America This Week, April 19, 2024: "To Build a Surveillance State."

Because there's some marauders coming to town, some marauding hippies, and I'm going to kick their butts.

Yeah, Elon.

In the new NPR CEO, Catherine Marr, who is what was originally a tangential character, not tangential, but she was. she was not the main character in a drama involving the NPR senior editor, Uri Berliner, now former, he has resigned in the middle of this week. And we talked about that last week and all the problems that that NPR had. And then she, there's that famous maple cocaine tweet, where, you know, about how, you know, everybody is famous on the internet for five minutes, and your job is to not be, not be that person.

Actually, it's each day. on Twitter, there is one main character, the goal is to never be it. And she became the, the main character of Twitter, probably last weekend. And, and then this progressed into this thing over the middle of this week, in part because Berliner was suspended, and then he was kind of ousted. And before we get to the whole thing about her, I'm just curious about your reaction to how NPR handled the criticism that they got?

Because it, just having covered all those police brutality stories, it reminded me so much of the way police departments behave, when somebody goes, you know, somebody accuses one of somebody on the force of, you know, a brutality complaint or something like that, there was a blue wall at NPR, and they just attacked him. You know, they defended the integrity of the institution, and said it was his fault, and didn't appear to be. take, take any criticism, it seems to me. Right.

Instead of addressing his criticism, as we went into last week, which was really about coverage and the content of NPR, they suggested that, besides being a traitor and a snitch, in some way, he didn't like the composition of the place, or that somehow he was rejecting their diversity, requirements and goals, which wasn't the aim of his essay. But in any case, he was made into an abominable ingrate, and someone who was trying to take down a revered American institution. They got very patriotic about NPR, in a way that they're not patriotic about a lot of things, and kicked him out, showing that the in-group is absolutely inviolable, and will not be questioned, will not be challenged.

I think they're on a course for some kind of, you know, all the people who might boycott them. don't listen to them anyway, so that won't happen.

The question is whether there's some 5% of listeners who still are, you know, forming their opinions about life and the world, and who might be a little distressed by their closed mindedness. But in any case, they've gotten rid of the, you know, they've gotten rid of the dissidents, the wrong thinker. They've demonstrated for all of America. what happens to you if you're in one of these institutions, and you raise your hand with an objection. And now they'll carry on.

They'll carry on under the leadership of this woman who has been now raked over the coals to some extent for many days. Not only was she the object of Twitter fame for one day, she's really been so solidly for almost a week.

you know, gets stuck in the middle of a Twitter maelstrom, it's because of one thing that they said, and you know, if you don't give the fire oxygen, which is interesting, because we're going to come back to that when we talk about our story today.

But normally, if you don't feed the controversy, it doesn't go on for more than a day. The problem with her is that there is this gigantic reservoir of stuff in her tweeting history that became, you know, central to the entire controversy. And there's a gigantic quantity of it. So people haven't even finished going through it. And it's germane to a real controversy because, among other things, when Berliner finally resigned, he said, you know, he referenced these divisive views that I mentioned in my article.

They continue to be on display.

And you know, we might as well just give people a little flavor of what that is. There's a level of this story, which is just kind of funny, because she's, you know, the comparison I made was to the spoof site, Tanya McGrath.

And Walter, do you read that site, by the way?

And she does resemble Maher. How do you pronounce her last name?

But the Tanya McGrath site has a whole thing about how daddy took me to the Veuve Clicquot champagne house and ordered the wrong vintage. and, you know, boy, am I upset. And, you know, it's so. it's the parody version. But just to give a little flavor of the exact comparison here.

So here's, here's Catherine Maher talking about her white woman voice. I know that hysteric white woman voice. I was taught to do it. I've done it. It's a disturbing recognition.

Well, I don't recall ever using it to deliberately expose another person to immediate physical harm. on my own cognizance. It's not impossible. That is whiteness. That's kind of awesome, I think, by itself, that tweet.

And then here's the Tanya. I get a lot of hate on Twitter from white women who simply do not understand my pain. Try, try experiencing 400 years of slavery, then we'll talk.

And here's Maher on talking about church, lol, a disapproval of the Met Gala, as though Catholicism's history has not been rife with appropriation, excess performative ostentation and rigid social hierarchies. Those who are raised Catholic don't at me.

And then here's the Tanya on the Church of England, if God exists, they should sue the Church of England for misgendering them for the past 500 years.

Just the last example I'll just give is this came on, comes up actually kind of repeatedly in both their accounts, this whole idea that when people are, are being

generous or charitable, they actually have some kind of other motive. This person, Tom Gara, points out that Noam Chomsky, is in that heroic category of people, along with Mark Cuban, who respond to every email. There should be a word for them. And he listed a whole bunch of Noam's emails and she wrote, man, if women wrote such abbreviated emails, they'd be considered terribly rude. This came up a lot.

The Tanya's version was. men will often conceal their misogyny by being nice. So if you have a male friend who has never hit you, spat in your face or called you a whore, he's almost certainly a misogynist. Anyway, I don't want to make too much of the jokiness aspect of it, but let's just say she's very on the nose in terms of the caricature, so much so that it's hard to. it's hard not to wonder about it.

at times. It seems it seems like almost like a performance, right?

It is a true melange or collage of buzzwords, received attitudes and nostrums and maxims from a kind of academic leftism that you expect to see on campus, but don't expect to see people seriously espousing as their own thinking. But her own thinking is an interesting construct for me, because, as I say, it does not appear to come from a human individual, but from a kind of party pamphlet filtered through, filtered through a person who's having all the same problems personally that we're having socially. In other words, whiteness, for example, seems to be something that she's thinking about every day and in almost every interaction. Patriarchy seems to weigh heavily on her, even while having coffee.

She doesn't have the same problems that you and I have.

And I think she represents what happens and what will happen once we no longer have free speech, once everything is a sort of canned recitation of reverential, pre-approved political statements. And I was telling you before the show, there's a kind of a conspiracy theory, a mock conspiracy theory, that she's not indeed a biological being, but an A.I. construct. And the reason that that's so funny is that it again appears that Gemini A.I.

might be responsible for all her pronouncements.

And. Like I say, it's easy to fall into the kind of gender based satire as far as her person and her persona, but I think more important than that is that she is a kind of walking Wikipedia herself. Everything seems to have been installed by some super user, you know, and she's down ranked her, you know, her most personal or eccentric thoughts. She doesn't seem to have any eccentric thoughts and upranked everything that.

You know, would be agreed to readily in a conversation on the Harvard campus.

In addition to the fact that when she's at at leisure, she doesn't seem to have most of her Twitter timeline is just a sort of an endless compendium of banal observations. Whenever she enters any works, any space, she always counts the number of people, that minorities and women. And then she tweets about that.

There's one very funny tweet where she's just sitting around doing nothing and says, you know, basically, it's a day like any other, except for the metric fuck ton of misogyny. So this is like going through her mind even without any stimuli. But what you just mentioned, this whole idea of, you know, not really having any individual conviction apart from what everybody thinks. Now, this this is a very important concept at Wikipedia.

And there was something that happened at Wikipedia. that was a kind of a radical and very important change in how we view information in this country, which is. the Wikipedia started off as an independently edited sort of encyclopedia service where everybody was allowed to participate. And then it became a fiercely regimented sourcing mechanism that that dramatically narrowed the field of what you can see. And it's funny, if you go back and look, her early statements are very much sort of traditional pro-free speech, you know, First Amendment kind of stuff, although she doesn't specifically mention the First Amendment.

But pre like 2014,, her attitudes seem a little bit like yours or mine. And then then there is this change. Now, I want to just play a clip of an interview that she did with Brandi Zadrozny of NBC. But here it's in the form of a discussion at the Atlantic Council. And here she describes the transformation of Wikipedia.

And it's this is worth checking out.

It revolves around whether moderation of speech or algorithmic amplification or quieting violates a person's freedom. And Wikipedia isn't immune to that debate. Right. In its own ways, it amplifies voices and points of view at the exclusion of others. So what are your thoughts about this current fight?

that's been the subject of congressional hearings and Facebook Oversight Board decisions? How are you thinking these days about the concept of freedom online?

But when she gets there, when she starts talking about structures of governance,

she's actually saying something quite meaningful after a bunch of, you know, sort of platitudes and just pay close attention.

I think this was very much the Clinton State Department understanding of rights in the space to an understanding that actually we've never really thought about rights at the scale of a network of three billion people and what our norms and expectations are, and whether traditional structures of governance can really meet. this moment. The platforms that I'm having a conversation with are really looking at. what might we need to do to fundamentally rethink the concept of governance at scale that is representative, in a way that sort of suits the needs of the platforms, while also respecting rights in a way that doesn't, that isn't impractical to be.

Somehow, the numbers of people in the world, you mentioned 3 billion, don't afford us the same latitude that smaller numbers do. Now, I don't know what the logic of that is. I don't know why quantity should affect quality with information, and why structures of governance and so on should necessarily change. But she is a wiki person, okay? She has a wiki mind.

She is devoted to the notion that,

as she said in other settings, there is no particular truth. There is only this agglomeration of beliefs, views, and trusted sources. And this is how things will run now. So we're post-rights, we're post-constitutional civil liberties, and we're now in some sort of strange, giant hive mind that has to run by new rules. I will note that in her verbiage, she always defaults to the biggest word and the fuzziest word, because, honestly, she doesn't know what she's talking about.

But she could not explain it to a fourth grader. I completely find a lapse in logic between saying, you know, freedom's great for you and I and, you know, small groups, but at scale, we can't afford it. Why? The way she speaks is hypnotic and lilting and very sure of itself, pretending that everything is self-evident, but she proves nothing. So it's really just a form of hypnotic suggestion, as far as I'm concerned.

I got no tangible argument from that.

And I think it's kind of interesting. Let's just have a listen about, you know, the conception about the difference between being sort of truth-based and focusing on something else.

Now, that is not to say that the truth doesn't exist, nor is it to say that the truth isn't important. Clearly, the search for the truth has led us to do great things, to learn great things.

But I think if I were to really ask you to think about this, one of the things that we could all acknowledge is that part of the reason we have such glorious chronicles to the human experience in all forms of culture is because we acknowledge there are many different truths. And so, in the spirit of that, I'm certain that the truth exists for you and probably for the person sitting next to you. But this may not be the same truth. This is because the truth of the matter is very often, for many people, what happens when we merge facts about the world with our beliefs about the world.

We can only sort of pool our best guesses, and rather than there being a final truth, we have to be satisfied with that. But then she also suggests that certain beliefs and certain best guesses and so on should be downrinked versus others. She gave this speech before she was at NPR, but when there's no bottom line, what you've got is just a kind of argument by authority.

Whoever is most authoritative and highest, most highly esteemed at the moment gets to speak. They put their idea with others who are of similar authority, and then we get this glob of semi-truth.

Well, then let's just have a free-for-all. But now she's in a position at NPR and was at Wikipedia, where you're trying to do something better than just use people's beliefs.

And so it goes around and around and around. And what she's finally saying is, it's what I say it is. I mean, it's really animal farm. It's some truths are more equal than there is no truth, but some truths are more equal than others.

And that is going to be our definition.