social media has made us all dumber by confusing these algorithmically generated like discourse machines for a public, more like substantively defined, extrapolated to like the largest opinion soapbox in our country, right?

Like Twitter brain rot scaled up to the actual New York Times.

A huge number of her columns are just about like, people are saying this thing online that I don't like.

And that's essentially it.

I mean, I am kind of obsessed with this tendency.

And I do think looking back, this is going to be one of the main threads that people pull out that basically intellectual elites lost a little bit of their relative standing with the rise of social media.

Because if you're smart and funny and interesting on Twitter, you can find a following and you can start a podcast and you can become somewhat of an intellectual elite through kind of more democratic means.

And a lot of the people who had these kind of gate-kept roles as intellectual elites lost, like they basically lost their minds because they're getting yelled at all the time.

There are people who are experts in the academic fields that they're summarizing who are saying, hey, you're misrepresenting my work.

All of a sudden, they were subjected to a little bit of meritocracy in a way that they had not before.

And a huge number of them just like completely melted down and made this their entire careers is essentially complaining about their lessers, trying to do better than them in the marketplace of ideas.

Pamela Paul is like, I feel like she represents several pundit tendencies.

One is just the idea that you like need to generate a new thought every week, but you have no actual expertise, right?

Right.

You're not like on a beat of any real sort, right?

Like, I think of the people who are good op-ed columnists.

You can use like Jamel at the Times, right?

And like, why is he good?

Well, probably because he's like a nerd about history to the point where you can probably call him a historian in certain regards, right?

And so he likes to write about that in the intersection of history and politics.

But if you're just sort of like a free-floating brain in space like Pamela Paul, being asked to generate a thought a week is actually kind of crazy.

And in fact, I think for most people, it's kind of crazy.

And this is why I think that like, in general, the op-ed project is sort of a weird relic of

times past and we don't really need it anymore.

And that's why if you do what you did, Maura, which is like just read these in succession, you're like,

what's going on here?

Half of them are about leftists on campus.

The other half are just about whatever appeared to be bothering her at any given time.

And that's because she had an editor being like, what's your complaint this week, Pamela?

And I just don't, I don't think we need that.

It might be interesting to turn at this point to like Pamela Paul's personal history.

Because I was a little curious, and this is one of many instances where I really just wish I was a fly on the wall at a New York Times like personnel or editorial meeting being like, how did you guys make this decision?

Yeah.

Because she was for like 10 years the head of the New York Times book review, where she was an intellectual gatekeeper at this like very important outlet.

Right.

And then she moved to the opinion section in a role to which, as Peter was saying, she does not seem particularly suited, right?

Like she does not have.

a background specialty the way a lot of opinion writers tend to, right?

She does not have a cause exactly, but she had this kind of like general sense of like entitlement to authority that seems to have been grounded by this experience as a books review editor, right?

Yeah, I know I assume that she was like fun.

I have like nothing to say.

I'm like, yeah, I'm trying to be generous to this woman.

Here's the thing.

Her history is actually like really opaque to me.

Even though I know exactly what she was doing for the last 25 years, it doesn't actually add up to a career in my brain.

Yeah.

You know, she was like

writing writing books.

She was at the times doing like children's book stuff.

I can't remember the exact details.

Then all of a sudden she's the head of the book review, which I think she said publicly, you know, I put myself out there and I got the job.

She does that for a decade kind of quietly.

And after that, somehow there's a transition into she's on the opinion page.

And None of those transitions actually like make sense in my brain.

Like at no point has she put out like what i would describe as a coherent body of work even though she's been writing for 20 years yeah she's sort of mysterious you know there are people like thomas friedman for example who i think are probably just as dull but i can sort of map out his like intellectual project a lot more than i can with pamela paul who i feel like is just sort of like a you know, somewhat of a careerist, someone who was just looking to move up at the times and then one day found herself sharing her opinions with everyone once a week.

Because it's not like she wrote a bunch of columns that did well or were really interesting, and they're like, oh, let's have you do this permanently.

If you look at her kind of author page on the New York Times, it's like nothing, nothing, nothing, and then a weekly column, essentially.

She writes like two or three things before she's appointed as a columnist, but very little else.

So I looked at her books.

She wrote three books before she took the job, I guess.

The suspicion I sort of came away with was she's David Brooks, just 10 years younger, right?

She is more or less consciously aping his whole deal with a slightly more lefty pop feminist bend.

But what she's demonstrating sort of by some kind of fucked up experiment is that actually you have to be an old white guy to be able to do this job at this point.

If you're younger, people will be like, this is fucking stupid.

Don't say this.

So you're saying she's a DEI hire?

Oh, because that term is illegal now.

That's true.

So that's why I won't say it.

I am on a green card.

So that would be very, very foolish of me.

If anyone from the Trump administration is listening, we should make it clear that we did this specifically to destroy a powerful woman, right?

That's what we're attempting to do here.

So please bear with us.

Yeah,

we're getting there, guys.

Yeah.

So, right, her first book is The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, which is very much a David Brooks-style pop sociology.

Sort of, we were the children of divorce.

There's a lot of we in that book.

And like, now we are having starter marriages.

Whenever anybody says we and doesn't define who we is, I'm like, speak for yourself.

Well, I think she's sort of trying to speak for Gen X in this one.

Like, she does sort of describe herself as sort of a latchkey kid and all that stuff.

So, like, it feels very like Gen X resume sort of at the end of the 20th century.

But the other thing, of course, I think she's probably metabolizing is what appears to have been her own starter marriage to a fellow New York Times columnist and man who will write to your, what is it, dean or provost if you make fun of him on Twitter, Brett Stevens.

Yeah, she was married to Brett Stevens, quote unquote, briefly, right?

Starter marriage.

I read all about it.

Who is nominally a conservative, but has exactly the same opinions as Pamela Paul.

Yeah, weird

issue.

This is the type of fact that makes me want to crack a joke, but there's nothing that's funnier than just the fact that they were married.

It's just so funny.

When I read that, it's like things click into place in your brain, right?

And also, it sort of makes sense of her career, right?

She was running in circles with folks like this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, we talk about like how Pamela Paul is a type, like the anti-woke pundit is a type.

And there's a bunch of them, but there's not so many that they don't all know each other.

Right.

Yeah.

And like the people she's talking about on the internet who are making fun of her, you know, the like overly woke liberal is a type.

And again, there's not so many of them that they don't all know each other, right?

Like she is attacking in her columns a very specific milieu that is actually quite small, but she also is a product of a very specific milieu that is quite small.

Yeah, she says in one of her columns, like, Brett and I used to always fight about politics.

And my first thought was, like, what?

About what I hate a campus feminist and he hates a different campus feminist.

Like, what are different fighting about?

I think we should give her some credit here.

Brett Stevens is like a fascist in a way that I think that Pamela Paul is not.

You know what I mean?

It makes sense to me that they would spend some time together, that they perhaps imprinted on one another in various ways.

But I just want to be clear.

My position is that Brett Stevens is much worse.

You know, the heart wants what it wants, right?

You can't fault love, I guess.

When someone is dripping with masculinity like Brett Stevens.

Yeah, who can turn that down?

Not a straight-Gen X woman, that's for sure.

There is a weird through line that I only noticed in going through our archive of like 200 Pamela Paul columns, which is like she has these, obviously, these kind of both sides ism opinions where she's like, oh, we're not getting in touch with people with different opinions anymore.

And very, very frequently, those are about intimate settings.

Like I'm going to be later talking about the one about roommate matching, where she's like, it's important to share a room with an like, I mean, she doesn't say it, but like, smell the farts of like a Republican, right?

Like, and I'm like, oh, that feels like this is just, again, about Brett Stevens.

Like, there's this sort of like late 90s, like, but she's a Democrat and he's a Republican.

Well, how do you make it work?

And like James Carville's marriage.

Yeah.

Right.

Like, and who then used like, look, I'm able to fuck this person as like their model of bipartisanship, basically.

Yeah, I do wonder.

I mean, it's kind of like what Peter was saying that like he is like a straight up fascist, but also he doesn't believe that climate change is real.

Pamela Paul probably does believe that climate change is real and that we shouldn't do anything about it and that the people who want us to do something about it are the real problem.

So ultimately, at the end of the day, they do, in fact, have the same opinion on that.

It's just like they would express it differently.

Right.

Or at least their choice for how to approach the situation is functionally identical, right?

Right.

Brett believes that you should not be protesting climate change and racism because both of them are fake.

Right.

And she believes that you shouldn't be protesting them because protesting is gauche and humiliating.

Yeah, right, yeah, yeah.

You guys are pointing to like the superficiality of the supposed differences.

But the supposed differences, it's like narcissism of small difference we're identifying among these like anti-woke pundits and their conservative bedfellows is, I think, distinct enough that it's very, very important to them, right?

Because that allows them to understand themselves as having this like virtuous tolerance

of conservatism in a way that's like quite myopic about like what tolerance would actually

mean.

I mean, in the sort of 50-year view, I do think that we're going to look back at this moment as a time when elites took on this bizarre fetishization of like balance and

hearing out people who you disagree with and this weird, this completely far-right propaganda narrative that like people on the left can't hear views that they don't agree with and this thing where like we're all supposed to be hanging out with people we disagree with constantly, but with no actual kind of basic acceptance of the fact that sometimes people are wrong about things and that like hanging out with someone who denies that climate change is real is not actually intellectually nourishing in any meaningful way.

But there's just this fetishization of like the aesthetics of like, oh, you're supposed to hear people out.

But that that view only favors like right-wingers, climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, people who just do not have the facts on their side.

And this total refusal of intellectual elites to like just draw a line under things.

and be like, no, we're not going to hear from people who say that climate change is fake anymore.

That's not like me being afraid of intellectual challenge.

That's actually just like, we've closed this debate.

It's a huge waste of my time to keep debating this with people who do not have the facts on their side.

But there's this weird, she seems to really embody this thing, this construction of a moral panic that people like us are unwilling to hear views different from ours.

And I actually think being unwilling to hear views that are not backed by science is good and fine.

And there's been basically nobody defending it in places like the op-ed page of the New York Times because everyone thinks we're all supposed to be hearing from people who don't agree with us all the time.

It's it's bizarre.

And that like willingness to submit to being berated by a fascist is itself a kind of like intellectual virtue, right?

As opposed to just kind of like a symptom of not having a lot of principles.

I don't know.

I mean, another thing that came out, you know, one of you guys' research assistants came out with an Excel spreadsheet of all of her columns, which was very edifying.

Shout out to Olivia.

Thank you, Olivia, for

valiant work going through every Pamela Paul column.

It is fascinating how much she talks about like free speech as an issue.

And this, I've noticed those other like friends of mine have their parents kind of radicalizing toward the right and becoming like sort of drifting into QAnon territory.

And free speech is oftentimes the entry point for that.

It's like, well, I don't agree with what they say, but I think everybody should be able to say it.

And that is a completely right-wing propagandistic narrative that has been peddled by all kinds of far-right news sources, this idea that there's a problem with left-wing censorship in this country, which of course we're seeing now is like not remotely the problem.

But I think this is an entry point for a lot of otherwise well-meaning people to kind of open their minds and open their lives to people who do not have a good faith objection to things and are just like peddling garbage all the time.

But in this weird four-year interregnum period between Trump administrations, everyone just got obsessed with this idea that like free speech is under attack from like college leftists.

And I think Pamela Paul is such a perfect example of that.

It's like, why are you just talking about this all the time?

Yeah, I mean, this was always sort of a useful tactic for the right in a couple of ways.

I mean, one is that it just sort of, you know, creates an intellectual framework through which you need to listen to them, right?

It's actually important that you listen to my opinions.

Yeah.

And then the other thing is that they never actually have to discuss those opinions.

They just get to have this discussion about speech.

And the opinions themselves become almost a secondary concern.

They're subjugated to the idea that the left is suppressing speech.

And so the discussion becomes about the excesses of the left rather than any given topic of conversation.

And the debates never actually have to be had for the right to win them.

So you get this sort of idea that, like, A, the left is generally censorious.

And then B, that maybe they have something to hide on each of these issues, right?

That the reason they are censorious is because if we talked about race and IQ for long enough, we would reveal that in fact we're wrong, right?

And we we cover up for that by censoring opposing views.

That sort of thing has been very beneficial to the right in ways that just sort of end run around the actual substantive debate.

You know, it's almost like quaint at this point to talk about how the free speech concerns were not real, right?

Like, you know, the Trump administration is laying it bare to some degree.

But even last year, I mean, Pamela Paul was writing about how like students not getting jobs because they were protesting Israel was just sort of good and like the natural course of events that like wealthy business people don't want to hear you yapping at a protest, right?

That's not compatible with someone who writes 20 columns a year about the suppression of free speech.

But it doesn't even clock to her because at no point are they actually having a genuine discussion, right?

This is all just sort of frame shifting.

Right.

I think what you guys are articulating is that Pamela Paul and like sort of the anti-woke pundit genre

have sort of opened the door for the entrance into political discourse of some like really like odious ideologies that are just like incompatible with the shared dignity of human beings

in civic life and democratic governance, right?

Like if you are constantly being berated and having to have the debate about whether or not you should hear out the race science guy,

it

distracts people from actually shutting down the race science guy, right?

And I think what we are seeing at this historical moment is that like Paul and her ilk, this like anti-woke pundit genre, really could have only existed at this like very specific historical moment when conservatives were being made uncomfortable by what seemed like these ascendant social movements of the 2010s and were using their credibility, their authority, their places of great visibility and like quote-unquote platforms to discredit those social movements in a way that made the reaction seem more plausible and gave it this implicit imperimeter of elite approval, right?

And that's why I think Pamela Paul as an anti-woke pundit and maybe the anti-woke pundit more broadly in its like various other manifestations is kind of done.

I think they've like sort of like matured and burst like a pimple, right?

Because now Moira.

Oh, sweet Moira.

These people are going to be gone.

These people are all blaming the left for what is happening now.

They're like, if the left didn't scold people for not saying pregnant people, we wouldn't have Trump too.

Like this has become the entire narrative is like, oh, this, this vindicates the anti-woke pundits.

It's possible that that is simply their last defense before they wither away and die.

I hope so.

I honestly have no optimism left.

because

I really don't know what happens to the people who have been just decrying like wokeism or whatever for the last four or five years, but also sort of like nominally consider themselves liberal.

You know, many of these people have just sort of drifted right and have started presenting as right wing.

But for the Thomas Chatterton Williamses of the world, I don't know what happens to these people.

I don't know what their like columns about free speech look like when the concern is like, oh, the government is now deporting people whose speech it doesn't like.

Right.

And also they're literally going, they're using control F to go through documents and cutting funding for anything that uses the term like transition or like bias, like regardless of the context in which they're using those things.

Like the hypersensitivity of the left and like word policing, we're getting literal word policing now.

Right.

So just all this stuff feels so perfunctory and bizarre to be talking about in anything other than an apology for the way these people have spent the last four years of their lives.

But like, also, I think that part of the anti-woke pundits' shtick has been the assumption that these left-wing social movements had a degree of power, right?

They had to be able to present themselves as brave truth tellers challenging a hegemonic understanding that was wrong-headed, right?

They needed to have a boogeyman who was menacing enough to justify their own like very smug sense of heroism, right?

That is no longer plausible.

I think even to like really dishonest people, among whom I would count Thomas Chatterton Williams, who I think sucks, put that in.

Make sure that stays in the answer.

Say his name.

Well, like he does screenshot my tweets sometimes as like an example of a Herodon.

You know, look at this woke feminist.

Air horn or something.

Thomas Chatterton Williams sucks.

I'm like, you suck too, buddy.

But like they really have this kind of moral vanity of the brave and righteous that relies on a fiction that the left was ascendant in the 2010s, right?

And that's just like no longer plausible, even for like bald-faced liars.

Yeah, I think that's probably right.

I'll be watching Chatterton more closely than anybody because this is his only beat to a degree that is really unique among these pundits.

Yeah.

In the Braindead Olympics, it's like Pamela Paul is gold and Thomas Jeffrey Williams is like silver, I think.

I mean, at least Pamela Paul, every other column would be about just like some like movie popcorn's not as good as I remember.

You know,

there's an output that's not strictly about this.

Whereas Chatterton Williams and some of the other folks at The Atlantic, it really is their only beat.

Yeah, it's 100%.

I mean, I'm very intrigued by what happens next with these folks, but I do believe that, like you're saying, Moira, that

they had a moment where they could pretend to be kind of brave and they could pretend to be heroic.

And now we're entering a moment where like standing up to the regime would require actual bravery, actually putting your career and perhaps your person in some danger.

And all I can really guarantee is that none of them will be courageous in that context, that none of them will show any actual courage.

Yeah.

On our episode, Peter, you kept talking about how you kept finding Pamela Paul columns and being like, this is the quintessential Pamela Paul Paul.

And we were going through the Excel spreadsheet.

I noticed she has one where she says the whole point of the column is cats are better than dogs.

And I'm like, we have a winner.

Just the dumbest thing to litigate in the op-eds.

That's what I'm telling you.

Just because her columns are just like her editors, like, where is it?

And she's looking around the room and seeing a cat and being like, oh, I got it.

Love it.

Cats, it's something of like, you have to earn their loyalty, but you get their loyalty in the end.

I'm just like, watching.

The parents.

You can't make a column about that.

It's basically copyright infringement.

So that's actually a question that Pamela Paul is more open about than some of these other people.

Like, I feel like, especially Atlantic contributors, named and unnamed, tend to kind of work themselves into sort of moral high dudgeon and like tend to sort of

write, like, these pieces are like 4,000, 5,000 words long.

They're very, very serious.

Yeah.

But there is this kind of anti-woke punditry that also is sort of kidding, sort of not.

They're like, oh, like if you, if you push the button, you're like, that didn't happen, or that no one says that.

They're like, well, I'm just trying to get the overall vibe.

And like, why can't you take a joke?

Right.

Like, there's the infamous, still one of my favorite articles of all time, Sasha Eisenberg fact-checking David Brooks

on the steak pricing in, I forget where it is.

It's like rural Pennsylvania.

Yeah, yeah, your county, maybe.

Yeah, it's this whole like, oh, I was actually kidding in my analysis, but I also wasn't kidding, right?

Yeah.

The fact was a joke.

The conclusion I drew from it was not.

Yes, right.

This was, I thought, an excellent insight in the Andrea Along Chu piece on Pamela Paul, which is the kind of thing every now and then a takedown piece, and it's usually by Andrea Chu, will emerge that like then gives me nightmares about being the subject of such a like withering dissection of all of my flaws.

Spare me.

Andrea Chu, if you're listening, please do not write this piece about me.

Because it's like, it's very precise and it's the kind of cruelty where like a certain writer can just see into somebody's soul and like...

understand everything that they fear about themselves and then just confirm it as true in public.

And one of the things Chu says about Paul is that she clearly wants to be given the credit of being a little unserious, a little cheeky and kidding.

Yeah, yeah.

And you can see that in a lot of these pieces.

There's a posture of like, like jocular knowingness.

Yeah.

And I think part of the disconnect between Paul's sense of herself and how she appears to the outside world is that she thinks

she has a set of claims to credibility of like being an insider and being on the right side that she actually actually has not earned from her audience, right?

Completely, yeah, yeah, yeah.

She's like, Of course, me as a good liberal, I would never endorse the worldview that these annoying campus protesters are protesting against.

I am objecting on

matters of priorities or of style.

And it's like, well, actually, it's not obvious to those of us merely consuming your public output and not living with you in your head that you do object to the substantive

facts of injustice, right?

Like it's not really made clear.

This is why I asked you guys to put together a list of all of her columns is because I wanted to figure out like to what extent is she actually dedicating her intellectual output to like the messages of liberalism.

She doesn't think I'm a liberal, but, and then everything is just conservative boilerplate.

So in the Excel spreadsheet that Olivia produced, there are 164 entries of like her actual columns.

There's other things that she's written, but her actual columns, she wrote 164 of them during her tenure.

I counted six that were just like straight up like liberal stuff.

Like she has one about like the rise of Christo-fascism.

She has one about like how John Roberts should retire.

She has one after overturning Roe v.

Wade that's like the Supreme Court is bad.

So six columns out of 164 are just like liberal stuff.

She has eight.

about how trans rights have gone too far.

She has 13 about like campus controversies, like various things of like this college president messed up.

And she has countless, I mean, I like stopped counting at a certain point, but she has countless that are just like these like anti-progressive screets.

Like progressives are fucking up.

So she has one, don't let Republicans off the hook on same-sex marriage.

Political correctness used to be funny.

Now it's no joke.

This 1991 book was stunningly prescient about affirmative action.

The most profound loss on campus isn't free speech.

It's listening, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And it's in this interregnum period, when there was a real opportunity to turn the country around into a better direction, she spent the vast majority of her time warning about the excesses of the left and ignoring the excesses of the right, which were becoming more and more obvious and is now the regime that we live under.

I always think about my own career of like, well, what do I want to tell people I did?

Like, what do I want to talk to my grandkids about?

What did you do during the four years when Trumpism was ascendant?

Oh, I complained about campuses.

I complained about words being different.

Are you proud of that?

Are you happy with that?

Like, I just have bottomless contempt.

We were podcasting our asses off.

That's what we were doing.

That's right.

It's like, at least, I feel like at least, I hope that like we've given people a realistic picture of like the threats in the country.

And like, every once in a while, you know, we'll complain about campus stuff.

We'll complain about leftist excesses.

Fine.

But it's like, if you look at the corpus of work, you would not get a sense from Pamela Paul that like, oh, yeah, there's this like increasingly openly fascist movement on the right that is seeking and gaining power all over the country.

You would never get that impression.

Yeah, I was thinking about like, imagine if a historian 50 years from now or 100 years from now tells the story of 2020 to 2024 using only one columnist.

And imagine they tried to reconstruct it using Jamal Bowie's columns.

Yeah, yeah.

They'd get a pretty accurate picture of what happened.

They'd probably get a bunch of events, right?

And there'd be some things missing.

There's some things he doesn't write about because that's someone else's speed.

But with Pamela Paul, you'd have an absolutely absurd picture of what actually was going on in the country.

Yeah, you'd think campus protesters, like 19-year-olds, were like taking over the entire government apparatus of the country and like throwing conservatives in prison or whatever.

And like, well, funnily enough, 19-year-olds are now taking over the government, but it's a very different kind of 19-year-olds.

I'm just correct about that.

Yeah, it was not the blue-haired, like non-intuitive pronoun 19-year-olds.

It was the like, I have spent thousands of hours on YouTube watching like only a Nazi video game streamer.

It wasn't like the black-haired

Yeah, that's who we have right now.

I think I disagree, Adrian.

I feel like reading the Pamela Paul columns would be a little more useful because if you read the Jamel columns, you'd be like, how did Trump get re-elected?

You read Pamela Paul and you're like, oh, I see.

People were a bunch of idiots.

I mean, the, you know, the whole like, I'm a liberal butt has just become a throat clearing exercise for people who are shifting right.

It's a way for them to sort sort of like just salve the like internal wound created by the fact that they recognize that to some degree they are conservative now, that they have become reactionary, and yet want to communicate that they are, you know, egalitarian, that they embrace those values that they feel like they should embrace.

Right.

But again, it doesn't matter.

They don't embrace those values in any meaningful sense, right?

The liberal values are the ones that you keep at home tucked away in a drawer, and the ones you bring to the New York Times are the reactionary complaints.

Yeah, you should be judging me on what's in my heart, not what I choose to put out into the world.

Not what I write in the New York Times, guys.

Not what I like say and do.

Just what I think privately, yes.

So now that we've like diagnosed Paul as a conservative who believes that she's a liberal

who has been sort of backed in by the excesses of liberals to publicly proselytize conservative viewpoints, right?

Do we want to like list some of these symptoms in the form of just like her columns and her subheads?

Because we thought one way of approaching this phenomenon might just be in like revealing its repetition.

So here's like a few of Pamela Paul's subheads.

Too many bus and subway passengers don't pay.

The best solution is more policing.

Stop all the talk of breaking barriers and glass ceilings.

With children's health and well-being at stake, effective, evidence-based, and compassionate health care must be accepted.

To argue against Kamala Harris is not inherently racist or sexist.

The left's narcissism of small differences hands mainstream positions to Republicans.

I don't like operating in unison and I've never been much of a tribalist or a joiner.

Sorry, I can't get through it.

My favorite, Kamal.

It's so good.

A generation raised to believe it could change the world learns the rest of the world may not share this vision.

PEN America needs to ensure more than than one point of view is heard on even the most contentious issue.

You've been wronged.

That doesn't make you right.

Roommate matching eliminates an important part of the college experience.

She's got her finger on the pulse.

Oh my god.

Did you guys see the one where she complains about the demise of DVD.com?

Wow.

That was a funny case.

As a fellow, I mean, honestly, as a fellow old person, I like, I get it.

But like, Again, it's like you can just complain to your friends about things.

You don't have to dedicate a column to them.

This is the New York Times.

Those urging non-partisan organizations to favor certain speech over others should consider that the tables can always turn.

Some of these could be weirdly self-aware.

When schools become overtly political, they put their future at risk.

I wonder what she means by that.

There's no definitive research on how many transgender people have detransitioned.

Oh, yeah.

Trans activists have pushed an ideological extremism by pressing for an unproven treatment orthodoxy.

And the ultimate.

Barbie is bad.

There, I said it.

It's fucking art.

Bad art, but it's art.

Yeah.

So let's maybe stand back and reflect on what has just washed over us, right?

Because one point I wanted to make about Pamela Paul that might be like more of a broader media criticism point, right?

Like there are institutions and incentive structures that created this

flood of slop.

And like the anti-woke pundit genre in particular really relies on this kind of like repetition of basically the same complaint in different packaging from week to week.

Right.

Yeah.

It's an incredibly narrow and repetitive genre that Paul was working in.

And that I think is actually kind of part of its appeal to the people who read this kind of stuff.

It's got very specific genre conventions that it serves over and over, you know, like your mom's mac and cheese.

Like it's comfort food that just assures you that like new information that might be challenging about your worldview can in fact be disregarded right but it's also this repetition is like a function of a digital media ecosystem that extends even beyond the anti-woke pundit genre like there's this notion that writers and publications now are continually reproducing the same thing over and over

and they have incentives that just don't allow for a lot of like experimentation or like new thinking or different thinking, right?

It's a rhythm.

We are in the third week of the month, and therefore Pamela Paul will be complaining about a campus, right?

There's this like kind of narrowing of options that has happened.

And also in the fourth week, she's going to be saying how she's not a joiner and she's against conformity of thought.

And then the other three weeks just produces the same column as everybody else.

I've noticed that there are trans people and that makes me scared and sad.

Yeah.

I have to give a shout out to my favorite line in all of Pamela Pauldham, which we talked about on Fooks Good Kill, but it's just too good to resist.

In her very, I think it was her very final column for The Times, she sort of gives like bulleted pieces of advice for everyone, and one of them is break up with your tribe.

And in that, she says,

belonging to any group that requires ideological, behavioral, and even aesthetic commitment isn't necessarily the best way to connect with fellow humans in a highly pixelated and polarized world.

And so we were thinking,

aside from ideological, behavioral, and aesthetic commitments, how would you connect with another human being?

What else is there?

Yeah, you're supposed to choose them at random from the yellow pages and just form a friendship.

Anything other than that is conformity of thought.

Just free float, like amoebas in a Petri dish sort of connections.

I believe that she has these sort of like preset beliefs, right?

She has these like thoughts about cancel culture.

She has these thoughts about tribalism that like loosely weave into it.

But at no point has she ever sat down and tried to make them cohere.

And so they end up in these really absurd places where she ends up saying like, you shouldn't really be basing your connections with other human beings on their behavior or ideology or aesthetics.

Yeah.

It should be a fourth thing.

Right.

Right.

The

take your grandma to a punk show.

She'll love it.

Right.

I mean, you know, but that is sort of the natural result of the position she takes about tribalism because her only purpose for bringing up tribalism at all is to scold the left, right?

And obviously when you start breaking it down, it's sort of like, well, of course, everyone belongs to like quote unquote tribes and, you know, they cohere for different reasons.

Some of those reasons are relatively rational.

Some of those reasons are relatively irrational.

That's like way too boring and way too convoluted for a New York Times op-ed.

So you have to be like, tribalism bad.

Yeah.

Then you write about it for years on end.

And then in your final column, reveal that you've never actually thought about it at all.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I also, when I was coming up with a list of like her actual legitimately left-wing columns that she's written over the years, one of them I came across the headline, which is, 90 years ago, this book tried to warn us.

A 1933 novel on the Nazi rise to power is still relevant.

I was like, oh, she's talking about the Nazi rise to power.

Like, okay, finally she's talking about like right-wing radicalization.

No.

It's about maintenance phase.

It's the dangers of tribalism.

Oh.

So she says, it's a warning about the ways in which a country can lose its grip on the truth, the ways in which tribalism is is easily roused to demonize others, the ways in which warring factions can be abetted by the media and accepted by a credulous population.

Which book is she talking about?

The Oppermans?

Oh, Feustwanger.

Leon Feutwanger.

But like, I don't think 1933 is an example of the dangers of tribalism.

It's not like people believed strongly on both sides.

Like, you cannot look at that as a historical event and think that it's about polarization and like the guys losing things.

If German Jews had gone out and just like made friends with more Nazis, maybe that wouldn't have happened.

I mean, like, that is a monstrous proposition.

I'm like, I'm not familiar with this book, but I'm familiar enough with the historical period to say, like, I don't think tribalism was the problem in 1933 Germany.

Yeah.

And I mean, Fleuchstanger wouldn't have said that either.

I mean, like, it's an utter misreading of him and his work.

You mean what she's getting?

German intellectual history wrong?

I'm shocked.

Well, I mean, she's getting the book wrong.

I'm shocked that she's getting 1933 German history wrong after only reading her get 2025 American history wrong.

Yeah.

Things that are literally happening now.

Yeah.

I mean, the other thing that's interesting about this kind of tribalism complaint is that it's noticeable, right, that that's a kind of meme or idea that really seems to catch on among elites, particularly.

Like, I wonder if there's a sociologist doing work on like whether or not their tribes are just kind of smaller.

Like, especially her book on parenthood ink or whatever it's called, like, seems so specific to like Park Slope moms that I'm like,

well, yeah, but you do realize like you are obviously surrounded by a lot of those people and you may not like them.

That's fine.

You understand that for me, the Park Slope mom is something I know from an HBO show I watch.

She lists all these things, like parenting coaches and whatever.

Like, I'm a fairly new parent.

Like, I haven't heard of any of this shit.

You do kind of imagine that, like, maybe these people just run in fairly similar circles and then sort of try to tell themselves, like, oh, it's actually very, very diverse because some of these people are Republicans, right?

Like ultimately, they're using the whole like diversity of opinion to like hide the fact that like they might, you know, when they're being super honest with themselves, notice that they only hang out with people in the same field who have the same level of accomplishment, same socioeconomic income bracket, whatever.

Right.

They don't find the differences between like center left and the center right to be that meaningful because everyone within that spectrum that they ever meet is worth $3.5 million.

Right.

That's sort of like the heart of their analysis of tribes.

Pamela Paul doesn't really do this to the extent that someone like Thomas Chatterton Williams might, but a lot of people in this reactionary centrist space will basically imply that like tribalism is like step one, and then like step 50 is genocide or something along those lines, right?

That that first you create tribes and then there are all these snowballing effects and then one day Nazism.

I sort of intuitively understand why someone might think that.

It does feel like baby's first analysis of Nazism,

right?

It's so weird to talk about this stuff so abstractly, to talk about the dangers of tribalism.

And it's sort of like, you know, there are Nazis in America, right?

Like you don't need to think about like whether moderate Democrats might one day be this

thing 100 years in the future because they've embraced tribalism when that thing actually exists right now and they're on the other side of the political spectrum and actually holding a pretty solid amount of political power.

This stuff just

it frustrates me because I can't tell how intentional it is.

I'm like, are you talking past this problem on purpose?

Or are you really this blind to political dynamics in America?

Right.

Because you can say the left is on like step one of 50 toward genocide, but also the right is on step like 42, 43.

So it's like, which one requires more attention and warnings about?

Right.

Who's closer to Nazism?

The ones that are 40% Nazis?

Or like the Kamala Hera supporters?

Or like people who yell about a book on Twitter.

being like, I don't like this book.

I think you guys are getting to the point where, you know, what's really conspicuous about Paul is that her professed values or her supposed values really do not match her demonstrated priorities.

Right.

And I think like what you can do from the columns is sort of reverse engineer what her actual priorities really are.

Yeah.

And one of them is just like quiet.

Absolutely.

Like she doesn't want politics to intrude in her life or in her social world or to demand anything of her, which on the one hand makes her very amenable to whatever the status quo is, but also makes her really hostile to anybody who seems to be making a demand for change.

Right.

So she's like

always

looking to like make this gesture of telling a certain group, maybe an imaginary one, to like stop doing something.

Like, how are we supposed to read?

like,

you know, I don't like protests.

Yeah.

That's her quintessential don't bother me column.

Yeah.

It's don't bother me.

It's don't make me go outside.

Like, I would rather like be at home where it's quiet.

It's about like objection to nuisance.

Yeah.

And like

fascism is less of a threat in this worldview than like of being bothered or inconvenienced.

Yeah.

Like having ideals is actually gauche.

Like trying to pursue those ideals in an activist manner is embarrassing.

The don't protest column sits right next to her final column where she,

when giving advice about dealing with the world under Trump 2.0, says basically like, don't freak out, don't react too much, ignore Elon Musk, and then find like small ways to protest.

And the example she gives is that she doesn't use words like huge that Donald Trump overuses.

Revolutionary.

So her preferred form of protest is something that literally, you could be married to someone doing this and never notice that they're doing it.

Yeah, it's like, don't do anything that might compel an institution or a group of people to have to change their behavior, right?

It's like, one of the things you heard during the big campus protests in like 2023 and 2024 was like, oh, God, like, why are they blocking traffic?

And it's like, well, because they're trying to draw attention to a cause by creating like material consequences.

And it's like, oh, no, but they need to do this in a way that doesn't bother or inconvenience me.

It's like, well, that secures an ineffectual protest, right?

Right.

Yeah.

You need to be under the covers while Donald Trump is on television and you flip him off under the covers, right?

Make sure no one else is in the room.

Don't tell anyone afterwards.

You cannot tell anyone.

That would ruin the beauty of the protest.

Otherwise, Pamela Paul Collum.

People should stop telling their spouses that they flipped off some trip under the covers.

That's the real problem problem with the left.

Symbolic actions only, no material effect is allowed.

Also, I have like an emerging theory on this that, you know, part of what's going on in America and like the rest of the world and why so many countries are falling to populism now is just an aging population.

And I think there's this data like when you have a younger population, you're much more likely to have revolutions.

And I think we don't have as much data on what happens when you have an aging population because it's essentially never happened in human history before.

But what it feels like to me is a very powerful force in American politics is this nostalgia for a previous era and also wishful thinking that like, I just want things to go back to normal.

And as a 43-year-old person, I think this all the time.

I have like deep resentments about like, what the fuck?

Like I have to go to another protest.

I have to deal with these fucking assholes for the rest of my life.

This is such garbage.

Like I'm so mad about it.

And like, can't everything just go back to normal so I can just live my life and not have to think about this stuff.

I think that's like a real impulse.

But the problem is she then doesn't take the next step of being like, well, that's not an option anymore.

You just have to engage with the way that things are and you have to do your best in the situation that you're given.

You can't just retreat into yourself and be like, eh, I don't want to deal with this.

Like we all don't want to deal with this, Pamela.

But you have to actually, especially as a journalist, you have to have the capacity to look at the conditions in the country and think about what is necessary and look at like previous historical periods, what has worked to resist fascism, what has not worked.

Like you have to be an adult, Pamela.

You can't just retreat.

I mean, you even see this among like elected Democrats, right?

You had Chuck Schumer this week saying, like, well, you know, once you get on the treadmill next to these Republicans, it turns out they're not so bad.

And we can come to an agreement.

It's like, you want that to be true.

I get why people want that to be true.

It's not true anymore, though.

And at a certain point, you just have to grow up and accept that we don't have a country where you can do this, like, kumbaya.

We're all going to come together and Republicans are going to be normal.

It's just not going to happen.

I think there's a degree to which everyone's sort of trying mentally to return to 2014.

And it happens in different ways where if you're on the left, you're thinking, well, obviously what we had in 2014 was insufficient because look what happened next, right?

And we need to sort of like reevaluate what we want from our politics.

If you're just sort of like a very comfortable liberal, then you might think, oh, the solution is we elect someone like Obama.

and they return us to 2014.

Yeah.

If you're a little more reactionary, then you might think, well, what has changed since then?

And what's in your field of view is like left-leaning protesters, right?

And so rather than think that there is an ascendant reactionary movement in this country, you think, oh, the problem is like that people on the left, the people who are in like my general vicinity in Park Slope, are becoming a little too annoying.

And that has somehow brought us here.

And returning to 2014 means subduing them and subjugating them politically.

Also, as someone in my 40s, I empathize with being being annoyed by a larger and larger percentage of your friend group.

Yeah.

I get that, Pamela.

I'm with you.

100%.

Although, people are fucking annoying.

I couldn't tell you because I'm 39.

Thank you.

I mean, in 2014, also, like, my back didn't hurt.

You know, like, I could run faster and I was more beautiful.

She literally has a column about that.

I was like, use representation.

People whose back and knees hurt.

Fine, Pamela.

Who will bring me back to the moment when my deadlift was 350?

Yeah.

So, I mean,

that's another like wonderful line in the Andrea Long Chu piece, right?

She says, many of her columns are primers in aging gracelessly, full of half-hearted gripes about young people and a reflexive longing for the poorly remembered past.

And I think this is why I'm a little surprised she got shit can, to be honest, because in some way, there is this sort of like multiplicative narcissism there, right?

Like, as you say, Michael, she could confront these really gnarly, scary questions that are occupying us all today.

Like, what is happening in this country?

What can we still do to stop it?

What's happening next?

Or you could be mad at the thing that's happening right in front of you, the barista with the blue hair, or your friend whose kid uses neo-pronouns or whatever.

You can obviously legitimately have both those gripes.

But Pamela Paul shows you how to telescope from one to the other, right?

How to say, like, oh, the thing that mildly annoys you, right?

She's a lot of turnstile jumping, right?

Like, the thing that you saw on your way to the office today is the downfall of civilization.

That is

through

this insane little caval, you basically are bringing the whole house of cards down, right?

As opposed to,

well, you know, it's obviously not the most important thing, but it also annoyed me, which, like, right, like my back hurting also annoys me.

It is not, I don't think, the cause of fascism in America.

I think, unfortunately, those two things are unrelated, and I will have to deal with them separately.

I mean, not to be like, it's the phones, but I do think social media makes it difficult or more difficult to distinguish between what is most annoying and what is most important, right?

If you're barraged constantly by shit you find really annoying, that will come to seem urgently important.

And we're just not in an age where we have the luxury of taking our own annoyances as seriously as Pamela Paul wants us to take hers.

Wait, can we talk about the language policing columns?

Please.

This is like my obsession with these people.

So as I mentioned, 164 columns, three years of work.

She has six columns about how like the right wing is radicalizing.

She has 11 columns about like language policing and how like liberal like leftists are doing too much language policing.

My favorite was like don't say queer, the straight woman being like, I on behalf of the LGBT community.

And that's, that's a favorite of mine because she mentions, she's like, the word queer has been used 632 times in the New York Times in 2022.

Like, oh, we're seeing this word so much.

And then she mentions the name of the column is Let's Say Gay.

And like, you can't even say gay.

And then in the number, she mentions like they're actually using gay around three times more than they're saying queer, but they're using it less.

So it's like, okay, your own numbers indicate this is not really an issue.

Also, queer and gay mean different things.

I'm jealous of this bravery.

The balls to be like, you know what I think you guys should stop saying?

She also has one about the term anti-racist.

How that's a bad term.

Of course.

Wow.

She has one about how Karen is a slur for white women.

Yeah.

She has one about the term lived experience.

She, of course, has one about how you can't even say woman anymore.

She has one about liberal, the term liberal, how it's like being overused and it doesn't mean as much because now people say like classical liberal and that confuses her.

Fine.

But then she also has one about the term conservative because people are labeling.

people like her and you know Matt Iglesias and Jonathan Chait as conservatives simply for their stated views in the nation's newspaper how dare you smear me for my words and actions yeah

this is so cool To just get mad about all the things that people call you.

I know.

And then anytime someone asks you to call them something, you get mad about that too.

Right.

Like just the introduction of any new vocabulary one way or the other.

She's writing a column.

Yeah.

But there's also a weird timelessness here, right?

Like, cause like some of these like you know are wrong just off the word go, right?

Like when I first came to the United States, the word liberal meant anyone to the left of like, I don't know, Bill Clinton.

Like the gradations between democratic socialists, leftists, right?

Like people who are, I'm not a liberal, but I'm on the left, right?

Like those have proliferated during my time in this country.

I can't speak for the New York Times, but it would seem that like the number of people that Pamela Paul meets who say, I'm not a liberal, you know, if anything, this word has undergone a little bit of a decline, I would say.

And what you can tell is that like these complaints are sort of, they're weirdly timeless, as are so many of her things, right?

Like the same columns could have been written in 95, 96.

I mean, the word queer, people were upset about in the 90s, right?

Like, that's why queer theory is queer theory, because they wanted to trigger Jesse Helms, basically, right?

Like, this was 80s, probably, right?

She literally has a column about how the political correctness panic of the 1990s was like fake and it didn't really matter, but today it's different.

It's like just the same panic, Pamela.

That's amazing.

It was mostly like linguistic complaints.

Yeah.

And, you know, it was like, we're supposed to say Native American instead of Indian now.

Can you believe these like wacko activists?

Like, it was the same garbage.

She just doesn't remember it because she wasn't a pundit at the time or whatever i i mean i also think it speaks to the parochialism because as public figures i don't know about you guys' inboxes but my inbox is full of like complaints about vocabulary like if you're someone who does things in public for a living a lot of the complaints you get are about like oh this term has fallen out of fashion you shouldn't say this some of those are very valid some of those are like really bizarre honestly totally but it's like yeah it's just like a minor annoyance about my job that like a lot of the things that people give me feedback about intellectually are like the ways that I pronounce words or the words that I use, not really like the content of what I'm saying.

And you, you sometimes feel kind of scolded.

You're like, why am I getting yelled at about this like thing that I don't think is all that important?

I've told you why, Michael.

It's because you put yourself out there as someone who would be responsive to these complaints.

I never get this stuff because I think people are like, oh, Peter doesn't care.

Yeah, that's the thing.

It's only half true.

But I'm glad that I'm putting that vibe out there so that I don't get these emails.

I will say Pamela Paul is obviously right about Karen being a slur for white women.

And

it's very funny that she immediately clocks it.

She's like, you know what, you guys should be saying, yeah, you should stop saying Karen.

But it's like, that's what all the complaints of the progressive left are, too.

You should stop saying this thing that hurts my feelings.

Right.

That's the thing:

if you are the recipient of an insult like that, if it's sort of targeting what you might believe to be you, all of a sudden you get super nuanced about the importance of language and things like that.

If Karen were something that was like directed against any other demographic primarily, I assure you that Pamela Paul would be like,

what are we doing?

Yeah.

Policing language like this.

You know, it's language is imprecise.

Yeah, part of it seems to be about like the arrogance of people to dictate how she would refer to them, right?

It's like, how dare you?

And there's a degree of like, just frankly, just like status enforcement there.

It's like, no, me as a fancy white person who works for the New York Times, I get to decide how you are talked about.

And also a weird obsession with social media.

I mean, so much of this stuff comes down to like, yeah, I'm sorry, your inbox is annoying, Pamela, but like you write for an audience of millions of people.

If 1% of your audience sends you a complaint, that's thousands of emails in a week.

That's just like part of the job of being an intellectual influencer.

And in the social media era, it's really easy for people to send you, you know, to at you on social media or to send you something in your inbox.

Like I feel like Adrian, we should do like a whole episode about the like linguistic complaint era that like everything became about fucking vocabulary in the last four years.

And that conversation has almost exclusively been led by pundits, people who have inboxes, people who get a ton of feedback on their words.

And so the idea that this has been like constructed as a problem for the left, like they're going to scold you for saying meh, it's just like you're a pundit.

People scold you about things.

If you're a waitress, you're not getting yelled at about your use of vocabulary, right?

This is not something that is happening to normal people.

It's something that is happening to pundits.

And because our intellectual discourse is led by pundits, it's like these people basically complaining about a mild gripe about their own jobs.

To me, I'm just like, grow up.

Sometimes you get annoying emails.

Who fucking cares?

I get maybe, I don't know, maybe one of those a month where I'm like, ah, that's like kind of a weird complaint.

But it's just, it's so minor.

It just doesn't matter that much.

We've talked about this, Michael.

Like when you are sort of putting your views out there, if you get 20 emails complaining about something, it feels like you are drowning in complaints.

You might have a podcast that gets 100,000 listens per episode or something.

And 20 is in fact just an unbelievably small percentage of those listens.

But when you're sitting there getting those emails, you're thinking, oh my God, everyone's mad at me.

I am

this is drama, right?

So if your column is going out to actual millions of people, I would imagine that the volume of complaints they're getting is super large and probably feels even larger.

But in reality, again, it's just a tiny percentage.

It's just that if you want people to listen to you at that scale, you sort of have to accept that this is part of the deal, right?

That people get to give you feedback and sometimes it'll be good and sometimes it'll be stupid.

Most of the time it will be stupid.

You can't build your politics around it.

As somebody who has opinions in public, online for my job, I always take a lot of comfort in knowing that I am annoying other people much more than they will ever get the opportunity to annoy me, right?

Like that's just a privilege.

It's a privilege.

Yeah.

We're so lucky to do what we do.

It's like part of being able to influence public opinion and share your views with people.

Some people will disagree with your views.

Yeah, some people are going to think you suck shit.

And a small portion of those people will tell you about it.

And that's just part of the work.

And an even smaller portion will record entire podcast episodes about it.

For example.

Also, like, the thing is, it's not that I'm not annoyed by those things.

I just screen grab them and share them with my group chats and be like, can you believe this person who's yelling at me about this dumb thing?

I just don't talk about it publicly because who cares?

Proportionality is the name of the game, and it's what Paul lacks.

Right.

Right.

And a lot of these pundits lack, right?

It's very important to have an active group chat where you complain about people who are emailing you.

That is like a crucial outlet for any public figure.

I'm now to the point where I just told Michael this yesterday or the day before.

There are some people that have basically make, you know, 10% of their career yelling at Michael Hobbes, and I'm getting a little upset that I'm getting zero

collateral damage, that they're never even once being like, and Peter 2.

When is the Jesse singall or Matt Iglesias column about Peter coming out yeah it's infuriating they know I'm too cool to

they're scared they're afraid of you Peter yeah

that's what I told I told Michael

I'm like a crying little boy and my mom is reassuring me being like they're they're scared of you they you're too strong you're too strong this might be like a decent place to wrap up because I think that there's something about Pamela Paul that really speaks at least to me I I can't speak to your guys' experience, but for me, I'm like, oh, this is my id.

This is my pundit id made.

You know, like, yeah.

And she's just there very clearly showing all my worst impulses.

Like, no, Moira, lash out at your critics on Twitter.

Like, Moira, like, totally, talk about the thing that annoyed you that doesn't actually matter.

No, my id's Iglesias.

Sorry.

I know it's embarrassing for me too.

But it's like, this is the warning, right?

Because your pettiness, your own insecurity, your own excessive investment in your like narcissistic little annoyances can actually drag you to like the dark side in a moment of, you know, world historical crisis, right?

So like we all have to get our own bullshit in check if we're going to be acting in public and try to behave a little more responsibly.

We need more group chats.

Group chats for every pundit in America.

Just post them in the group chat, you guys.

Dedicate your journalism to actual journalism.

I'm going to start like a pundit support group, like just for like people who are annoying online.

It's like listen to their whole hands together.

Yeah.

Is this the right solution, though?

Because I do feel like some of these pundits, now that I'm thinking about it, are probably emerging from group chats that got a little too powerful.

Yes.

Yeah.

Right.

We're on a balance beam.

Yeah.

My suspicion has been that a lot of the cancer culture freak out among American punditry was a group chat thing, right?

That like the America's pundits discovered WhatsApp.

I think that can also juke your brain, unfortunately.

Well, also, the right-wing media basically is a group chat for like mild linguistic complaints.

It's like this trans person said this thing online.

And then even though it's in like total right-wing garbage, you find it popping up in these columns in like New York Times or like people like Yasha Monk will post things, even though oftentimes these things originate with somebody like Andy No or somebody that's a super bad faith actor or just like a deranged like newsmax style outlet.

It's just like these anecdotes find their way into the New York Times op-ed section.

Yeah, right.

Like maybe, maybe group chat is aiming too high, you guys.

I think a paper bag in which to scream might be really what America needs right now.

You need an outlet of some kind, but you really just need to keep in mind that this is dumb petty bullshit.

And at all times, you need to be asking yourself, am I writing about dumb petty bullshit right now?

And if you're doing that, then I feel like your chances of Pamela qualifying yourself are relatively low.

Never go full Pamela.

That's the rule.

That might be a good place to wrap up.

That's a great place to wrap up.

That's so much.

Never go full Pamela.

However, you guys should listen to If Books Could Kill because it's very lovely.

And I want to thank Peter and Michael so much for being here.

I feel like you guys added a lot of star power and humor.

Lovely is not the word that I would use, but thank you.

Thank you for that.

This is the negative feedback that I'm going to post in the group chat.

Someone call me lovely today.

Ridiculous.

Good to be here.

Yeah, reach out with your complaints about Michael.

As always.

Only my pronunciations, though.

Only the way that I say words and the words that I use.

And we'll see you next time on Embed with a Right.

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Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.