Episode 50: The Second Annual Cursties, Part II

We have no choice but to play video games.

Right.

You know what?

You were mean to me, and now I just sit at home and play video games.

Wow, why would the feminists do this to me?

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Weird Donegan.

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

So, Adrienne, this is the second half of our very special, only once a year, or I guess now twice a year,

curse discourse awards ceremony the cursies with our special guest michael hobbs whether you like it or not here's another hour and a half of this

look we do edit these like there's more there are outtakes if you can believe it there's stuff that we remove yeah

but i on the other hand it was a banner year for curse discourses around gender and sexuality if our friends on the right stop supplying this bullshit we can do like a quick 15 minute thing like yeah that's all right it's not great but it's all right This was not that year.

2024 is not that year.

And, you know, if I were a betting man, I'd say 2025, not looking great.

I'm clearing the sketch for the entire month of December to just record like a live Kirsties.

Like, get a load of this shit.

Me with my head in my hands, like, haven't eaten in days.

Yeah.

Just like playing Insta clips to each other.

So, on that note,

welcome to part two of the 2024 Kirsties.

We hope you you have as much, I guess the word is fun

as we did.

Enjoy.

So what is your take number two?

My take number two

might be bringing us into more officially serious territory, for which I apologize.

Oh, no.

My take number two is feminists are why Trump won.

Wait, where was this?

Oh, it was everywhere.

I didn't see this.

Oh, I thought you meant this was like a specific piece.

This is just like a discourse.

This is a discourse.

I do have specific examples because I come with receipts, Michael.

Okay, good, good, good.

But this is like an emerging consensus among like reactionary centrists, you know, your like New York Times op-ed kind of regulars, but then also like a like kind of red-brown alliance types, right?

Like people who went from being really gung-ho for Bernie in 2016 and who are now sort of like Trumpy.

I think Myra Donegan's haircut is is the reason why Trump won.

I think that's actually.

I look great with this haircut.

Not that you can see.

Looks like woke is over.

But this idea that like feminism's popular visibility was excessive, it was wrongheaded, and then it victimized young men, leading them to embrace Trump, right?

So this is from right after the election, my take of the year, from a gentleman named Lee Fang.

Do you guys know who Lee Fang is?

Yeah, that's one of those like post-left, I do not support Donald Trump, even though every single thing that I say and write is in support of improving his popularity.

It is the Glenn Greenwald sector, which is getting very crowded.

I'm totally not a fascist.

It's just that everything I do and say supports that part of the political spectrum.

It's so fucked up that like in the way that Inuits have 19 words for snow, we need 19 words for people who say they're on the left, but in fact are not.

There's so many different flavors of this.

There's like the Barry Weiss ones, there's like the intercept ones, there's the Sink Uyghur guys,

Bernie Sanders press secretary.

Or Brianna Joy Gray.

Brianna Joy Gray.

Yeah.

I kept calling her Gray Joy in my head, but that's from Game of Thrones.

That's Game of Thrones.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, but this is Lee Fang, who I think is a former intercept guy.

I might have that wrong.

Yeah, yeah, he's an intercept guy.

So he tweets on November 7th.

Imagine being an 18-year-old young male voter.

When you were 11, the Me Too movement launched and men across the board like you were deemed oppressors.

When you were starting high school, liberal politicians closed your school and forced you to take classes online.

The women around you don't seem like victims.

They are going to college at way higher rates, earning far more than men in many professional white-collar jobs, and are way less likely to be addicted to drugs and as lonely as most of the guys you know.

Your peer group of other young men play video games and enjoy memes, mocking the dominant, suffocating, woke culture across all the major entertainment and academic institutions.

How is voting for the establishment Democrat who already avoided any voting process or scrutiny for her nomination in any way appealing?

So this is this logic that women are doing better than men are on empirical grounds, right?

This is something you see in a lot of these discourses that is like empirically untrue that has to get laundered into making sense.

So right after the election, the New York Times ran a big piece with a bunch of charts trying to show how women are like earning more money than men are.

And their big comparison was between women with a college degree who on average earn a little bit more than men without one.

And they make it look like they're

sharing apples and apples, right?

But that's apples and oranges, right?

With and without.

It's like you're not actually showing the comparison between men without a college degree and women without a college degree, right?

Because those women earn less than the men do, and that wouldn't prove your point, right?

You're also not showing women with a college degree versus men with a college degree, because those men, once again, earn more than the women do, right?

And that wouldn't prove your point either, right?

The point you're trying to make is that this is a disparity of gender when actually it's a disparity of class.

And that's like a very common logic.

It also tries to justify men's radicalization into like a politicized misogyny, which I do think has happened around Trump using the 2024 Trump campaign as a vehicle, right?

But that's mostly like right-wing propaganda.

It's like, you're under attack from me too.

You're under attack from the COVID restrictions.

None of this had to be about like left-wing overreach or like this whole thing of like, they came for Harvey Weinstein and you're next is just like amazing to me.

It's like, if you two also raped 80 women, yes.

Yeah, if we first we came for the like.

extremely explicit sexual predators and you, an 11 year old boy, exactly

you too.

It's just like, if people are drawing that link, and I think people are, honestly, that's mostly due to manosphere toxic garbage.

They're like, ooh, they came for him and they'll come for you.

But it's not like there was some like misunderstanding.

And that's why Harvey Weinstein was accused by all these women.

Like he did all the stuff.

So it's just a really weird case to hang all of this on, even though people have done it anyway.

The idea that like an 11-year-old boy would look at Harvey Weinstein and say, that guy is just like me.

Yeah.

Imagine such a weird vision of childhood.

Yeah, completely.

I don't know I was not looking at the executives and being like yeah I share a lot of interests with these people not in the seventh grade

I was more interested in like my homework

and and I frankly wasn't even paying much attention to the news but the logic is that like men's radicalization is always a symptom of a way in which they have been victimized that is legitimate right so like men men can never fail they can only be failed right but also it's taking the feminist grievance and casting that as illegitimate and overblown at the same time.

Right.

Right.

So women can never respond in kind to men's misogynist radicalization.

If men are incels, if they're MRAs, if they're Trump voters, you as a woman are A, at fault and B, now obligated to like.

abandon your own pursuit of rights and dignity in the public sphere in order to like heal their hurt feelings over your success.

we have no choice but to play video games, right?

You know what?

You were mean to me, and now I just sit at home and play video games.

Wow, why would the feminists do this to me?

Like, I saw a 19-year-old on TikTok say men are trash once,

and now I am a loser.

You know, skyrim in mom's basement until I get to vote for Trump.

Yeah, yeah, I also love the fact that all of these guys who are like anti-woke, everything, become the fucking cartoon version of a diversity consultant the the minute it's like whites or men who they think are oppressed.

So it's like, okay, lower average incomes for black people.

Well, black people have lower IQs and they're inferior, right?

Lower average incomes for men.

We really need to help men get a leg up.

We really need to have some affirmative action in the colleges.

Doesn't this indicate some structural discrimination on the part of men?

It's like they believe in microaggressions.

They believe in all the shit that they complain about.

They believe in fucking trigger warnings.

They believe in everything as soon as they perceive white people or men to be the victims.

They don't actually have an argument about any of this stuff.

I mean, their argument is for male supremacy, right?

Their argument is that men are valid political subjects and that women are not, right?

Yeah, you took this from us and we want it back.

Yeah.

Anything that makes men sad is a national emergency demanding collective action.

And anything that makes women sad is something that they need to put up with for the common good.

Aaron Powell, it's also weird the way that, like, I mean, he's making a point about a type of voter, so I get that.

But on the other hand, like, it does sort of fold COVID into a gendered thing.

Yeah.

Like, you were over-cradled kind of by these liberal politicians.

First of all, first lockdowns, sure, were done locally, but like in the end, that was under a Republican administration.

It's funny.

There has been a kind of ex post facto feminization of COVID policies that I think is probably due to the fact that a lot of the truly deranged anti-vax and anti-kind of COVID measure activism did merge with the manosphere, right?

So that's people who happen to hold both of those beliefs, it seems to me.

Yeah.

But it is striking that that's in the list here because it wasn't a co like COVID restrictions weren't particularly like on feminist grounds It wasn't no, it wasn't like a gender equality argument that's just kind of tangential No, he's just like throwing a bunch of random grievances in there if anything post-COVID feminists have been paying attention to the way that the lockdown like overburdened particularly working mothers, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A lot of agitation to reopen the schools was from mothers, right?

But I think what might have happened is that the guy Lee Fang is imagining, and for all I know, maybe Li Fang Fang himself, they live with their moms.

They live with their moms.

And being in lockdown meant they had to spend a lot of time at home with mom.

And it was mom telling them, you know, don't forget to take a mask.

You know, like, don't forget to wash your hands.

Like, we're going to get you tested.

Like that kind of.

public health like atomization down into the family home became women's responsibility, right?

Right.

And that sort of day-to-day encounter with COVID precautions was probably something that they experienced, like being pushed on them by women, because they're not responsible enough to test themselves or to wear a mask at the height of those lockdowns, you know?

That's a good point.

Wait, this is kind of similar to my next one.

Yay.

This was the year of like everything being cast as like activists are doing it wrong.

Like there's no social issue that you can just talk about.

Like climate change is really bad, you guys.

It has to be like, here's how climate activists are fucking up, right?

Yeah.

Don't use these words.

Don't use this tactic.

There's no way to talk about an issue without somehow blaming the the left for it.

So mine is like kind of went under the radar, but it was in the New York Times.

It was November 10th, a sex strike is a losing strategy for American women.

Oh, yeah.

The opening paragraphs are, no dating men, no sex with men, no heterosexual marriage, and no childbirth.

These are the four principles of South Korea's 4B movement, a radical feminist movement that gained popularity in 2019 in response to sexism, hidden camera pornography, and intimate partner violence.

After Donald Trump's victory, some American women have sought out the movement, but it would be a mistake for women in the United States to adopt its principles, which risk alienating those who would be our allies while ensuring little actually changes about our reality.

So don't do this.

But then what drives me nuts and what drives me nuts about all these fucking takes is there's no evidence that this was catching on in America in any way.

The only evidence in this article just links to other New York Times articles about like women are doing this thing.

Wait, whose article is this, may I ask?

Oh, uh, Cami Reek?

I've never heard of her.

She's an editor.

So this piece links to a New York Times article from a couple days previously called After the Election, A Call for Women to Swear Off Men.

You have to get through like some anecdotes and some discourse and stuff.

You finally have like the evidence that this is catching on.

It says, searches for the 4B movement in the United States spiked the day after the election, according to Google Trends.

Dozens of videos on this topic have popped up on TikTok in the last 48 hours with users sharing why they are for or against the movement's gaining steam in the United States.

And then the only like one of the links in here, like things are popping up on TikTok, the only actual link to a specific TikTok has 7,000 likes.

And that's after, this is like, I checked it the other day.

This is after being linked in the New York Times.

So this would have had significantly fewer likes when this appeared in this article.

So I could find, other than some fucking like articles about it, I could find no evidence whatsoever other than like 10 TikToks that women en masse were joining a sex strike or doing this.

So it's like we're scolding activists that we literally just made up and being totally indifferent to whether or not, like, sorry, are people doing this?

Is this something that's actually resonating with people?

Just like, whatever, yada, yada.

Let's skip past that.

Anyway, this is a bad idea.

Yeah.

Like, it seems like most people in the country think it's a bad idea and didn't do it.

Yes, I saw one take from actually like a sex radical feminist who was like, if you think 4B is a good idea and you're an American, it's because you are in favor of eugenics against the Asian population and you don't want them to be breeding.

And I'm like, okay.

I mean, I feel like this, this relates a little to like my last one and that the idea that women have a obligation to use sexuality for purposes of like positive social engineering or like pro-social as like you have to fix men, you have to fix our broken American society.

Fuck a Republican in order to destroy your menu.

And you have to do it with your vagina, ladies.

Like it has to be this way, right?

Sexual access cannot legitimately be revoked, right?

And even the mere idea like prompts this massive panic and backlash, even though I think you're right, Michael, I don't think this was really very much of a thing.

Yeah, and I read other pieces that linked.

They're like, people are posting about this on TikTok.

And they click on the TikToks and the TikToks were obvious jokes.

So one person was like, let's all go out and get a hysterectomy to like stick it to the men, which was like obviously facetious.

So it's like, okay, you're conflating people promoting this movement and people mocking this movement because you can't find any actual evidence that this is going anywhere.

And of course, like you can't imagine a New York Times op-ed piece being like, hey, men shouldn't vote for Donald Trump.

Don't do that.

It doesn't, you know, you should care about the women in your life.

It's really bad for them.

It's also, he's not really going to protect men's interests anyway.

But it's like somehow we can just issue these calls to activists, like activists, don't do this.

Can you imagine a piece that's like men have to like

be nicer to their wives?

They have to like do more of the housework at home.

They have to like take her to a nice dinner, you know, like any of these calls for like emotional investment and like romantic and sexual attention to fluff up the egos of women.

It's never going to happen in part because that would make you gay.

Nice.

But it's also this kind of way, I mean, this is where the New York Times sort of starts seeding

the discourse for like future constructions of reactivity, right?

Like, wasn't it the left-wing excesses after the 2024 election that really brought about the

calamitous policies of the Trump administrations about reproductive rights?

This is going to show up in articles for years of like, these women hadn't joined the 4B movement after the election, blah, blah, blah.

Like, these things just become canonical without

college campuses.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Also, I think if people don't want to date Trump voters, that's not really an issue of public influence.

And if they don't want to fuck people.

Yeah, if you want to date or not date anyone for any reason, have a fucking blast.

I mean,

I think the idea, again, it's like they're casting the people, like the echo chamber thing.

It's like the people leaving the platform are the problem.

The people not wanting to fuck Trump voters are the problem.

It's like, well, maybe an entire movement based on like very open misogyny, that's not a thing you want to write an article about.

The article is about people who are like, hey, I just don't want to date this category of people due to their behavior, not due to their like demographic or variables that they can't control.

It's like, yeah, you chose to take an action, and I don't want to date people that have taken this action.

I don't know why.

And honestly, an end of an entire gender is like, hey, nah, like, yeah, go within yourself, my brother.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Reflect on why that might be, right?

Like, I've met some real shitty men over the years who had girlfriends.

Like, they managed.

Yeah.

But, like, I think the principle being upheld is that men have like a foundational entitlement to women, to sexual access to women, right?

And that it's unfair and excessive of women to be like, actually,

I am an adult with freedom of association and I don't have to, you know, like provide pussy to anybody by virtue of the fact that he is a man, you know?

I mean, I don't want to go super dark here at the end.

Like, I do wonder, like,

because I, you know, Michael and I have both been spending a lot of time in the moral panic minds and like moral panics can be about totally non-real things and then spawn perfectly real sort of legislative consequences.

Yeah, yeah.

And it is hard to sort of think like, oh shit, would a 4B panic possibly get us even closer to kind of a handmaid's tale kind of thing where entitlement to women's bodies is codified into law?

And like, that is, that's fucking grim, man.

Yeah, there's, there's been some flirting with this over the years.

Some of the like fixes for incels or whatever.

Yeah, so they need a socialist distribution of girlfriends.

Yeah.

It's just weird discourse around it.

I mean, if you look at like rape law, it's really not a litigation of like, when do men have a presumptive right to like fuck women?

It's like, when do women have a presumptive right to say no?

And that is actually a very narrowly defined set of legal circumstances.

Like, do you actually do not get to like refuse access to your pussy in like a, in as many situations as you would think if you have one?

I think the presumption of male sexual entitlement is already codified into a lot of our law.

Not to like go like full kitty McKinnon with a skunk skik in my hair like on you guys like so early in the morning.

But like like it's already, it's already kind of there.

I just think the most important thing to stress is that women deciding not to fuck Trump voters is exactly like white flight.

Isn't it the same as people who left cities due to demographics they don't like?

I think it's the same thing.

Judging people on their beliefs and actions, isn't that the same as judging people on their demographics?

Isn't that the new racism?

Yeah.

So should I go for my number three?

Yeah, do it.

Yeah, do it.

All right.

So I've decided to go nuclear on this one.

It's specific, but I think it says a lot about what went wrong this year, to my mind, in the discourse.

So I'll take you to Berlin, a place that Michael, I know, has spent much time in, at the new National Gallery.

Can you picture that, Michael?

It's the sort of the modern building.

Looks like a gasp hat.

Yeah, yeah.

And late November 2024, and the photographer Nan Golden gave a speech to inaugurate a new exhibition of her work, and she used that speech to call out Israel's actions in Gaza.

and the German government's complicity in them and especially the German government's sort of actions in silencing voices that had called for boycott and divestment.

Here's an article about this.

I'm going to translate from the German.

So this is a person who's there and seems horrified by Nan Golden's speech and says, these people, among them many who think of themselves as queer and arty, are a kind of sect who wants to talk to no one and whose members no longer want to engage in any kind of discourse.

And the thing I want to drill down on here is the queer part.

What the fuck is the word queer doing here?

There's been a lot of garbage with like, oh, you'd rather be gay in Gaza or something.

And it's like, exactly.

Even people are homophobic.

I don't want to kill them in the tens of thousands.

It's just like a completely irrelevant fucking argument.

So my number three, and this is what I'm leading up to, right?

People very vividly imagining death for queer people in order to make a point about Gaza is my most cursed discourse

of 2024.

It's been so fucking annoying.

And this is, you know, you get this from Israeli politicians.

You get this from European politicians.

This person who wrote this article, I know this guy, I'm not going to name him on the pod, but I know this guy.

Like, you know, these are supposed left-wingers casually sort of being like, oh, isn't it weird that queer people are like pro-Palestinian?

And it's like, is it really?

And then you very quickly get to a kind of punitive discourse, right?

Like, you're delusional, right?

Like, do you know what happened to you in Gaza?

And as you say, Michael, the logic of it just isn't clear to me.

I am sure that Sudan would be a bad place for me to be a gay man.

I do not think that we should fire rockets into Sudan tomorrow, right?

I think large portions of Alabama would be very homophobic to me.

I also think it's wrong to kill tens of thousands of people and starve children in Alabama.

I mean, I don't even accept the premise that everyone in Gaza is homophobic, but even if we did accept the premise, it's a wrong to kill tens of thousands of people, many of them children.

So what are we even doing here?

There are so many people who don't like me personally that if I was going to advocate for bombing them all, you know,

like it would just be, it would be a lot.

It would, it would take out a lot of the population, I think.

Also, Moira, we're such fucking normies for only bringing articles in one language.

Oh, it's such a flex to be like, oh, I'm translating this from the German.

I actually, this is from my Esperanto friends who just speak the nine languages that I speak.

But it did really kind of transcend borders.

This was really kind of this international thing.

It flitted around, right?

Like every time someone had a sign queers for Palestine at any of the campus encampments or any of the marches or whatever, like you'd get these kinds of comments.

It shows up in the Atlantic immediately.

Yeah, exactly.

And then it also sort of went kind of viral on social media.

And we're going to stay kind of in Berlin with a man that both Michael and I have thought a little bit about this year.

Because I know I texted you about him.

What is the fucking deal with Daniel Ryan Spalding?

Oh, this.

Wait, is this one of these creatures?

Because every now and then, Adrian, you bring me a little tidbit from the gay internet and it's like you're handing me a pearl and I've just like never encountered it.

No, sir, my impression is that Daniel Ryan Spalding is not part of the gay internet.

I hope not.

I think he is, he performs gay for a straight audience.

I get so sad like watching any of his videos.

I get so sad.

So maybe we'll walk you through him real quickly more because

I think he's mostly an Instagram phenomenon.

And he was known for these kind of little skits about being a power gay, which I never understood what that was.

Yeah, what is a power gay?

He's an American or a Canadian living in Berlin.

Yeah.

And he would do these skits of like, I'm a power gay, so I'm at the rooftop pool of this hotel or something, but in a sort of like, power gays, do it like this.

And other people do it like that.

I moved to the USA to pursue my American dream of being a power gay in New York City, and I made it happen.

I lost over 200 pounds, and now I'm a skinny bitch who doesn't take shit from anybody.

Power gays lift weights together, but I just run because muscles are for boyfriends.

We escaped to Fire Island because because we don't like being around straight people.

I don't think they were ever very good or funny.

Well, and it always simmered in a certain kind of resentment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You kind of were supposed to find it cute and other times you were supposed to make fun of it.

Yeah.

Anyway, and then October 7th happens and Daniel Ryan Spaulding, who had had, as our friend Bernstein documented, a very interesting kind of fixation on hot Israelis throughout.

I forgot that's how it started.

Yeah.

Well, not so much pro-Israel content, I should say, but anti-critics of Israel content, right?

It's really about the left and about how they're anti-Semites, et cetera, et cetera.

So that becomes sort of his new bailiewig to the point that he introduces a new character who is somehow even less funny than the power gay, I gotta tell you.

I mean, it's so hard to watch.

Purple-haired girl, I guess, is her name.

Yeah, he got like a cheap wig somewhere, and he does like a literal purple-haired feminist with this awful voice, and it's not funny.

I just watched a very disturbing clip from Eye on Palestine.

Annie Lennox and Rosie O'Donnell have both shared it, so it must be true.

Hi, I'm Mr.

Daniel and this is my friend the purple haired girl.

She's not a bad person, but she's been radicalized to become a raging Jew hater and we want to help her.

What's happening in the video, purple haired girl?

Human rights abuses by the IDF.

Interesting.

I can only last like 15 seconds into the videos because they're just so cringe.

It's incredible.

It's so cringe.

And it's also just so kind of ugly.

It's the same thing that we were talking about earlier: of like, all he can do is criticize activists.

Like, look how dumb the activists are.

Look how annoying the activists are while never addressing anything on the merits.

Like, is it okay to kill tens of thousands of people?

Let's put that aside.

Yeah.

Some of the protesters are really annoying.

It's like, that's what we should be focusing on.

Do you remember that fall semester 2023 when we spent every weekend calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state?

Good times from the river to the sea.

And remember, all the Jews were like, hey, that's calling for our genocide.

And we were like, fuck off.

Rashida said it was fine.

If I'm not mistaken, I do not follow him, but my impression is that he ended up in a pretty trumpy position in the end.

Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

And also, he's not Jewish.

Yeah, that's important.

He's sort of like semi-implying that he's Jewish at various times.

He goes to Israel at one point.

It's a sort of like he's like sticking up for Jewish people, but he's not Jewish.

He's just like this random guy who says like fucked up things about feminists.

And then I'm also stealing this point from Matt, but it's like by the end, he's kind of repeating like right-wing talking points

about gay people.

He's basically recreating all of the deranged shit that MAGA people say about gays, but he's saying it about like feminists.

So he's like, he's joining this like virulently anti-gay movement on behalf of Jews, which he's not Jewish.

The whole thing is just so fucking weird.

So you're like, he was so opposed to this supposed Palestinian homophobia that he like owned them into

adopting his own position of homophobia, right?

Yeah.

I mean, it's also what like Barry Weiss is doing.

Like Barry Weiss allegedly dedicated her career to fighting anti-Semitism and she's joined the right, which is openly anti-Semitic.

Like

the owning the left is more important to any of these people than like their actual values or even looking at the conflict holistically and being like, which side of this do I want to be on?

Yeah.

So, and I realize it's not really the point here, but I did then get kind of interested because he keeps going on and on and people like that keep going on and on about what happens to gay people in Gaza.

And I was like, this is something that must be documented, right?

And, you know, obviously Gaza is probably not a great place to be LGBT, but it's also not a great place to be anything right around now.

But it's very noticeable how much.

fake news there is around this stuff, which is not to say, again, like, it's not to say that there isn't brutal repression, right?

I'm not going to say Hamas is like somehow great on LGBT issues or any other issues, to be very, very clear.

But, right, so there was a famous image that people kept circulating of a gay man being thrown from a roof, which sort of came up as like, well, in Gaza, you'd be thrown out from a roof.

And that turns out, as fact checkers kept telling us, that's from Syria, it's from Homs, and it was an atrocity perpetrated by IS, by the Islamic State, not by Hamas.

There was this story of a Hamas commander that kept coming up who was executed by the group itself in 2016.

He was accused of homosexuality, among other things, but it appears that the main offense was stealing money allegedly to have gay affairs, right?

And then I looked at the report from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and there are tons of executions in Gaza, you know, after the Hamas take over in 2006, I guess it is, but

I couldn't find a single one that's about homosexuality.

The main thing, and I mean, like, again, that's not to say that these guys aren't complete fucking assholes, but like the number one thing is like either murder or spying for Israel.

They accuse you of collaboration and then you get killed, right?

And I think that's significant in that like it begs the question about where this imagination of like what would happen to you in Gaza comes from.

It's not to say that again, like it wouldn't be bad to be gay in Gaza.

It's to say that like there's something odd about the specificity with which the thing that would happen to you, queers for Palestine, is imagined.

I have another tweet, unfortunately, that is also in German.

Flexbro, Flex.

This is about a Icelandic group at the Eurovision Song Contest who are holding up a Palestine banner.

And then this German politician, I believe a social democrat, tweets, I wish best of luck to these humanists when they play their song next in Gaza.

These three Hamas puppets will be hanging from their balls from a construction crane faster than they can shout LGBTQ.

That's just like a hella homophobic tweet.

What the fuck?

Somebody is having a fantasy about committing inventive forms of violence against gay people, and it's not the pro-Palestinian side.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's so vivid, and it, and, and there's this glee in it, right?

Like, she's not just saying these people are wrong or these people are inconsistent and these people are.

She's like, I hope that something violent and awful happens to them.

And I'm like, I don't know, man.

That seems like a very much a you problem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And also the, the current ruling regime in Israel is not particularly pro-gay.

So it's not as if like Israel is this like haven for gay people and Palestine is bad.

It's like everything kind of contains everything.

And also so much, I mean, it's kind of the perfect example because so much of the discourse on this all year has followed this thing of like, oh, you think it's wrong to murder a bunch of innocent civilians, but did you know how bad Hamas is?

Hamas did this.

And then they'll list some fucked up things that Hamas did or some fucked up things that happened on October 7th.

And then it's like, but they're not killing Hamas.

They're killing a bunch of innocent people, including children.

So it's even if every single thing that they're saying about Hamas is true, you're killing tens of thousands of people who aren't Hamas in any meaningful way.

So it's all just irrelevant to even talk about any of this shit.

Only one thing can be bad at a time, guys.

I think what we've learned.

If you think one thing is bad, that means you think everything else is good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they're trying, they're trying to do this like weird hypocrisy argument, but I don't even get it because it's like, it's actually a stronger moral case to say, regardless of someone's political beliefs, including anti-gay beliefs, I don't think they should be murdered.

That's not, that's not a hypocrisy of mine.

No.

It's like you say, you say LGBT rights are important, and yet you don't want to kill people who are anti-LGBT.

Well, yeah, killing people is bad.

Don't do it.

You heard it here first, folks.

Michael Hobbes bravely coming out as anti-murder.

It's a cancelable take.

This whole fucking thing all year has been so fucking annoying.

The other outcrop of this has also been like, it's not technically a genocide.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know.

Maybe it is.

Maybe it isn't.

It's a technical legal term.

Some people use it.

Some people don't.

I genuinely don't really care if people want to call it a genocide, but it's like, oh, it's just the mass murder of a bunch of innocent people.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, either way, it seems like you should just be joining with the people who are trying to stop it rather than complaining about the word.

Yeah, do you want to be in a position of arguing about the semantic definition of what it is that is not a genocide to try and justify the actions of your own side?

Call it what you want to call it, man.

Technically, it's not a genocide.

Okay, well, I guess it's fine then.

Like, even if that holds water, like, I don't know if it's probable war crimes.

Like,

everything just feels like a distraction.

It just feels like no one wanted to address what's fucking going on on the merits at all.

I mean, I just also don't think that, like, I think just the weird moral standards that palestinians are being held to it's like they have to be morally perfect in order to us justify not bombing them that's actually kind of asymmetrical like israel can do anything and still be righteous yeah but the palestinians can't do anything and not be deserving of slaughter you know yeah that's an asymmetry i've noticed over the past year yeah

Well, sorry to drag us all way down.

This was, I was like, I'm just going to go for it.

This is my darkest.

I'm glad someone did it.

I had a third take.

I was going to take you guys on a long trek through the rise of pronatalism over the past year.

But instead of doing that, I'm just going to read some of the things that our prominent pro-natalists who are really concerned about the supposedly falling American birth rate and about the poor eugenic quality of American babies that are being born and the wasted eggs of educated white women who are, you know, going to law school

instead of settling down with some dipshit and having like 50 babies.

I'm just going to read some of the names.

Okay.

Okay.

So these people are supposedly pro-babies, right?

Supposedly they are pro-children.

They think that it is pro-social and morally edifying to have children.

But this is what Malcolm and Simone Collins are bespectacled

avatars of.

We're having a million white babies, people that have been the subject of like 300 feature articles at this point.

Yes.

Here's what these people have named the children they supposedly love.

Okay.

This is such a mean dig, Moira.

Octavian George Collins.

That is a boy.

Torsten Savage Collins.

Also a boy.

Savage is my middle name.

He can say that his whole life.

How cool that would be.

Nice.

Titan Invictus Collins.

Every one of these children's names sounds like a white supremacist avatar on Twitter.

Or like a gay porn star.

Yeah.

And then finally, that's a girl.

Titan and Vixus is a little girl.

What?

Titan's a girl's name?

Titan's a girl.

And then

the last so far, although I think they've promised us about 74 more of these children, the last so far is named Industry Americus Collins.

Fuck off.

You made that one up.

No, I did not.

I think if you love your children, you would not burden them with these names.

I don't even want to talk about what Elon Musk names his children because I can't say it.

My like scorching hot take that I get yelled at about in bars constantly is when I lived in Denmark.

Denmark famously has a thing where you have to name your kid one of the approved names on a list of, I think it's like around 5,000 names.

Oh, wow.

Like you have to name your kid one of these things.

And if you don't want to name your kid one of these things, there's a whole like court approval process that has to go on for you to say like this is actually really meaningful to our family or whatever.

You have to justify it.

And I like this policy because parents are naming their kids things to like flex on other parents.

Like I named my kid ugly dumbass as like a social experiment.

That poor kid has to go through life.

Yeah.

With this, like, there's this famous case of a guy who named his kids winner and loser.

And like loser kind of ended up being like more of a quote unquote winner or whatever.

It shows up in fucking freakinomics.

It's like, I don't think you should be able to name your kid loser.

That's like a fucked up thing.

I mean, there's the famous case of a man who went ahead and named his boy Sue.

Oh, see?

It's a Johnny Cash song.

I'm super old.

That was the original pronouns in bio.

Like my first boyfriend's name was Ashley, which is like a pretty common boy's name in Ireland.

But like he had to put his pronouns in his bio in like 2001 because like otherwise people just called him she all the time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this is this is the real equality that we want.

We just want it for everybody.

Anyway, sorry, Maria.

Sorry, I just knew a guy in college whose legal first name was Hummingbird.

Okay, that's not that bad.

He was not happy about it.

That's that California hate, dude.

Like don't you?

He's from Massachusetts.

I do think the right of a kid to have a fucking normal ass name that they don't have to spell spell their entire life should supersede the right of parents to like self-expression through naming their kids.

If I had a kid, I'd name them like Matt or David or like Jessica or something normal and easy to spell because this stuff, just sentencing your kid to have to spell out their fucking name and hear the same goddamn joke their entire life, I do think is like kind of mean.

I don't know.

The reason I'm being so quiet is that River is due from school any minute now.

But that's a normal name.

That's within his name.

That's like one standard deviation or half a standard deviation.

It's an object in the world.

River Phoenix.

I feel like River Phoenix opened doors for you guys.

Yeah, I hope so.

I hope so.

It's fine.

Also, river is easy to spell.

People know what a river is.

There's no like, it doesn't have a number in it, like in Elon Musk's kids.

Well, okay, but that's a very low bar.

I am a better dad than Elon Musk.

Write that on my tombstone.

All right, guys, that might be it for the Kirsties.

Are we done?

I have one more.

I have one more.

Oh, you have one more?

Okay.

Well, mine is not about sex and gender, so we can just just do it really quickly.

I, okay, this is like an overall just gripe of mine about like the general bedummining of America, how like every elite institution just seems to have like no real interest in like addressing things on the merits or like presenting facts to its readers.

So this is, there's always recency bias in these things, but this was something that came out, I believe, last week in the Atlantic called The Allure of Smoking Rises Again.

The cool factor of cigarettes has proved hard to shake.

And it's by Nicholas Florco.

and I'll read you guys the first paragraph.

The allure of smoking has proved hard to stamp out.

Listen closely.

Despite the fact that cigarette use is at an 80-year low in America,

smoking has unfortunately become cool again.

At the New York Fashion Week show in February, some models accessorize their runway outfits with a cigarette.

A clip of the TikTok influencer Addison Rae smoking two cigarettes is cut into her latest music video, which has more than 4 million views.

That's not that many views.

The pop star Charlie XCX, who was recently gifted a bouquet of cigarettes for her birthday, sparked one during her performance in Manchester last month and has said that her brat starter pack would include a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra.

So people are not smoking in America.

Smoking is at the lowest rate it's been for 80 years, but I found three random things online where people were smoking.

And then I wrote a whole fucking article about it.

A person in Manchester was smoking.

Like, hold the the fucking presses.

What really bugs me about this is like, you know, that it was written, that it was pitched, that it was published, everything.

And also, this guy, Nicholas Florco, is the newest staff writer for The Atlantic.

So this isn't some random freelancer with like a pitch.

This is a guy whose previous work, which is fucking abysmal.

He used to work at Staten News.

Most of his articles are terrible.

Like The Atlantic saw this guy and was like, yeah, let's hire that guy.

And then everything he's written.

has just been garbage.

He also wrote an article called RFK Jr.

is in the wrong agency.

He could be a great agriculture secretary.

Oh, God.

Which again, just the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard.

Like that's not, the guy lies constantly.

Like he's not qualified to be the secretary of anything.

It's like, not only are these takes getting published, but it's like the people writing them are being accepted into intellectual institutions.

And these institutions themselves are showing this just sector-wide indifference.

to whether or not something is true.

And I find this so much more corrosive than like some people online being like, I don't want to have sex with men because Donald Trump, like all of the activist stuff that they complain about, some of which is genuinely pretty bad or pretty, you know, inconsiderate or whatever.

This thing where like elite institutions just don't fucking care whether something is true anymore is so much worse.

Well, and the fact that like, I mean, you said it's not about gender, but isn't that like, it feels like these examples, right?

Fashion models and female starlets, like there's something about the centrist brain that demands infinite examples of something if they have to say it it about men.

Yeah.

And where three fucking little tiny anecdotes will do if it's queer people or ladies, right?

Like,

I definitely think there's an element of like, like, it's not an accident.

Like, if this were like, you know, this country singer lit up on stage, like, I think they wouldn't publish that.

Like, marginality is sort of short-circuited in the reactionary centrist mind.

They've taught themselves that anything that anyone who's vaguely left-coded ever does is relevant to their take.

And like, sometimes they they get away with it and sometimes they end up with like, smoking is making a comeback because Charlie XCX lit up in Manchester.

It's, I just think you should not write a take if the first thing in your article is just like, oh, yeah, this isn't true.

Like smoking rates are really low right now.

Well, then just write something else.

Is there nothing else that the U.S.

public needs to be informed about rather than this?

Well, it's kind of worse than that, isn't it?

Like, because it's in some way, you're right.

Like the Atlantic and like, frankly, New York Times opinion, like,

it almost feels like they are more interested in a problem if it doesn't really exist, right?

Like, didn't the New York Times just do like, there are no more men in literature?

Did you see that tape?

No, baby.

And then, and they're like, and then, like, in the first paragraph, they're like, well, it's not true numerically, but

that should be the fucking end of it, man.

That is weird.

You should write about it.

Yeah.

Like, it basically, it almost seems better for it not to be the case for you to like write about it being the case.

Like, that's bad.

You set agendas for people.

You shape how people perceive this world and what they think matters for their own identities, for their politics, for their voting decisions, et cetera, et cetera.

It feels real bad if your main way of grabbing their attention is by reporting shit that did not happen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's, I mean, in some ways, it's kind of full circle too, because the whole thing with the anti-echo chamber argument is that we need to be exposed to challenging views.

And I think that is the guiding ideology of the bunch of editors of these magazines is like, like, we need to be challenged.

But there's a difference between being challenged with someone's views and being challenged with facts, like information about the world that you did not know previously.

And so it's not a challenging view to say, like, oh, it's really bad that cigarette smoking is back.

If cigarette smoking isn't back, that's not a challenging view.

That's not adding to my ideology.

That's not something I need to hear out.

It's actually very good to be like, I'm not really going to entertain this.

Come to me when there's evidence that smoking rates are rising.

They're like, yeah, let's talk about it.

Right, no, they're not.

So I'm not being exposed to a challenging idea.

It's challenging in the sense that it's false, but then the fucking earth is flat is a challenging idea.

Like,

these people don't seem to have a clear view of what it means to be intellectually challenged by something.

But, Michael, what if they are actually trying to challenge you by furthering epistemic collapse?

That challenges me.

That does challenge me.

That's challenge of all.

Look how easy it is to get my face red.

Michael, what if stupid?

But the other point, of course, is that like we've reified the difficultness of difficult conversations, right?

And we haven't asked, like, well, what's this really about?

Right?

Like, sure, smoking being back would be something I would find troubling.

At the same time, like, it's selling us one of the most seductive and easy narratives any medium could ever spin, which is young people and minorities are doing something that you don't understand and you don't like.

And fora that you don't use anyway, right?

Like the Atlantic reader to TikTok consumer, like that, that Venn diagram are two separate circles, basically, right?

So you're feeding them this pabulum that just confirms their priors.

Like, sure, the content of it might be a little challenging to them, but the meta message is you are okay the way you are.

Other people are the problem.

And frankly, like, that's not particularly challenging.

That's very reassuring.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think the secret is that the Atlantic knows that and that that's how they want to excel their subscriptions.

Right.

They want people to feel like they're bold and engaging with different ideas.

Like, no, they're feeding you the reactionary centrist shit that you crave and can stomach and you get to feel like an adult for it.

But like in the end, like the overall structure of this thing is that like other people than you are the problem and you get to yell about them.

There's a whole industry now of people selling you the least challenging ideas imaginable as challenging ideas.

So like one thing Naomi Klein talked about in her book was how Naomi Wolf will now go to these like Steve Bannon rallies, essentially.

And she never says like, I'm one of you, vaccines are bad.

What she always says is, I'm a liberal feminist, but I'm standing up against the vaccines, right?

Just that little caveat at the beginning makes people think that they're hearing challenging ideas.

Like if you ask people that are sort of reading these websites, they'll be like, oh, I hear from a wide range of views.

Like just yesterday, I heard from a liberal feminist.

But the thing the liberal feminist was saying was something you already believe.

She's just telling you that vaccines are evil and Fauci's bad, right?

But people think that they're receiving challenging information.

I think this is why Joe Rogan is so popular as well.

It's like, it feels like he's skeptical.

It has the aesthetics of something skeptical.

And like, oh, you're hearing something that's going to make you really uncomfortable, but and then he just tells you something you already believe.

I think this is kind of the same sort of thing where it's like, we need to make sure people are exposed to these challenging ideas, but the ideas themselves on the mirrors are not remotely challenging.

No.

Young people shouldn't be smoking.

It's bad for you.

They don't know.

Well, that's something most people believe anyway.

It's not that hard.

Kids are doing it wrong.

Given that Moira is sort of pulling us back to the echo chamber discourse, and I think that's exactly right.

Like it's so interesting that so much of this is happening on and around digital platforms, because I do think this kind of brain rot took place in Silicon Valley at the same time as it sort of took hold in DC.

Yeah, a lot of it was Twitter, honestly.

Yeah.

So I love to hate read this essay by Paul Graham, who's this kind of like Silicon Valley thought leader, which is called How to Think for Yourself.

And I'll quote from that briefly.

It matters a lot who you surround yourself with.

If you're surrounded by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express.

And that in turn will constrain which ideas you have.

But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience.

Hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to and to think more.

And then I want to skip to the very bottom of this piece, where he thanks the people who read early drafts of this.

And maybe I'll tell you who these people are, because it takes a little Silicon Valley inside baseball to understand who these people are.

So he says, Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, he's a Y combinator guy.

Paul Buchide, that's the inventor of Gmail and Google AdSense, I believe.

Patrick Collison, who started Stripe, I believe.

Jessica Livingston, who's a Y Combinator partner.

Harsh Tagar, who's another Y Combinator guy.

And Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this.

So this guy has basically talked to people who are essentially clones of himself and then congratulated himself on...

figuring out how to think for yourself.

Like, don't surround yourself by, yes, men, surround yourself with partners from Y Combinator.

Like, there's not a non-billionaire in this bunch unless someone also has a gambling problem, right?

The thing about these like heterodox thinkers calling for more intellectual diversity, right?

Or like patting themselves on the back for exposing themselves to unfamiliar ideas, actually, all they do is talk to the same 15 fucking people over and over.

Like, this is definitely a specific issue in Silicon Valley, right?

But if you look at like the intellectual dark web, like anything Barry Weiss ever puts together, it's always like the same fucking like 15, 20 people

over and over and over again.

And they all agree with each other on basically everything.

Yeah.

You know that meme that's like, it's just two dumb bitches telling each other exactly.

Like that's

a whole media ecosystem that's just like 500 dumb bitches telling each other exactly because they actually have a pretty uniform worldview that they are like reinforcing, right?

They just recreated their own echo chamber about how we're in an echo chamber.

Yeah.

It is weird, this like the fetishization of like intellectual diversity at the same time that all these people spend their whole time denigrating actual expertise.

Yeah.

It's very anti-intellectual.

Yeah.

On both of the podcasts that I have, which are both like fairly research driven, but also like we're kind of new to this and normies and we don't want to get stuff wrong.

Most of our episodes, before we put them out, we send the rough cut to like academic experts like, hey, you're a medievalist.

We're about to talk about medieval research.

Can you listen to us?

Make sure we're not saying anything boneheaded.

You've sent it to me.

You've sent me episodes of, I think, if books could kill, be like, hey, is there anything misogynist in here?

And I'd be like, well, let me look, you know, and I like, I'd be like,

you're like the first third to one half.

But

that's like a viewpoint thing, to be honest.

Like, if we're talking about a group, we want to send it to members of that group.

But also, like, me and Aubrey did an episode about like the science of sleep and like how sleep works.

And I sent like four different researchers on sleep to be like, am I making any technical errors in this?

And we weren't really looking for like viewpoint diversity.

It's just like, you are experts.

We're doing our best to summarize a field.

Let us know if we're getting anything wrong.

And then we will update stuff if we're getting things wrong.

But it's not like when you're talking about facts, you're really not trying to get like a range of views in the same kind of way.

Like the fetishization of viewpoint diversity and the total like indifference to academic expertise and the extent to which these people are fucking complaining about academics all the time, it just reveals the nature of the whole project, right?

Because if you were trying to go about the world in a more responsible way, you would try to engage with people who know what they're talking about and have dedicated their lives to whatever issue you're talking about, like space exploration or anything.

Like there's real experts on this, but these people don't seem interested in them.

There's like, oh, I need to hear

from basically seven people from an extremely narrow slice of like center-right ideology.

Like, that's what they actually want under the guise of intellectual diversity.

I feel like the quote-unquote trans debate is such a good example of this.

We're like, people who study this stuff for a living are the activists, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then shouldn't we get a different viewpoint?

And that's a person who's just like shooting their mouth off on like mumsnet or whatever, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And actual clinicians, I mean, nobody talks to the fucking clinicians.

Yeah.

Like, right?

Clinicians are totally absent from this entire discourse because they're seen as like biased, but it's like, well, these are people who are doing this day to day.

Shouldn't you talk to them about like timelines and shit?

Yeah, if we were talking about like cancer treatments, I think we'd ask an oncologist, you know?

Yeah.

It's also also a place where our clique economy and academia sort of diverge in interesting ways because in some way, they're interested in having the same debate over and over again.

Whereas indeed, academic research kind of says, oh, I think we kind of know this and we move on to the next question now.

I can't tell you how often I'm told, well, you guys talk a lot about trans people at the Clayman Institute, but you never address like, what is a woman?

I'm like, oh my God, like,

really?

You want me to do dumb gotcha things?

Like,

what are we doing with this?

Like, right?

It's like, it's, it's like, you know why are we why are we bothering with this stuff like there are is interesting work to be done let's platform that interesting work and then eventually we'll be done with that work too and move on to the next thing right like fields tend to evolve in these ways and that's what expertise is right you've heard from people who are clinicians and researchers but you haven't heard from 50 dumb bitches going exactly

i think that's wrong i think you need to hear from everybody i think that's a that's a good note about like the repetitiveness of these discourses right?

They do kind of like circle the drain for a long time.

And I think this comes back to your point about comfort, Adrienne.

It's like, this is the mac and cheese that your mom has made you 40 times this past year.

You know, it's like there is something really reassuring, I think, about returning to these discourses where...

you feel like you already know the answer and you can have your preconceived answer reaffirmed again as right, even in the midst of a world that is presenting to you like frightening contrary evidence, right?

Right.

This might touch on what you were talking about, Michael, about how like these discourses, and including the ones that get laundered into like elite publications, tend to not really have a lot of reference to facts or like empiricism, right?

I think it's a feature and not a bug, right?

I think what they're doing

is like soothing readerships who are being confronted with unfamiliar, disturbing, challenging, like to them, new new information, right?

And just kind of like soothing that information away and restoring the status quo ante.

Like, no, no, no, no, no.

You don't have to think about gender differently because you've encountered a lot of, you know, accounts of trans experience and trans people.

You can just think that trans people are fake and we're just going to like soothe your hair and shush you to sleep.

Right.

And no matter how many state laws get passed, you still call that like challenging wisdom.

You're like, ooh, no one wants to talk about it.

It's like, well, 25 states have now banned this kind of care.

It's not really like the, this was also the year of the fucking lab leak discourse, which

more than 50% of Americans believe the origin of COVID was a lab leak.

So like, you won, guys.

Congratulations.

But every time this comes up, it's still cast as like forbidden wisdom.

You're not going to be able to do it.

Like, the elites don't want you to know.

It's like, guys, at this point, you can just say it's the fucking establishment view.

It's false, or at least there's no evidence for it.

But it's like, you can only do this like put upon challenging view garbage for a limited amount of time, but it doesn't seem to fucking matter to anybody.

Does the president, the speaker of the house, and a five to four majority of the Supreme Court agree with you?

Not that challenging of you.

I'm sorry.

That's pretty canonical.

You guys I need a cigarette so bad.

That might be where we have to wrap up.

It's time.

That's now four examples.

You can put that, you can edit the Atlantic article, put me in there.

All right, guys, thank you so much for coming on this weird journey with me.

I feel like I've really recapped my year in a distressing way.

Yeah, my heart heart rate is up, which means I've been podcasting.

Michael Hobbs, friend of Inbed with a Right, host of every one of your favorite podcasts, and an all-around mensch.

Thank you so much for being here with us.

A gay mensch, which means I only have sex two minutes at a time.

That is gay.

That is gay, fellas.

That's true.

In Bed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.