Emily (72:53)
you follow my work in different places or you have over the years, you know, even if it was back at Federalist Radio Hour, I love having people on, no matter if they' or right or center, whatever. You know, it's a criticism sometimes that I see is like, well, what does Emily actually believe? Why is Emily talking to this person? Blah, blah, blah. It's like people are interesting and frankly, people are smarter than me. And there are all kinds of fun questions you can pepper people with and have a better understanding of where they're coming from. At the end of the day, it sounds so cliche and honestly, it sounds so stupid. I get it, especially right now. It sounds quaint and maybe a little boomery. But I just think other people are very interesting and they have interesting reasons for what they believe, interesting experiences that have brought them to what they believe. So, you know, Daryl has seen so much. He's seen so much and he's truly been one of the people at the front lines of continuing communication with folks who have been absolutely radicalized. And he's willing to tell you what he thinks the left is doing wrong. He's willing to tell you what he thinks the right is doing wrong. And he has so much experience actually talking to people who have drifted into radicalization in one way or the other. I mean, one of the things that we have talked about in the last couple of Happy Hour episodes, or it seems like every, almost every Happy Hour episode for the last six months basically is conspiracy theories, sometimes on the right, sometimes about Israel, whatever it is. And I think you see in a lot of people who are spinning up those theories, the, the Internet has trapped them in some unhelpful positions where it's almost uncomfortable as a viewer. It's probably one of the reasons some people watch it, right? It's like with reality tv, some of us are just addicted to those uncomfortable moments because there's something very real in it. One of the things you can't fake is that authentic discomfort, right? That's, that's one of the reason prank shows are so popular. It's like you can't, you have to have whatever Ashton Kusher is doing on punk, that was a really toxic millennial reference. But whatever he's doing, you have to have someone else on the other side who's actually very uncomfortable or scared or whatever, because you can sense that it's real emotion. And I think what we've, we've seen is just the way algorithmic social media is totally poisoning people's ability to think rationally and clearly about a lot of this stuff. So I was, I was curious to get Daryl's take on that. As promised, though, I said I would weave together the misadventures of Lindy west, clavicular and Taylor, Frankie, Paul, and I'm gonna do it. It. I'm gonna do it. I think I can do it. If you've never heard the name Lindy west before, you're probably very confused. If you're also on X, you're probably very. I don't know what the middle of that Venn diagram is, but you're probably very confused right now about why you keep seeing these two words next to each other, Lindy and West. And why the elder millennials on your feed seem to be so caught up with Lindy West. I mean, I counted 12 pieces in the Atlantic just in the last week. We can put one of them up on the screen. This was a fantastic piece, and both of these pieces in the Atlantic were excellent. And I'm not used to saying that this was by Helen Lewis. It was called the Death of Millennial Feminism. The great Tyler Austin Harper also had a piece reviewing Lindy West's new memoir called Adult Braces. And basically, Lindy west is. Is the sort of peak elder millennial Lindy west wrote for Jezebel at its heights. And once again, if you don't know what Jezebel is, God bless you, you missed out on an absolutely horrible era of the Internet. Here is Lindy West's bylines in September 2014, right before she left Jezebel. Jezebel was one of those sites where people would blog like three articles a day or something. It'll be like 300 words of just pure snark. Like, here's a headline. Scarlett Johansson gave birth. Golden Retriever loves watching football so much. Oh, my God, some of us liked Chris Pratt before it was cool. I'm actually just gonna click on that one for the hell of it. Apparently there's been some grumbling lately. She wrote, from people who identify as Chris Pratt, early adopters unimpressed with the Jilly come lately, swinging over Guardians of the Galaxy. And to those Chris Pratt hipsters, I say you guys are being ludicrously legit. All Cast because I am one of you. She wrote like Donald Trump was tweeting at the time, I like Chris Pratt. She goes on to say again in all caps, for who he is as a person, you shallow fucks. And Lenny west went on to have a calm, like at the Guardian and was understood to be a feminist thinker, not just like a blogger, but was really seen as somebody who was a feminist thinker. What was the. Was it like Anwar Al Awlaki that got the obituary? They were like an austere scholar. I forget which, like, jihadist got that from, like the post of the times. But Lindy west was actually treated like an austere feminist scholar. And this new memoir has just the. The peak millennial feminist arc baked into it. And it took a turn. There have been all kinds of reviews making this point. It took a turn over the weekend where Slate, where you would imagine Lindy west getting a very friendly hearing, says they got an email responding to their review, just getting absolutely hammered by Lindy West, Lindy West's non binary husband, basically. It turns out that Lindy west isn't a throuple. Lindy West's husband, who I guess, like, it sounds as though racially guilted west into opening up their marriage to this Lindy West's husband's girlfriend. And the adult braces part of all of this. Yeah, the headline here from the New York Times, Lindy west thought she couldn't handle polyamory. She was wrong. You go, girl. You get a polycule, you get a polycule, you get a husband, you get a wife, you get a they. That's really what's happening here from some, some corners of the media. But here's a. Here's a point from Slate. Much of Adult Braces reads like a divorce memoir for the elder millennials raised on Jezebel in the golden age of Twitter. Something in Elizabeth G. Gilbert or a Roxanne Gay might release to lighten up, to light up group chats everywhere. What a depressing sentence. Because that's really what was happening circle like 2012 in millennial culture. But really Lindy west and Lindy West's husband get in touch with Slate. These reviews are popping up in every publication, but Slate gets an email. Let me put this up on the screen. The weekend after we published this profile of Lindy west, she and her partners all emailed me about their displeasure with the result. Quote, I feel hurt by this piece. It feels subtly designed to generate exactly the kind of backlash against. Ahem. Phule. That's the husband and by extension, me. It's hard to weather backlash that's about someone else, especially when I tried so hard in my book to convey who we are and the complexities of what really happened. Perhaps I failed. Roya, who I believe is the third, says, if I'm honest, it just feels like a Slate article which no one I know actually reads and certainly wouldn't pay to access even for this. I hope that one day you can apologize sincerely to Lindy. She deserves it. And then the husband's email quote indicated the most dissatisfaction among the triad. It's republishing full at the bottom of this piece, so let's scroll down onto the oh yeah, I'm not logged into my Slate plus membership. Damn. What. What a sad state of affairs we are in here. But Lindy west. This is my theory and this is where we're going to go with this. Lindy west is basically a proxy. A proxy for Elder Millennial culture. So Matt Iglesias posted on X Another toxic Elder millennial. Maybe he's, he's, he's junior Gen X. I don't know. Iglesias posts shouldn't someone have to write the Lindy west is good and actually write about everything take in order to justify the volumes of takedowns I am seeing. But this is really interesting actually, because the idea that Lindy west would publish a memoir that is so Lindy West. I mean Lindy west has not changed one bit. Much hay has been made about how Lindy west was anti hooters and then at one point on her feminist arc became like pro stripper. And that's just genuinely interesting. But what you're seeing there is the same person who is wearing an ideology like fashion and it's, it's this contrarianism, right? Like it's, it's a person who's not necessarily dressed fashionably but is dressed contrarian. That's an ideal ideological form. That's what Lindy west and her peers of this generation carried with them. And it became fashionable for a moment. There was this peak era of like Buzzfeed and whatever else, like Wonkhet, dare I say Gawker, where it was all wrapped into this Liz Lemon cosplay. That's really what it was. It was Liz Lemon cosplay of, you know, 28 to 35 year old women and probably gay bloggers who were doing the snark thing and getting a lot of plaudits for it. Like it was seen as very edgy. And I think probably because it was. If you go Back to the blogosphere, which Iglesias was a part of, certainly Lindy west was a part of. It was the first different thing from traditional media on the Internet. It was what came up of blogspots when they first popped up. And it was so very millennial. And I always go to Culture of. Of Narcissism from Christopher Lasch to understand what happened in my generation. I think it's. It's happened just across the, across the board. He talks about very early in Culture of Narcissism, the therapy, the therapization. And this book was written what, in the 70s or the 80s? He writes love as self sacrifice or self abasement, meaning as submission to a higher loyalty. These sublimations strike the therapeutic sensibility as intolerably oppressive, offensive to common sense, and injurious to personal health and well being. And what we started to see are the people who were raised by parents who had adopted a lot of this, bring it into the workplace and into politics. And when it merged with politics, I think it was particularly toxic. It became canc. Cancel culture, essentially. So if you were reading Jezebel in 2014, you were getting glimpses into what was mutating into cancel culture. This is more lash. Today, Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility, by the banality of the social order they have erected against it. It's just so crazy how prescient this was. As the family loses not only its productive functions, but many of its reproductive functions as well, men and women no longer manage even to raise their children without the help of spiritual certified experts. The atrophy of older traditions of self help has eroded everyday competence in one area after another and has made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation and other bureaucracies. Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self esteem. On the contrary, the narcissist, he lash says his apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints, that is important because we're talking about the blogosphere, right? Where you're totally leaving behind institutional constraints, quote, does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his grandiose self reflected in the attentions of others, or by attacking himself to those who radiate celebrity, power and charisma. This became millennial politics. And that's where I'm going to go ahead and put this clavicular reaction up on the screen. I'm not going to play the clip because I think SNL gets annoyed if you do that. But here's the caption. Clavicular goes off after seeing SNL gesture Max and impersonate him saying, millennials have no culture. I mean, what he's saying is that millennials have a totally mimetic, repetitive, hollow culture. This is. When I watched the sketch, I couldn't believe how cringy it was. I feel like the word cringe has become cringe. Maybe we need a Zoomer correspondent to explain that. But it's like your skin crawls when you watch this sketch. And clavicular, like, Donald Trump is somebody who should be eminently easy to mock. That is a gift to comedy writers, and they do the worst possible. It's sort of like what they did with Tucker the other week. I don't know if you saw that. It did this impression. Impersonation of Tucker. Impression of Tucker on Weekend Update that was like Tucker Carlson circa, like. Like 2014. It bore absolutely no resemblance to Tucker we talked about with Griffin last week. It was so, again, like, hollow and just self. It's. It's people who don't get questioned enough because they've projected a fragility. So they. It's. It's. There's too much friction to question people who project that fragility. And if you yourself are fragile, you don't. You don't question other people because you don't want to be accused of stepping into, you know, their fragile space or their.
