Podcast of Our Discontent w/ Thomas Chatterton Williams

Summary

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Red Scare: "Podcast of Our Discontent w/ Thomas Chatterton Williams"

Date: October 4, 2025
Guest: Thomas Chatterton Williams
Topic: Williams' new book, the Summer of Floyd and Covid, the collapse of liberal discourse, race and power in America, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the state of the left and right.

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Episode Overview

The Red Scare hosts, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, welcome writer and public intellectual Thomas Chatterton Williams for a wide-ranging discussion anchored by his new book Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse. The conversation examines the transformation of American race discourse since Obama, the "meme-ification" of public tragedy, the unraveling of institutional credibility, the emergence of a “woke right,” issues of free speech and cancel culture, and the difficulties of finding moral and cultural clarity in a polarized era.

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Main Discussion Topics & Insights

1. The Genesis and Timing of Williams' Book

• Williams describes his motivation to chronicle the events and aftershocks of the George Floyd summer and Covid, focusing on race, discourse, and shifting cultural paradigms.
• On the timing:
  • Dasha: “I was kind of worried it was too late... but it turns out that it’s back in a big way, or it never really left us.” (02:45)
  • Williams: “I started in 2021... I delivered the book late, so I was able to see Trump come back to power, and thought that was good for perspective.” (02:24)

2. Dissecting Contemporary Discourse: Klein vs. Coates

• Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent conversation served as a lightning rod, exposing deep fractures even within the left.
  • Williams: “Everybody was mad about something... this conversation was really a Rorschach test.” (03:32)
  • Dasha: “These guys are both invested in maintaining the illusion of progress, even as all of the progressive institutions have been exposed as corrupt or inadequate.” (05:13)

3. The Kirk Assassination and Comparative Martyrdom

• Comparison between the deaths of George Floyd and Charlie Kirk:
  • Dasha: “The left thinks your speech is violence, and their violence is speech.” (28:22)
  • Anna: “With Kirk… you have a coherent worldview reflected back... George Floyd was a metaphor, no one knew who he was until he was killed.” (34:11)
  • Williams: “It is interesting that there has not been violence in the streets at all [for Kirk]... what triggers a kind of license to do violence that’s not even connected to addressing the initial harm?” (29:49)
• The role of meme and myth:
  • Williams: “There’s the man, and then after death, posthumously, there’s the meme that is used for purposes and is sanctified.” (42:34)
  • Anna: “The narrative that the meme of George Floyd was used to prop up this narrative that the original sin of America is racism… whereas the narrative around Kirk is about the violence of the left against civil discourse.” (43:10)

4. Institutional Credibility and the Media Landscape

• Williams discusses being reviewed in major outlets and the ideological straightjacketing that comes with it.
  • Williams: “Who you choose to review a book is already making the judgment by who you give the book to…” (13:30)
• The general loss of trust in institutions, accelerated by the pandemic and media polarization, frames the broader malaise.

5. Race, Culture, and the Myth of Stasis

• The group debates the stickiness of racial victim narratives, why the improvement in black American conditions is ignored, and why activism intensifies as conditions improve.
  • Williams: “People really struggle with incremental progress... microaggressions are only possible when things are much more equal.” (45:34)
  • Dasha: “As soon as people start to live on more egalitarian terms, the slightest kind of inequality becomes unbearable.” (46:53)

6. Class vs. Race, and What Explains Crime

• Williams and the hosts push back on left/literalist narratives:
  • Williams on George Floyd: “Much more so than being black, he was killed because he was poor.” (64:52)
  • Dasha: “Most poor people aren’t criminals.” (65:55)
  • Anna: “Poverty and crime are related, but Floyd was a criminal—poverty was a factor, but the criminality put him in contact with the police.” (65:39)

7. Policing, Reform, and Narrative

• Noting the media’s race-centric focus, Williams argues for a more holistic approach:
  • “In sheer numbers, white people by far get killed by police more than anybody, but that’s my frustration with how these things get done when filtered through the lens of race.” (53:23)
  • “Black citizens... insisted that white liberals who were pushing [defund the police] on them get a grip and refund the police.” (50:31)

8. Assimilation, Immigration, and Cultural Change

• Debating America versus Europe, the hosts and Williams talk about assimilation, the “Great Replacement,” and why demographic and cultural change breeds anxiety:
  • Williams: “America always was fundamentally Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, African, Native American... the challenge is assimilative capacity and the rate of change.” (119:56)
  • Dasha: "If you have too many immigrants, the ideal of America ceases to be." (148:47)
  • Williams: “No society can have completely porous borders and allow a new population—change itself is what’s at stake.” (156:59)

9. The "Woke Right" and Cancel Culture

• Williams warns of the right imitating the authoritarian excesses of the woke left.
  • Williams: “J.D. Vance guest-hosted Kirk’s podcast and encouraged people to inform on each other to their employers... that’s cancel culture, that’s consequence culture—it’s the worst possible politics.” (91:44, 103:04, 160:53)
  • Anna: “It is bad on the left, and it’s bad for the right.” (103:24)
• The persistent dilemma: How to defend liberal values, especially free speech, when the playing field is not level, or when institutional power is unbalanced?

10. Liberalism and Its Discontents

• Williams advocates for reclaiming the “abandoned moral high ground,” but the hosts challenge whether liberalism is enough—and whether its inherent tolerance undermines itself.
  • Williams: “Genuine liberals don’t believe everything is zero-sum... We must identify and disown the means of extremism, even in pursuit of ends we agree with.” (160:53)
  • Anna: “Liberalism is incoherent. It claims that reclaiming a moral high ground that’s not based on anything except for liberalism is going to... [fail].” (185:11)

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Notable Moments & Quotes

• On Moral Clarity:
  • Williams: “Everybody feels they’re operating from a position of moral clarity. The only way you can impose that is through authoritarian imposition, which only works as long as you’re in power.” (169:29)
• On the Dangers of Pendulum Swings:
  • Williams: “Chris Rufo’s saying, ‘cancel culture makes sense now that we’re in power’—that’s the worst possible politics… He’s going to see it swing back in a way he doesn’t like.” (161:00)
• On Institutional Capture:
  • Dasha: “They literally hate husbands and fathers... they think abortion is rad.” (100:46)
• On Progress and Victimhood:
  • Williams: “There’s a kind of comfort in fetishizing the wound—but it takes some courage to acknowledge progress and accept it.” (61:23)
• On the Narrowness of 'Race':
  • Williams: “Different cultures value different things... there’s nothing about genome or blood. It’s what’s valued in your community.” (70:29)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:40] Williams discusses the miracle of public engagement around books
• [02:16] The genesis of Summer of Our Discontent
• [05:13] Ezra Klein vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates debate as a cultural indicator
• [11:29] Charlie Kirk’s effectiveness and the reaction to his death
• [27:39] The implications of “structural violence” and post-October 7th victimhood narratives
• [41:13] Memeification of public deaths and the transformation of individuals into symbols
• [45:34] Why does racial grievance persist despite evidence of progress?
• [53:00] Data: who dies at the hands of police and why
• [63:42] Black-white wealth gap and how it’s mostly at the top tiers
• [78:00] Is race a lie, a construct, or a genetic reality?
• [91:44] The right’s embrace of cancel tactics and consequences
• [120:09] America’s original ethnic/cultural constitution
• [156:59] The Great Replacement: demographic anxiety beyond race
• [160:53] What must liberals reclaim, and what are the means of extremism?
• [169:04] The journalistic turn to "moral clarity" and the danger in it

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Episode Tone & Style

Consistent with Red Scare, the conversation is frank, irreverent, and discursively wide-ranging—willing to probe taboo territory, poke at contradictions, and traffic in dark or sardonic humor. Williams is thoughtful, measured, and somewhat wistful about both liberal possibility and its ongoing erosion.

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Conclusion: Takeaways

Red Scare and Williams offer a sobering reflection on polarization, performative moral clarity, the failures and dangers of both sides, and the apparent exhaustion of the liberal project—while acknowledging that its alternatives are, if anything, scarier. While no easy answers are provided, the episode stages a nuanced, and at times uncomfortable, reckoning with the limits of discourse in an age of certainty and spectacle.

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If you missed the episode, this summary should give you a clear sense of the major arguments, the freewheeling discussion, and the way contemporary American pathologies are being re-examined through the lens of books, memes, and (sometimes morbid) public spectacle.

Transcript

[Anna Khachiyan]

We're back.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Y' all be talking.

[Anna Khachiyan]

We were just talking with our guests about how much we talk on this show.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I'll talk a lot. Y' all be talking. I'm. I'm happy to be back in the studio with. With Whammon.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Thanks for coming. Our return guest, Thomas Chatterton Williams is here to.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

We be chatter.

[Anna Khachiyan]

To chattering a ton. But you kind of talk a lot, too.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I'm trying. I'm trying to get. I think I said this last time. I'm trying to get on your level, be, you know, be chatter and be podcasting.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Your media trained, I feel.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, it takes a while, I think.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Do you enjoy or loathe doing all the press stuff every time you come out with a new book?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I do. I think it's a little bit of, like, a miracle when you go in a room and, I don't know, 50 people in some place actually come because they earnestly want to hear you talk about something that you thought about for a few years. That's, like, a beautiful thing. And, you know, everything is digital now, but actually, like, going out with a book and going into rooms and talking to people is. Is amazing. People still care. That is lovely.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Is there any part of you that. Well, because you. So Thomas has a new book. It's called Summer of Our Discontent, the Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse. About. Basically about the Summer of Floyd and Covid and sort of. It's kind of like a brief genealogy with some focus, I guess, specifically on race relations and how the country and the state of discourse has changed from the Obama era to where we are now.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And you wrote this in the afterword, you make reference to Trump's third bid for presidency.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, I delivered the book late, so I think that was actually a good thing because I was able to see that he was coming back to power. And I didn't, like, turn the book in when it was supposed to be due and.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But you wrote the majority of it in 2020.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I started in 2021. Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Okay.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I remember you telling me about that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And honestly, I was kind of worried that was too. Concerned. No, that it was too late. Because I figured that by the time, like, all the editing and the production had been done, it would be like 2024, 2025, and who would want to revisit that era? Because I think people got really sick of, like, the, what you call in, like, scare quotes, anti racism or wokeness or whatever. But it turns out that it's back in a big way or it never really left us. Like Ezra Klein and Ta Nehisi Coates most recently.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You watched that. I wanted to ask you about that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I wanted. Well, I wanted to ask you about that. What is. What's your beef with Ta Nehisi?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I don't even. I don't have a. For years I have. You know, he's a really interesting guy. I've met him a couple times, but, like, way back when he was. Before, between the world and me, when he was writing at the Atlantic. He's a nice. I find him to be a nice person interpersonally, unlike a lot of people that you meet in the industry. He's actually like. He's a nice guy. I think he's a smart, curious person who, in his writing, you can see is really, like, wrestling with ideas, which I think is the highest thing you can do. I have for years now, like, had disagreements with aspects of his conclusions or his. Or where he goes with his critiques of culture and politics. But I think he's a really interesting person to engage with. I was really intrigued by this conversation with Ezra Klein that he had because it seemed like just nobody was happy with this conversation. Everybody was mad about something. And if you go in, like, blue sky, they think Ezra Klein is really bad and they hate Ezra Klein. Yeah. And then if you go on X. Yeah. Ta Coates is. I mean, people think he's a laughing, so they're so angry at him. I mean, this. This conversation was really like a Rorschach test or something. It was interesting to see people's reactions to it.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I didn't even realize that they were at odds.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I thought they were having a. That's a funny thing.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, they slightly were. It's just like two people who are both on the left, like, slightly disagreeing, and no one is satisfied.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Ezra Klein basically having to kowtow to humor Ta Nehisi Coates because, like, a. A good, like, white Jewish liberal. He's scared not so much of the man himself, but of the reaction.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You can see that he's calculating that, like.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. That he's going to get some pushback or whatever. But I was really, like, perplexed, baffled by it because, like, somebody called it Kayfab.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, really?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

If I'm pronouncing it correctly. But yeah, it's like kayfab, whatever. Like, these guys are both invested in. In maintaining the illusion of progress or the myth of progress, even as all of the progressive institutions have been, like, exposed as, like, corrupt or captured or inadequate. And I Think Ezra Klein is probably a little wiser than Ta Nehisi Coates on this count because he can see that they've been, like, emptied of their content and credibility, but he can't lean too heavily on that because he so dearly wants to believe in progressivism.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I would think that Klein would still believe in institutions. In Ta Nehisi Coates is kind of saying that it's pointless to believe in that you can't even do anything but just struggle in a Sisyphean way knowing that your defeat is preordained.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, well, that's. That's sort of like, I think the big difference between you and Ta Nehisi. And I would preface this by saying that, like, of course, everybody on the right really hates him.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean, they hate him more than I had realized until a few days ago.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Think that he's a hate monger.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Right.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And I don't really get that from him. I don't really feel like his hate is particularly. I mean, it is personalized and it is overinvested, but it's almost like he's like repeating progressive shibboleths. Like, I don't think he's really thought through where he stands because it would be like, ego obliterating for him.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

What do you think he got wrong?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

What do you mean? In that conversation or in general?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean, I think in that conversation, because that conversation was really about Ezra Klein wrote this piece that said Charlie Kirk is doing politics the right way. And that drove people on Ezra Klein's side ostensibly crazy. And Coates basically said, like, why, of course, you don't have to. Like, it's horrific that the man was killed. I think, obviously everybody thinks it's horrific the way he was killed or that he was killed at all, but that you could just not say anything he said. Couldn't you have just chosen to be silent rather than say that he was doing politics the right way? And Ezra was saying, well, but he was. He was engaged in debate. And so that was where the real difference of opinion between the two of them.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, I think the attack on Ezra Klein is like, somewhat opportunistic coming from the left, because they're kind of saddling it with moral value. And when they say. Say that he said that Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way, they mean that he thinks that Charlie Kirk was good or positive, and he's merely saying that he was effective, which he was. Whatever you think of the guy. I'm personally, like, pro Charlie Kirk. I understand how people are anti Charlie Kirk, but I don't think he was imbuing that. Excuse me, With a value judgment. And Ta. Nehisi Coates is.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, he's.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He's. He said that Ezra Klein was a hate monger. And in response, somebody. Yeah, that Charlie Kirk was a hate monger. And in response, somebody was.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Which I think is wrong.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, I don't.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Were you, like, really up on Turning Point USA before? Yeah, no, not at all.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And I'm a fan of like, Internet debate.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But it kind of passed me by just because it was a little too. Honestly, a little too moderate. A little too, like.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Too moderate.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

That's the big criticism that.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Because if I'm gonna seek out kind of political content, I wanted to have like a little bit of an edge of some extreme, you know, a little more.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, now a lot of people more.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Of a point of view.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Like, who would you say is. Is doing debate with more of an edge than Charlie Kirk?

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, Tom.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean, Nick Fuentes, he didn't like Charlie Kirk.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, he was criticizing Charlie Kirk. And he's not alone in this. I can't even single him out for this because a lot of guys on the right, a lot of their pundits and commentators and thought leaders thought Charlie Kirk was kind of a pussy and a cuck and a normie con. And really, he is a normie. He was. And in. In the day, he was a standard.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Fair, like evangelical Zionists, like Republican, you know, and.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, but I mean, Donald Trump said he was one of like the foremost effective people in getting him reelected. So he. He was not like your Mitt Romney type of.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, no, he was incredibly effective. But in the days after his murder, I think what emerged was that people hadn't fully appreciated his influence.

[Anna Khachiyan]

They took him for granted.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They took him for granted. And they also didn't fully appreciate how savvy and in the know he was and how he was being intentionally moderate to not scare away the base, the constituency, to maintain some level of what you would call like liberal discourse. And so you have this strange phenomenon of a lot of people on the right now maybe pivoting or backpedaling or being like really kind of honest and self aware and saying like, man, I. I really didn't appreciate him. I didn't give him a chance or like, what an effect.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, he was engaged in very. I mean, part of the reason he was so effective and part of the reason I didn't really like, you know, wasn't a Turning Point USA chapter member.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, you Were.

[Anna Khachiyan]

No, just that it was like a very like low level of discourse of like debating college kids, which is like amusing, makes for good, like, and things like that. Yeah, yeah, but it's like, it's pretty low hanging. Fruit is like inviting, kind of like young people. It's virtuous, I think.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

From his perspective.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But virtuous and lucrative.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And lucrative, definitely. Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. But like, if. If you hold that. Charlie Kirk was a hate monger, I think it's also fair to say that all the people coming out and accusing him of mongering hate like Ta Nehisi Coates, like Ilhan Omar, like Mehdi Hassan, are also hate mongers for the other side because they are engaged in basically a smart, subversive and anti white rhetorical argument.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I would separate those people. I mean, Mehdi Hasan, I just find to be so noxious. He's the worst. And I would say someone like Ta Nehisi Coates is a real. Is a serious person. Mehdi Hassan is not. Ilana Mar is in a different category. Yeah, but, but I. Yeah, no, I understand what you're saying. But it's interesting to see the kind of. I don't think we have a way of talking to each other anymore, which is really kind of.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, what I thought was, I read the New York Times review of your book.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, my God.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Which was a little scathing by like a Yale lob guy. Guy. They only really let black people review your book. I noticed.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

See, that was the. No, that was the best thing.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Why won't they let a white person.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Review of this book was reviewed. My last book, Self Portrait of Black and White, was reviewed when Pamela Paul was editing the book review by Andrew Solomon. And it was interesting because, you know, I write about race a lot, but I also was writing in that book about having a child that is different than you. And so Pamela Paul, as the editor of the book review, didn't say, this is a black guy writing about race. I have to assign it to a black reviewer. She said, this is a parent writing about a child that's different than them. So she assigned it to Andrew Solomon, who had this, you know, he had this wonderful book, Far from the Tree, which was about parents who have children that are different than them in different ways. Like parents who are the, you know, the parent of a genius or of a child with, you know, a disability or something. And so that was the connection. There's different ways you can think about how to frame a book. And oftentimes when you assign a review who you choose to review a book is already making the judgment by who you give the book to. So this book was given to somebody who essentially, I don't think even read the book. You know, he had a point of view that was going to be expressed irrespective of the content of the book.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, his critique was, I bring this up with you saying we don't know how to talk to each other because I read it. And his critique is that you are like punching too far left where there's only minor blemishes, and further right, there's like horrible injustice happening and that you're like somehow making excuses for. He says that the Black Lives Matter protests were mostly nonviolent, which you, like, is like a direct contradiction to points that you make in your book that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He doesn't even trying to cite evidence.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But reading the review, I was like, wow, it's like so different. You know, I'm reading the book being like, damn, he's going a little hard on Trump. Like, he's being a little alarmist about the Trumpism.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And I'm like, oh, like me and.

[Anna Khachiyan]

This guy writing this review, I've just like had a vastly different experience of like reading this book.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, yeah. It's like literally like two kids who grow up in the same family who have like vast different impressions of their parents.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And me and my brother thinks that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

The parents were too authoritarian and the other thinks that the parents were too lax. But, like, at some point in the book, you characterized left wing ID poll as merely ill conceived, but right wing populism as openly spiteful. And I think, like, if I had any criticism of the book, it's that ultimately, even though you're very open and comfortable about critiquing the excesses of the left, you are, I guess, for lack of a better term, unwilling to delve deeper into why the right reacts like it does to the left.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's a thankless task. When you, like, I guess when you operate in the space that I do and you, you do all these things to try to be even handed, or you, you know, no one can be completely objective, but you try to be even handed and you get absolutely zero. Like, I get no credit for any critique of the left. It's just like anything that I would say that would be critical of the left is considered like, invalidating of everything else I say. So you don't ingratiate yourself on the left whatsoever.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, even I watch.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But then you're also, like, reading it and you're. And you know, and the the review in the Wall Street Journal was like, well, he was pretty hard on Trump. He doesn't, he doesn't give the President any credit, does he? You know, it's just, it's a weird place to be.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It's like, well, on the ice. Watched your Daily show and you are discussing with that man I've never seen before in my whole life, Jordan Clapper.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I like this, this guy is cool. Jordan Clapper.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I just haven't watched the Daily show in so long. I was like, who even, you know, I was like, I thought Jon Stewart.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Was on this show on Mondays. On Mondays, John Stewart's there.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But yeah, you're talking about how credibility and trust was lost in the COVID pandemic. And then he's really quick to be like, so you're saying you understand where Mag is coming from. And then you're put in this position where you have to like, so, Mike. Yeah. A question I have related to that is, like, when you were writing the book and I don't know if you write this way, but who is your like, idealized, imagined audience?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's a great question, Dasha. It's. I just want to imagine somebody who's open minded and I don't imagine a political position. I'm not writing for a liberal audience or a conservative audience. I'm trying to write for an adult or a reader mature enough just to say I want to try to engage with these ideas and think through them and come to my own conclusions and potentially be persuaded. So the reader would be someone of good faith, of open mindedness. But it could fall anywhere. I mean, I teach at Bard College and I'm a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I'm, I'm comfortable around progressives and conservatives and in all of these spaces you find people that are really smart and really open and you hope that you can have these kind of conversations where you bridge divides. That sounds really corny on Red Scare, I know, but you really do meet lots of people who don't neatly get categorized ideologically and can actually surprise you. And so the ideal reader is somebody who's just approaching it with an open mind. The exact opposite of the New York Times reviewer who didn't read the book with an open mind. He had a point of view and he just picked and chose quotes and things that would buttress his point of view, but was never opening, open to being persuaded.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Which again is like exactly the wrong way to approach writing a book review.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean, I think so.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Of all things.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, definitely. But being you know, sort of who you are and connected to these institutions. Don't you think the audience for the book would skew, like we said, someone who's open to being dissuaded? So, meaning that they would hold, what position would you imagine? What are you trying to dissuade them from?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I think that readers of the journalism that I write and most readers that would be reached, I think, and I might be wrong, most readers that would be reached by a book like this would probably be center to center left with some center right. But I'm trying to convince, I think, people who consider themselves to be liberals to be self reflective and self critical. And I think that's the, that's why the emphasis lies on pointing out the flaws of the left. I mean, maybe 20% of the book is critical of, of Trump and 80% is critical of all of the ways in which I think that the left overplayed its hand and in some ways set the table for the kind of reaction that we're experiencing now. You know, and one of the really frustrating responses was this kind of response that was in the New York Times, which is like, when this is happening with Donald Trump, who even has time to think about what the left did wrong? And it's like, well, if you would like to understand why Trump came back to power and why, you know, a surprising amount of black male voters and Latinos and Asians and all types of people you didn't think would be interested in Donald Trump's vision for America came over to him. You should probably take some time to think about what you did or what we did that was so unattractive that it, that it made Trump not just.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Plausible, but like alienated vast swaths of people and turn them to the other side. I have a question about that because you, you know, as, I guess you're.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

A late Gen Xer, I'm a young millennial.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Young millennial. Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Don't, don't, don't, don't miss cat. Don't miss categories.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I'm confused about where I stand on this.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Definitely a millennial.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Millennial. Yeah. But like, you characterize the Obama era as this kind of post racial utopia.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And you're not having.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yes, I think you've got a little bit of nostalgia.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. The Obama administration really set the time.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You're too young to remember this administration.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I feel like the Obama administration really set the table for the Trump administration, to use your phrase, because you had this guy who was supposedly post racial and unifying, but actually, you know, ended up like sewing quite a bit of racial discontent. How do you think Racial.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He did that?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Acrimony. I mean, he brought up the question of race a lot. I think at some point he threw his white grandmother and white mother under the bus.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, you made this point on the Daily show about him saying that Trayvon Martin could have been his son. And you drew a very intelligent parallel. I thought of, like, it'd be like Trump saying, if Lincoln Riley could have been his daughter, it would have been decided that way.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That would strike people as. Yeah, people. A lot of people would be like, why did you. Why did you insert that?

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And especially for the person that was supposed to deliver us a post racial.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But it didn't feel that way at the time. It felt very normal and like.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

We were all on board.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

The vibes were maybe right for.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, I don't think he would have said that now, but at the time, I mean, maybe.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I also think that he just didn't have much latitude for any types of errors. And so I think he was in a kind of very difficult, if not impossible situation. But it's true that if you look at it in retrospect, you know, if the point was that a lot of Americans were trusting him with bringing us to a post racial future that we all wanted, then if the first post racial president is supposed to not actually do things the way that they were done in the past and insert identity politics. Right. So that was a kind of. It was a kind of violation of an implicit.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. You know, at minimum, he threw his lot in with like, the plight of African Americans, which is because he is not really your stereotypical African American, as he's the son of a white American mother and like a Nigerian father. He's.

[Anna Khachiyan]

He's not descended from slaves.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. And he's, you know, he's one of.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

These kind of like rootless global Kenyan Kenya.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Rootless, like global intellectuals.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, I remember when I was. Yeah, I remember, like my late great friend Stanley Crouch, who's a brilliant critic and author at the time, when Barack Obama was coming on the scene, a lot of black writers like Stanley didn't necessarily consider him black. They were saying that he wasn't black American. You know, he was. They were drawing those distinctions that his father didn't descend from slaves and his mother was white and they were supporting Clinton at the time. It was kind of in victory. He became more African American and became part of that community or part of that kind of tradition.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. And I mean, you see this a lot with, you know, Virtually every prominent black intellectual or pundit or commentator. I think we've about talked. Talked about this before. Being like, a black nerd is hard because on the one hand, you're alienated from white people because you're not or too black, and you're alienated from black people because you're not black enough. And you have to, like, straddle these two world, two worlds. And it's, yeah, like, a pretty unenviable and thankless position. And one through line that I've noticed with a lot of the people that I've mentioned, like Ta, Nehisi Coates, like Kianaga Yamada Taylor, Roxanne Gay, Don Lemon, most recently Nicole Hannah Jones, Mark Lamont Hill.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Don Lemon got up in this.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He was talking about the violence of white men. Really, as a guy who's, like, married to or dating a white guy, always, without fail, you've.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, that's a.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

That's the thing. Like Ilhan aoc, Whatever. And also, like, knowing, you know, the full facts of it that, like, you can talk about this kind of ambient, diffuse, like, white supremacist, colonialist or imperialist violence, but in the United States, there's obviously a kind of, like, statistically provable issue that young black males commit most of the violent, serious crime. So it's a bit ironic when somebody like Don Lemon is making this point.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I don't know what he said, just.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He recently said, like on a podcast or a stream or an interview somewhere, like, he mentioned, like, the violence of white men.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, what you. A point you make in your book, which I think the. The afterword really hits because you kind of contextualize this, like, history in light of October 7th and how, like, the Palestine, Gaza stuff has added, like, an additional layer of kind of incoherence to this dichotomy that's been. That's shaped basically at the summer of our discontent is the, like, oppressor, oppressed, colonizer, colonized. What did you think decolonization look like?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You know, and papers, essays, losers.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And it's. At some. At some point, yeah, I feel like violence became something in discourse that only referred to structural violence. And then very real violence was justifiable because it was. Or it wasn't even violence at all.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, it wasn't worth mentioning.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It could not be, like, ontologically violent because it was, like, rebelling against. Yeah, it was rebelling against an oppressive superstructure. That was the real violence.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And you saw this in the.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And that's nuts.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's actually, like, now we. I think we have enough distance where we can say that that's insane.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That's crazy.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And you have this. I said this on one of the previous episodes, quoting somebody else. But it's like the. You know, the left thinks that your speech is violence, and their violence is his speech.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, you. That's true. You said that. That's crazy.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination, you had a lot of people coming out and comparing him opportunistically to George Floyd. But the reality is that those are apples and oranges. Right. To the extent that, like, Charlie Kirk's murder did not incite massive, like, violent protests and looting and arson.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No, I didn't.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But I wonder. Don't mean to cut you off, but would you. What do you think would have been the result if the shooter were a trans woman, illegal immigrant, or a black trans woman or something like that? What would. Would there have been?

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, it took a while to find out who the shooter was, and there was a ton of speculation.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I mean, peg it on MAGA and Groipers and whatever.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I don't think it would have made a difference because the reaction was when. When we still didn't know who the shooter was. People were already, like, acting as if that was the case.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You think?

[Anna Khachiyan]

I don't know. I think. Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It is interesting. I mean, I try to think through this. Excuse me. I try to think through this honestly, like. And I really want to be. I really want to be open to changing my mind and my biases and my priors with new evidence. It is interesting that there has not been violence in the streets at all. And, you know, when you look at a place like Portland, Oregon, or some of these places, there was just such a kind of license to do anything you want, like, autonomous zone, baby, because George Floyd died, I can go in the Apple Store. It's just a crazy. Yeah, it's interesting to think of what triggers a kind of license to do violence that's not even connected to addressing the initial harm.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I. I have a ideology.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Because.

[Anna Khachiyan]

So I know this.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

She knows this one. So, like, basically, the thesis of your book is that abandoning liberal principles, even for, like, ostensibly positive progressive goals, strengthens these authoritarian forces that are coming out on the left and the right. You say that free speech specifically is the bedrock for all substance, subsequent rights and assurances. And also there's this point where, kind of in an apparent nod to the excesses of BLM and dei, you write, it's no victory at all simply to lose together in a More equitable fashion. A really beautiful, profound line. And I've been spinning my wheels in the last few episodes about this very topic in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk. So it's good that you're here and you wrote a book about it. And I, I, you know, I think we're all in agreement just like in a vacuum, that, like, defending liberal values like free. Free speech is a noble fight and a worthy cause. But all of this, all this really presumes that there is, like, a level playing field between the left and the right, that it's like a game of hot tamale where they trade off for power every term or two and that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The field is level to begin with.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And like, my question is, like, yeah, what happens if there is no level playing field and the left actually does have, like, a monopoly on the levers of power? Is free speech even possible in that context? Like, what are we even talking about? Like, you think about anti racism is a progressive invention that turned out to be like a narrative fiction, which I think you would agree with.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, if you talk. It depends if you're talking about anti racism or you're talking about anti racism in quotes like tm.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, yeah. I'm not talking about, like, not being racist.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I'm talking about like the anti racism industry was selling. Yeah. Where everything is either racist or anti racist.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Like, and you, you know, as you yourself pointed out, this had an institutional mandate. It had global reach. It had. Even in places where it had no, like, historical context or residential. It was enforced through cancel culture.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Right.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And you know, I've said this a million times already, but, like, the, the left really has been, maybe not directly, but indirectly in power not only for years, but for decades. I mean, you.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Like in institutions. Right? Yeah. The right really does seem to do better with government authority. But yeah, there's a kind of cultural soft power. Yes. But even, like, matters that clearly matters. Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Of why there was no organized violence in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Well, you could make the right wing case that those people are, you know, of a better ilk or a better character. You could make that case. But also because the right has very scant organizational power. Like, they're really, like, rounded up and prosecuted at every turn.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You can't have organized the way that they could. Definitely they seized on the occasion of Kirk's death. Seems to me like there's a lot of organization there, and I think that.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Has less to do. Like, Kirk being right wing is incidental, I think, to him being Christian to his, his fans. Like, you know, people who were really devastated about Charlie Kirk's murder were predominantly Christian and they had. So they had a coherent worldview that they, that he reflected back to them, which is why they responded positively to him. Whereas, which is why, again, it's such an apples and oranges situation with George Floyd. He was not. No one knew who he was until he was killed.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But the response was very organic. It wasn't right. Elon Musk was offering a million dollars.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But they didn't, but they didn't have a coherent world view besides being oppressed or like, you know, there being structural racism. That George Floyd was like a metaphor.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean, there was, because I was even in France at the time and it was worldwide, this response. There was a kind of organic response to the spectacle of his death that like, you know, it was crazy. People, tens of thousands of people gathered in Paris, Amsterdam, London, people marched against racism in Helsinki, Finland, in Seoul, South Korea. You know, there was an organic response.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But how much of this is due to the fact that the kind of like progressive mythology is so conditioned in people at this point, they see, yeah, for sure, see like racism everywhere, even where it doesn't exist. You know, there was, you know, you mentioned in the book that, you know, correctly, like, indisputably that George Floyd's death struck a chord and made people come out and like march and loot and whatever. And you also mention all these other public atrocities that failed to gain steam, like all of the black men previously killed by cops. Syria, the Uyghur genocide. The actual Uyghur genocide.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The thing that really blew my mind.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, America, that nobody really wants to talk about except to describe these people as chuds and monsters. I was always wondering, why did nobody come out and march for Tamir Rice?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, that would be a much more, I think, scandalous killing. But part of the reason that I try to make sense of it in the book is this confluence of the pandemic. It's the mixture of the pandemic, this very slow killing. You know, it's also. It wasn't a gunshot. It was nine minutes, I think was very visually striking.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Right.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And then also you had hanging over that the, the stakes of this election where democracy was on the ballot and, you know, people were at home all looking at their screens and there was this kind of urge to rebel against something. And on the right that had manifested as a rebellion against stay at home orders and that was considered disreputable and, and, and maga coded and, and so People on the left wouldn't engage with that kind of way of, of, of. Of letting off steam until there was an urgent racial. But then as soon as there was a kind of racial injustice, then you could be out in the streets and people had this urge to rebel.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You can suspend these.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Like, really rioting in New York. We went out.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You were in soho?

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, we went all over. We like, met up. Yeah, I like, came.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

What did you get that night? You got some shoes? What'd you get?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I wish.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You got a toaster?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I wish I thought to loot the Balenciaga store.

[Anna Khachiyan]

We ended up hanging out with like some people who had looted like North Face or something. They had like this. I was talking to some girl who had like a new jacket. But I. Yeah, I remember returning home to that, that night to my like tenement apartment, seeing all the, like that there was something going on and I was like, let's go. Like, I was. It felt like people were protesting, like not having fun for a long time.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Exactly.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And then we were drinking margaritas and people were setting stuff on fire.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's like.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It felt chaotic for sure, but like in a way that was. It didn't really matter why people were out there. It mattered, you know, it felt like.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Really what it comes down to is that people weren't exactly mourning George Floyd specifically or racial injustice generally. They were mourning the loss of their own lives.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Exactly.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Due to this. Completely. We now know though you could have seen it then. Arbitrary and corrupt enforcement of rules and norms.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, you say has 100, but also, what did you feel when you saw that video the first time of the.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I. I haven't watched it.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You never watched.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I don't watch any sort of. I haven't watched the Charlie Kirk video.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh really?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Watch the Irina Zarutska video. Oh man, I don't watch videos with the sound on when I watch them. I just, just.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You didn't see any.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I minimize my screen time. I'm the most not online, extremely online person ever. Like for real. Because it like me up and I can't handle like that. And by the way, like, much like I can grant, contrary to what the right says, that Ta Nehisi Coates is a more like complex individual than people give him credit for and is not exactly like intentionally a hate monger so much as frankly confused, I can grant that George Floyd, in spite of his like pretty damning rap she life of crime and poverty. This whole story about him like punching a pregnant woman during the robbery.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No, he was, he was A com. He was an accomplice to a terrible. But he wasn't the one who actually assaulted.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

There's, like, more. I. I did see a video recently of George Floyd that he, like, filmed himself, where he was talking about how, like, society at large and the black community or something had failed young boys and men and. Da, da, whatever. Like. And I agree with your characterization of there being, like, two Floyds, like, the real Floyd and the meme Floyd, obviously, but.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, I was just asking you if you had seen. Because I was just saying that there was the opportunism and the. You said something very poignant. I think you said that people were mourning their own loss of freedom. But I think that also anybody who saw that video, it was a very. It was a very disturbing video.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, I know. I've seen clips. I've seen stills.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, you say this in the prologue. You say, has enough time passed now to begin to ask ourselves some questions? What exactly did we see in that video? Or perhaps more to the point, what is the seminal meme in the Western tradition that this video is so powerfully tapped into? Yeah, and, yeah, I think at the time, even I, who am, like, naturally skeptical and, you know, try to immunize myself against propaganda as much as I can. Yeah, it felt like it was like a metaphor for race relations, police brutality, whatever. That felt very, like, emotionally true because of how disturbing it was.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. And like, setting aside the complexity and reality of the actual George Floyd's life, to me it's like a meme, a testament to the moral inversion of the left, that they would elevate this guy, who, on paper at least, is like a troubled man, a career criminal, to kind of almost like a Jesus like status. So when people are making this equivalence between him and Charlie Kirk, it's like. Well, at the end of the day, Charlie Kirk was like a normie Christian family man.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Right. Those things are different in that Charlie Kirk was very successful. He was working. He wasn't down and out the way that George Floyd was. But there's a kind of similarity in the way that there is the man, and then after death, posthumously, there's the meme that is used for purposes and that it kind of becomes sanctified, what the death represents. Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And for, like, Kirk acolytes, the death represents. Yeah. A kind of, like, actual violence of the left against the civil discourse of conservatives.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And the main kind of, like, inconsistency or disparity. The main, like, apples and oranges thing is that basically the. The narrative that the meme of George Floyd was used to prop up this narrative that the original sin of America is racism. That we live in a profoundly white supremacist society characterized by systemic racism proved to be false on its face. Whereas the narrative surrounding Charlie Kirk, how.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Has it proved to be false, like, based on Floyd?

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, that white supremacy is the real pandemic that we all have a duty to, like, take a principled stance against.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I mean, I think you. You said so yourself. And like, there is a point in the book where you go through all the figures and statistics, like everyone to Adolf Reid to now you has pointed out that if you actually crunch the numbers.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. Things have been getting much better until.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Blm people in America, up until recently, like, you know, you talk about how there's, like, no really discernible statistical trend of white cops brutalizing black people in this country. The number of blacks killed by police is statistically small and decreasing. On the other hand, black Americans fortunes have improved significantly across, like, every important metric from household income to intellectual attainment to life expectancy. I'm not going to give the direct quote, but there's one on page 15, page 24. You guys can buy the book. And as your favorite person ever, Steve Saylor, showed, their fortunes took quite a dip after the racial reckoning to the tune of, like, 40% more.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And traffic fatalities because the policing stopped and they were left to their own devices. And, like, we just know that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. I have so many things to say.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Narrative, like, doesn't line up with the reality on the ground. You even say yourself that, like, this whole story of, like, white supremacy and black victimization is, like, oversimplified.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's oversimplified.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, it's a meme. Yeah, it's oversimplified. And I guess a question I have for you on that note is, like, why do you think it persists? Why is it so sticky?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I'm glad you said that because I think that, and I've become increasingly convinced of this, that people really struggle with, like, incremental progress and that, you know, something that Alexis de Tocqueville said in 1856 when he was talking about why the most.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You love this guy.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I love this.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You're always talking about this guy in your life.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He really got America early. And he got it right early. And he was talking when he was looking at the French Revolution. Why were the strongholds of the French Revolution in the parts of society that were doing the best and that were not actually experiencing setbacks? It's because People that have suffered the most egregious oppressions without any type of dissent, as soon as the boot is lifted off of them even a little bit, can rise up with a kind of force that you would never imagine. Like, this is the same reason why my father, who grew up in the segregated south, he wouldn't understand what it means if you talk about a microaggression. But as soon as people start to live on much more egalitarian terms, then the slightest kind of inequality becomes unbearable.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. They start to see. They start to notice.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Microaggressions are only possible when things are much, much, much more equal.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But to put a more cynical spin on that, that's actually not that cynical at all. It's like, because people have the luxury, the privilege.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yes.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

To make their voices heard. The voices of the unheard are not so unheard after all. And part of this is not an ideological political issue. It's the technological issue.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Exactly. The organizing of social media.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You have video of Derek Chauvin putting his knee on George Floyd's neck.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I like that you always. You insist on the French pronunciation Derek Chauvin.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's also so funny that his name is Chauvin. That's, like, so perfect and, like, symbolic and like Dostoevsky. It's like the. All of these, like, big viral stories have something beautiful and poetic about them. Like, as. As horrific and tragic as the murder of Irina Zarutska was, there is Ukrainian value to the fact that this girl fled a war zone to get killed by a black guy in America on public transit.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I just find this to be so upsetting, that video. I also. I couldn't watch the full. I just could never. And I think there's a real violence that, like, the algorithms do when they just. On X. When they force the video.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, I deleted it off my phone.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You know, but I don't want to see these videos. Just start to load immediately. Yeah. So is there's something you can turn.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Autoplay on so they don't just. But it's still like the whole feed. I deleted X after or off my phone, at least after that, because I just was like, I'm going nuts.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

We shouldn't be constantly exposed to, like, these horrific snuff films at all times.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You know, you realize that, like, life on the whole is relatively, like, safe and comfortable. It's more comfortable and safe than it's ever been for a lot of now. You sounded like Obama population.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He said, you just see ISIS more, but ISIS was always there. You just see it more now, that was Obama's point.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, but even, like, the fact that the.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Do we have more wine, Anna?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, I'll grab it. Like the fact that, like, y' all.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Stay with the children.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

That there was, like, an Asian officer and a black officer who were responding alongside Derek Chauvin to the George Floyd incident, and they both got lighter jail sentences and they've both been memory hold because they don't fit. Conveniently.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

American life is always more complicated and interesting than the kind of. Of the oversimplified narratives that take hold in the imagination allow for. That's for sure. It was much more. There were other. Yeah, there were multiple cops. Chauvin was the one who was kneeling on him. So that is different. But to reduce every. Every question to a binary of black, white, I think doesn't serve us well. And it actually, it does. It inspires this kind of, I think, I would say, ungenerous kind of reaction and backlash. Uncharitable. That is rooted in a kind of justified frustration.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, that's a premise you sort of don't question in your book is that there was need for police reform. And that's something I'm not saying, so. Sure.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean, well, I think that. I don't think we needed to defund the police. How white people are treated by the police. You know, if you live in Europe, you.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But the response after Floyd was to defund the police.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Right. That was stupid. But I go to links in the book to say how stupid that is. And that is actually black. It's black citizens who insisted that the white liberals who were pushing this on them get a grip and. And refund the police because they were the ones. They were the ones wearing the brunt of who were dealing with the violence. That wasn't just abstract and theoretical.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

There's also the fact that, like, if you actually look at the demographic makeup of, like, police forces across the nation, like, very, very often the people serving the community are of the race or ethnic group of the community, especially in New York. I think, of course, leftists will say that. Well, they're still operating under this, like, white supremacist structure. There was the story that you brought up of Tony Tempa, the white man killed in Florida under very similar circumstances.

[Anna Khachiyan]

People don't like to talk about Tony.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He only.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He only got. That only got known after George Floyd because it was so similar.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. And then there's also the story that we've brought up on the podcast multiple times that after, like, during the summer of Floyd, when all These chazes started popping up across the Pacific Northwest. Specifically two antifa guys who happened to be former snipers who were like, volunteering in Syria, gunned down two black teens who stole a car and were doing donuts in a parking lot.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, that was in the Chaz in Seattle, I think.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Two antifa guys sniped. What?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Oh, yeah, this is fact. I'm not making this up. One of the kids was killed and the other one survived.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But the point is, what police reform, I guess, would have been, would you have preferred?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

So I just start from the premise that, like, American police are extremely violent. And part of that has to do, of course, with the fact that Americans are very armed. And a police officer goes into a situation never knowing if the person they're encountering when they stop a car is armed. But if you look at like the numbers, it's astonishing, you know, like over 500 white people are killed per year in America by police. That's like greater than the combination of all people killed in the whole European Union. All these countries, like, American police kill more white people than is acceptable in any. Any developed nation.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

There is no epidemic of anti black police brutality in America. It doesn't exist.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Black people are killed disproportionately. They also are represented disproportionately as people who commit crimes. But the actual. The group. The group who gets killed the most disproportionately is actually Native Americans. But no one even talks about that.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, I mean, I mean, there is.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But in sheer numbers, white people by far get killed by police more than anybody because there's so many ways. But that's my whole frustration with how these things get done when it's filtered through the lens of race. You miss an opportunity to talk about, you know, why everybody should be concerned about unarmed people being killed by police, irrespective of color. Well, and Tony Temple should have shocked them. Should have shocked our consciousness. That was actually even crazier because. Because the cops were laughing when he was dying. They were making jokes.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

One of the.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You mention Tony Tim in your book.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He did. He's a.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, I did skip over the footnotes. I did. I have low light in my apartment.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

A lot of really good material. I like. He's like the last psychiatrist.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It's like, I. I love, you know, I love a Foster Wallisian footnote.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But it's.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I have low light in my apartment and I. Whatever I do, I'm sorry.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's okay.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But there wasn't a chapter.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You give this quote from this Woman called Janelle Austin, who was the leader of the George Floyd Noble Memorial, who said to you specifically, she gave this quote directly to you. I don't think there's more violence in the black community than there is in the white community. I just think we're counted more than white folks are counted.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

This is.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Which is like, insane, an insane thing to say.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean, you have to. I mean, we. The only way we can make progress is to. To name things, to face things, to speak clearly. And no one is served by. By those kinds of obfuscations. And.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, and, you know, maybe I'll be charitable to this woman. Maybe she didn't really, you know, know the facts and didn't know what she was saying. But this is not only permitted and not only tolerated, but, like, enforced at the highest levels of, like, academia and the media, which is the point I. To make. And then on the, you know, to give a counter example, I was just thinking of that Helen Andrews tweet that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You quote, tweeted disapprovingly this tweet, my day off.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Because you. You felt that the analogy that she made between disposition of the Palestinians by the Israelis and Gaza and white flight in American cities, I. E. The disposition, dispossession of. Of whites by blacks in the USA was maybe like, too vulgar, too dramatic.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, just. There's a difference. We could just. I would hope we could just say there's a difference between voluntarily leaving because you don't like the people moving in and having a government or armed citizens forcing you out. Right?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. But the point that she's trying to make with regard to Ta Nehisi Coates specifically is that he never stops to ask himself whether, you know, what role he's had in the dust, the dispossession of other people.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, black responsible for life. But the point is Jews are responsible for all of it. Jews turn the racism machine on. They turn the racism machine on again. And now we're doing George Floyd.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I have a question about that. I have a question about that because I watched a clip, clip of Nick Fuentes on Glenn Greenwald, and he was. He made a point that was like, you know, I guess perfectly reasonable and sane, and that would be considered completely, like, monstrous and racist, which was like, I'm a white guy, and therefore I feel more comfortable and familiar around my own ill. Glenn said it. No, please. Glenn would never.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Glenn.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Glenn.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And I have to be. I have my issues with. I'm not endorsing him, but what I'm saying. Saying is that he makes this point.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But the, the Wait, who makes this point?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I'm sorry, but the corollary to that point which no one seems to be willing to make is that you can call it like white supremacy or white dominance or whatever, but obviously everybody, including minorities and non white people like benefit from the so called white society. And no one really wants to live in like you know, there's a reason like Ilhan Omar is here and not in Somalia. Even though she takes every opportunity to talk about how she's like a Somalian girl who would love to move back and raise children and make a difference there.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I'm not a fan of hers. I don't, I don't know what she says as well as I think you do, but I, I mean there's a whole long conversation to get into about why societies that were colonized are still behind. Right. And why societies that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, in her case her father was aiding and abetting the colonizers because I have no idea.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Her background is. I was astonished to see recently that she filed, she and her husband filed that the net worth was $30 million.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And her husband's her brother.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, her husband's a lobbyist guy.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But she married her brother brother before.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Immigration purposes, not for incest purposes, which actually would have made it more romantic and wholesome honestly if she married her gay brother because she was in love with him.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But I do, I do think that, you know, I don't like, you know, I don't call these white societies, but these societies that you know, came out of, out of Europe and are in.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Fact they're Europe, white European societies that, that budget for multi ethnic assimilation because they're actually like fairly tolerant and anti racist by default because they're individualistic versus collectivist.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The only societies I'm aware of that ever tried to correct themselves for having enslaved and colonized are societies that came out of Europe. That doesn't happen in the Middle East.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

So it doesn't happen in Africa. They don't, they don't soul search in that way and rectify. That's for sure.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, yeah, and one of, I think one of the big differences like between you and Ta Nehisi for example, is that he's very like, I also still.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Have slaves in the Middle East.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes, they do. Yes. People, people act like, yeah, but people.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Enslaved in Ghana today.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. By other black people or by Middle Eastern people or by Chinese people.

[Anna Khachiyan]

We have slavery here.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He's very like essentializing and deterministic or afro pessimistic.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He's Afro pessimistic and fatalistic.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You know, in part because he has to be because his livelihood and his ego depend on it. And you're not that kind of guy. I guess I have a personal question for you as a segue, because, you know, I mentioned all these, like, prominent black pundits and intellectuals who at least on the surface seem very aggrieved and resentful. And I'm curious why you have largely evaded that fate.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, I just never felt aggrieved. I felt like, I mean, it's kind of what you were saying before. I mean, I don't think that I'm naive about any society or especially this society, but, you know, this society really works for me and for people that I grew up with and.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And, and know and love and, you know, I. My father, like I said, grew up in segregation. He was. He was literally a second class citizen in Texas. He was born in the 1930s, you know, and I've experienced a different country. This country has improved. And this country has looked at its sins and has in many ways come together to try to rectify those. Those wrongs. And I think to say that things are static and never change, there's a kind of comfort in fetishizing the wound. But it takes some type of. I think it takes some courage to acknowledge progress and to accept it. And I feel like this Kanye west has slavery. I wouldn't go as far as Kanye, but I would say that this country has. You know, I don't see how I could be pessimistic seeing what this country provides and how people risk their lives to be here. And I've also lived for a lot of my adult life. I've lived for 15 years in France. And that is a society that's much harder. Like, look, if you're in France and you're black or Arab and you're trying to make an intergenerational come up. It's just so hard. You know, America provides opportunities that you would be insane to think, yeah, there's more social.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

This is the blackest thing I've ever heard you say intergenerational come up.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's so true. Like, if you live in other societies, I mean, America clearly, I mean, even if does so many things right. It does.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It does, yeah. And the fact that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And to be Coates, who's a multi millionaire and who every institution has actually.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Served, what are you so mad about?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Like, and he would say, because it's not about me as an individual, but that's the cop out. Every single institution has worked so well.

[Anna Khachiyan]

He, as an individual has profited immensely.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, for, for you, for us, for.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Me, but like, also for plenty of people who aren't famous. Like, I've so many friends who got fantastic educations and are in a different class position than they were born in.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. I mean, look at you, look at.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Me, look at people. People.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I'm from Belarus.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. People only listen to us because we're women. We are affirmative action hires up in here. Nobody would listen to this podcast if it was a bunch of guys.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Now they'd be like, these guys are pretty low.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They would if they could replicate that chemistry. You just have a special chemistry together.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But one of the statistics that you mentioned that, that really like stuck out to me was that the wealth gap has actually closed more for black Americans than it has for white Americans in recent years.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, one of the statistics that's really fascinating that Adolf Reed and Walter Ben Michaels point out and that Matt Brunig wrote about is that almost all of the wealth gap exists in the top 10% of blacks and whites.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

So rich blacks are way behind, way less rich, rich whites.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Rich whites like, like rich blacks are like Jay Z and rich whites are like Bill Gates.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And that's like basically all of the wealth gap.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

New slaves.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But like everybody else is basically more or less like without wealth.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Right.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

In any kind of considerable degree. And so actually like class based kind of politics makes more sense than filtering everything through the lens of race and saying that, you know, a daughter of Nigerian immigrants, both of whom are professionals, should get a leg up in applying to Harvard. That makes no sense. As opposed to somebody who's actually impoverished getting a leg up.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, something you say in your book that I have a question about and you reiterated on the Daily show is that more than that, George Floyd, more so was killed because he was poor than because he was black.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean, when's the last time you heard of a black Harvard?

[Anna Khachiyan]

No, no, I agree with that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, that's, that's why Ta Nehisi Coates is so outrageous, because he's like, well, you know, my, the whole book that he wrote about being like racially profiled with his son by an old white lady who's clearly just a pushy Jewish broad train in the cinema. Yeah, but I have a question, I.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Have a question, I have a question which is. And this is like, I'm not saying that this is the most significant thing about George Floyd and that he was, you know, I. His humanness is Intact.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

His humanness is valid.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's valid.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But I think more so than he was poor. He was a criminal.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And not all poor. Obviously, poverty and crime are related. But I think George Floyd, most poor people aren't criminals. Was in the situation he was in, not merely because he was poor, though that was a factor that contributed to his. Him being a criminal, but because he.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Was chiefly, he was passing a counterfeit.

[Anna Khachiyan]

A criminal.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Most black people don't have counterfeit bills.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's just a fact.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. Yeah. And. And that's like the left comes up with all these elaborate rationalizations for why black people commit the vast majority of street crime, why leftist and or trans transgender individuals seem to commit a lot of the mass shootings lately. And it's like. Well, the Occam's razor explanation would suffice. Right. Like, you go for the simplest explanation that's available to you is what?

[Anna Khachiyan]

What?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, that there is a problem in these communities. And you can make the left wing argument and say that it's a problem of, like, structure, structural and social constructivism. You can make the right wing argument and say that it's a problem of genetics and biology that I fully reject. And I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. But you have to deal with the problem as it is. Right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And alleviating poverty will not necessarily alleviate crime.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's. I mean, I. My first book was about how much culture matters. So I don't. I think that it was surprising to me when I started out writing that that was such a controversial thing to say. Of course, culture must matter. Communities and groups of people decide what matters to them and pursue certain goals. And some people really, like, I live part of the year in Paris. And that's a place where, you know, lots of people really emphasize being good, especially when they're young, at soccer. And it's like the best place in the world if you want to be good at soccer to grow up. And other communities emphasize being really good at standardized tests. And there's, you know, that those are cultural, well, norms.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

This is a crazy footnote because I've been spelling schools for the baby because he's aging out of preschool and going to kindergarten. And surprisingly enough, there's a government website where all of this stuff is broken down by demographics. I live in Chinatown. I'm fully doxing my location. You can see, like, for example, like in Chinatown, the Asian test scores rival the best schools in the nation. And the black test scores are horribly lagging behind. And when you make that comparison It's a very interesting one because blacks and Asians in downtown New York both live well below the poverty line. We're talking about two very poor, poor communities.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

These are cultural differences. I mean, Thomas Sowell has really fascinating writing on how that wasn't always the case. You know, blacks last century in the 1940s or so, had the same kind of test scores as Lower east side Jews.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, they were catching up. They were.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, they were all just kind of.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Jews used to play basketball, too, these things.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, that's true.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Now they just run the basketball.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Jewish guy in New York has, like, a tall tale about how his grandma was played on a team with Babe Ruth before he hit the majors. Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You know, culture really matters. And I think the. The left made a huge mistake when they made that a taboo to. To be able to be discussed. Honestly, culture matters. And I know that growing up that, you know, there were things that were not prioritized in your social circle. And one of those things for me growing up and for my best friend Carlos, who ended up coming over to my house and secretly studying with me and my dad and ended up going to Harvard Law, like, the things we couldn't tell our friends, that's what we were doing when we were together.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Why? Because that was gay.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Super gay. Super super. Just. It would be unthinkable to tell my girlfriend that that's what we're doing.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Right.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You know, it was so like, we're.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Doing hood rod stuff.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

We snatching some ropes.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No, but. But that's not. There's nothing about your blood or skin or genome. It's just about what is valued in your community.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, then it's true.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But, Thomas, I think, like, culture is race and ethnicity, and. Well, it is, because when you. In your book, you describe. You say that race is like a lie or a construct. And like, that, you know, goes against what guys like Tanahisi Coates or Ibram Kendi would argue, because they want to have it both ways. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. Right. They want to invoke race to, like, redress historical grievances. But then race magically disappears when they have to take any responsibility in the matter.

[Anna Khachiyan]

This is why coaching is why emphasize the poverty. Oh, yeah. As opposed to the cultural factors that contribute to his criminality.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Both because, well, you know, you could say he's in a culture of poverty and, you know, his. His girlfriend was white, and she was also a drug addict. And, you know, but like. Well, that's.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I'm not saying race I'm saying criminality.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, drug addiction is amazing because it is the one like leveling force.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Drug addiction.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Oh yeah, it's.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Drug addiction is the most anti racist.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Hunter. Hunter Biden's a drug addict. Like Hunter Biden smokes crap go around.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And I would say like worse than alcohol.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, he's right. He's probably right when you burn the impurities out of the crack. But it's true.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I think I have a recollection of Dasha speaking very positively of Hunter Biden on this podcast.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But when you actually warm feelings towards.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Log off and touch grass and go outside and see, look at the people who are like in the throes of drug addiction, like street homeless, whatever. People who like refuse to enter the shelter system. It is like actually a very multicultural multiracial demographic and they all break bread together. They have their own parallel society. They have their, their own norms and values. They, they look out for each other in a weird way when there isn't like an.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's kind of multi ethnic utopia and.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Poverty is part of it. But it's not. I feel like it's.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, you're right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That's a really brute materialist poverty doesn't mean you.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, most. This is important to emphasize. Most poor people don't actually commit crimes. Yeah, you're right.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They're the victims. There's, there's, there's. You can be poor in dignity for sure.

[Anna Khachiyan]

So more so. The reason George Floyd found himself in the situation he was in, though there were contributing structural factors was because he was in contact with the police due to him committing crimes certainly.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And it was not his first contact. Even with that same officer, I believe.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, they were. Used to work at a club together. Pointed out they were bouncers together. Okay.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I can't, we can't.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It really is something like out of Russia. Somebody needs to write a book about Russian people. Had it figured out.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, hundreds of. Every time I see you, we can talk about blacks and Russians forever. But I would say that there's a confluence of factors. Right. Like you could even say that. How can you extricate. And if I'm making, you know, the, if I'm steel manning the other side. How can you make a case about George Floyd's poverty without talking about how, you know, his, his racial ancestry is part of why he was impoverished. His grandfather was a landowner and you know, there was a very good biography of Floyd that came out. No, but his grandfather, his grandfather owned land and that land was taken from him in the south. In. In a way that happened in this country where black landowners simply had too much land and. And white neighbors said that that was intolerable and took the land. But he didn't inherit land.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, I've got. I have no. I know I'm not like a. I obviously have spent very little time in the south, so don't. This isn't my beat, but there is a. There's a very taboo subject in America is Reconstruction era, where land was also taken from whites.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Which caused exorbitant amounts of white poverty after the south lost the war.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, they lost everything.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

So there's always a way to look back and see why is someone poor, is my point.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Why is someone poor is not always just because of individual decisions they made in their own lifetime. Of course.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Of course.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Why do some people inherit and some people don't.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, yeah. No one's denying that. Yeah. Most people are born into poverty unless they mismanage their finances.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Like I have.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But I was born into poverty, too, so maybe.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I think you had a quote in your book that was like, who are you quoting? Poverty is gradual until it's sudden.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, Hemingway.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Hemingway.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I've always heard that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I've always heard that about gradually and then all of a sudden.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I've always heard about a cancer.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

A cancer.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I didn't realize that was a Hemingway quote about.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Resources. I thought it was always about, like.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Cancer develops gravity to me, because that's where I'm headed. We're gonna be bag ladies on the street.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No, you're gonna be good. I don't think, like, certainly not in this part of New York. You can't go out without someone buying you a drink. Anna, catch in.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

What are you drinking?

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, it's true. We're saving money on drinks and drugs, probably.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Not that I do those anymore.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I just. My memory with you, I love. This was a great New York memory. Was just like stepping out of this place with the downstairs. What's this place in Dice. Yes. Stepping out and some guy goes. We're just standing on the street smoking cigarette with Eleanor. And some guy goes, ana Katyan. Love you. In Denmark.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They'Re crazy white boys and just kept walking.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Love you from Denmark.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. They were nice because they didn't linger.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You're a pillar of your community. You're a pillar of your. In your city.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It's nice when they keep it brief.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, they keep it well.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Why that?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I have to give Thomas some credit because when we rolled up to his book launch. My friends were like, oh, this is going to be a reading or a panel. I'm not down with the show and a drink. And then he got up on, like, stage and was like, hey, here's a toast to all you guys. Have a drink on me. It's. It's all good.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Got off the mic really quick. Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You really read the room.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I like that you're. I like that you're recognized by the Danes on the street downtown.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Cute.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You get recognized too. Yeah, you must.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, but I.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But you. You keep it low key. Well, she lives around the UN I.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Live in discreet neighborhood. But even then. Yeah. Some guys stop me and say. Just want to say I'm a big fan. It's very, like, autistically, like, kept on his way. I said, thank you, sir.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I suffer from learned helplessness and structural poverty, so I can't leave this apartment without taking massive financial.

[Anna Khachiyan]

L. Moving is. Moving is too tough. It's way too hard.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

So we're trapped.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Circling back to my original point.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I'm sorry I derailed y'. All.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, but when you. When you talk about, like, race being a lie and a construct, I don't really agree with that because, like, in my mind, like, race, ethnicity, like, is very obviously like an extended family or clan that has a genetic basis. And I think, like, you can, like, obviously transcend your race. And I'm sympathetic to your position because I think what you're arguing for is this very, like, classical liberal ideal where people are treated as individuals versus as part of a collective. But the only way that they can be even seen early conceptualized as individuals if. Is if they are viewed in reference.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I see your point.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Their tribe or their clan. Right. Like, we're talking about generalization. One of the things that people get really mad at me for is when I, like, make these gross generalizations. And I get that. I'm very, like, sympathetic to that. But it's like Nassim Nichols said this. He still has me blocked. Obviously, generalizations include. Involve their own exceptions. Right. That's the nature of a generalization.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Sure. I see your point. But I would say that if you have the experience of being in a family where racial borders dissolve.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They dissolve very easily in even one generation.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Which is your experience.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Which is my experience twice over as a child and as a parent, like.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

As a biracial child, and then as a parent and then as a parent of children who. What was the phrase? Who are, like, white appearing or white passing.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. They're White presenting.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But they also are, you know, if you go on 23andMe, they're. They're almost a quarter Senegambian.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And nobody can see that by looking at them. And I doubt that people can understand.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I can kind of see it. I can't. Noticing.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Whatever.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Thomas, your children do look more white than my child, which is hilarious, I know.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Especially my son. But, like. But think about it. I'm just saying the hold that. Whatever group you're in is. Whatever hold that group has on you is actually quite tenuous, because as soon as you. That's why I thought it was always so strange that Barack Obama said, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. It's like depending on who the mother is.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Right, right.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well. Well, you know, that's so true. You know, the famous. It's not. It's not that famous. But there was, like, an iconic, legendary sailorism where he was like, well, Barack Obama dropped his Japanese GF for a black wife because he thought it would be politically accepted. Expedient.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Which is a little bit his white girlfriend for. She said, I can't. I can't rise up with you.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Wow.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I think she was part Jeff Knees. Yeah. Wow.

[Anna Khachiyan]

A haa.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

He let a haa go.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But that's. I. I think we talked about this on the last podcast. You. I think maybe you even brought it up, like, when MC Hammer was like, you know, my. My son at any point could be the victim of, like, targeted white supremacist violence is like, that's not true.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Not true at all.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And then there's also, like, the converse reality that if you actually, like, again, crunch the numbers, look at the statistics. Like, even if you adjust for income, young black men are still more prone to criminality.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's what my white book is.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's also. It's like what sociologists call cool post culture.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Where you get so much social validation for certain behaviors that are prioritizing the community. Like, whereas, you know, like, if you look at why Stuyvesant High School is so lopsidedly Asian and Indian, that's not because of genetics. If the kids talk about why they're there, it's because they couldn't dishonor their family and that certain expectations about how you approached mathematics and testing were the norm in their community. And, you know, there's. You know, if you're. I grew up around some kids like this. If you're a black kid whose dad happens to be a lawyer, you still have to present yourself with certain behaviors among your friends.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Doesn't that, like, refute your point that there is no race as such? Because, like. Well, he's saying it's as much as, like, culture. But culture is a proxy for.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I don't think so.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It's not.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No, I don't think so.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I think it is.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You can. Different cultures.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You can. Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Don't you think, like, African Americans, descendants of slaves. Right. Have been shaped more distinctly by their experience of have. Being ancestral slaves than, like, whatever country in Africa they're from. Like, what those people are. And that is called.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

That's culture.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yes, that's history. That's culture. That's not like.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But also, if you look at Africa, it is a continent that's riddled with crime and corruption. And again, you can make it. You can make.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I've noticed, like, there's all kinds of people.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You can make colonialist, imperialist, whatever.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The real based one. But. But in recent. Dash is more like a liberal now.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, no. Okay. But I just. I want to point out that, like, I'm not. I'm not, like, a rage baiter or, like a race baiter. It gives me no pleasure to say this, and I actually fundamentally, at the end of the day, agree with you, and I think that all of these, like, categories and labels can be transcended.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, the other part of what I'm saying, also that's a little less politically correct maybe, is that those.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

The.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Africans who were selected to be slaves were selected for, like, brute physical strength and not necessarily, like, other traits.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That I thought that they were the ones that were captured by their tribal rivals. Tribal rivals just captured them. I've been. The whole thing is so ridiculous. I mean.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I mean, when you look, no one.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That Ta Coats isn't getting there. He's on the sleep market. We're not buying him.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You know.

[Anna Khachiyan]

He'S skinny, fat. He doesn't look like he's worked a day in his life. You know, he's not going to be. I'm not gonna think, like, if I'm a slave trader, which I would never.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Be, but that's really his current anxiety.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But I have a limited amount on my ship. He's not even gonna make.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He's not. He's not getting on the show, but.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I'm not gonna get a good price.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Core anxiety, because he knows this is such, like, a Kanye thing. It's like his whole thing of, like, new versus old slaves. I think Ta Nehisi Coates is, like, core anxiety, obviously, is that he is his audience is primarily white, and he's not exactly accepted by blacks who don't openly, actively reject. I mean, they just don't know who he is and they don't care.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Kanye West.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, tnc.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, I see. I see.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, everybody knows who Kanye is.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I see what you think. Tanahasi Coates is interesting because he really is different than someone like Ibram X Kendi and Ta Nehisi Coates, actually, you know, is a book that really blew my mind. Is. Is a book that he also said changed the way he saw the world, which is Racecraft. And he said that, you know, he became aware reading this book. Barbara and Karen Fields in 2012, wrote this book, Racecraft, about how race functions in societies like ours, in the way that witchcraft functioned in, you know, the Massachusetts colonies or like, you know, and it still functions in parts of Africa. Yeah. Where you, you know, there's no such thing as being a witch, but you could be killed for being a witch because the society believes that witches exist.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And so that because you're albino, it.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Doesn'T make being a witch real, but it takes on a social reality. And he said that changed his view of everything and that actually he didn't believe that race was real. He's an interesting thinker. I think that since the book he published on Israel, Palestine, and then more recently in this conversation with Ezra Klein, I'm noticing a reaction on the right that gives him no credit for anything. And I've criticized him for a decade based on things I think I see differently. But it's kind of frustrating. I think, in the larger conversation around him on the right, that he gets no credit for anything, because I think he's much more interesting than that. Even when he's wrong, he's much more interesting than someone like Kendi.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I would agree with that. I would actually like. Like to meet him and talk to him.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You should have him on the pod.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I don't.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You should have him on the pod.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, no, I will. I mean, I was actually gonna say I think it's. I mean, I know we have. We're friends, but it's nice.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I think it's really. I was excited for you to come on and think it's cool that you did because a lot of people don't want to come on this show.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Is that true?

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, a lot of people do, but, like, people who are more of, like, towards the center, really. I mean, sort of see us as.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Like, what I like so much about both of y'. All is that y' all are serious and you talk about things honestly with candor, because you don't actually. You have a freedom where you can actually speak your mind, which many people don't have. I thought that when you listen to, like, Ezra Klein, talking to Tanya has a. Codes, probably. Ezra Klein can't even say everything that he thinks.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You know, he probably can't actually.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He's too curbed by, like, this kind of ambient social pressure. He's bought and sold.

[Anna Khachiyan]

He's got an agenda.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. All of these, like, centrist pundits are like him. Matt Glacis, Matt Brig, Matt Stoller, they're all named Matt. Somehow magically, like, they all do this thing where they're like, I'm objective and impartial because I'm a statistician, and then they, like, cave to these kind of liberal shibboleths, like I said. But. Okay. I have a question about the nature of free speech.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. Because I. I've been. It's interesting. I've saw. I've seen some of the things you've tweeted about free speech since Charlie Kirk.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You published this book which deals with cancel culture. Stuck Extensively. We're now seeing. Yeah. Like a.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The woke. Right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

A different discourse.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

James Lindsay was right. The woke. Right. Is real.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Oh, no, no.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You need to have James Lindsay on. No, no.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's like a head case. Okay. What do you think the limits of free speech are? Or, like, in your mind, what should they be like? Obviously, like, you look at somebody again, like Ilhan Omar or Mehdi Hassan, they're entitled to exercise their speech. They're protected by the Constitution. But what happens if, like, what they're saying is fundamentally, like, subversive and against the national interests of the country? Or what about somebody like Barry Weiss, who we all know and love? She's our girl.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I love Barry.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

She's cool. We chill with her. Sometimes love her to death. But she's a free speech absolutist. Right. Until it comes to any criticism of it, of Israel, and then the whole thing is, like, shut down. And how do you solve this problem without resorting to some kind of authoritarianism?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, I would say that, you know, you want a society that's maximally tolerant for speech and for different viewpoints. You want to always err on tolerance. You know, that should just be the basic framework. And I think that one thing you should do is to make sure that you're able to allow speech that criticizes the group that you're a Part of.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's just that I think that, you know, whenever you get yourself in a situation where you think that the one group that you're a part of is the one that must be protected, you.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Have to question you've lost the mandate. I think so Even though you're still technically protected by the Constitution.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You're certainly protected by the Constitution. I mean, America is very different. You know, France is not the same kind of society. Germany and England are not the same. They don't have something like the First Amendment.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Dasha has a.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, I'm gonna circle. I have a whole idea about France.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh yeah, I want to get into that with you, but I just want to say, just to answer your question, you know, I think someone like Mari Hassan, I think is one of the nastiest people who's been able to somehow find an audience because most of his audience has no idea how noxious he actually.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Sane and reasonable liberal.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But he's not, he was like an Islamist and he's probably a kind of like psychopath who would say anything. And at one point in his life he was saying that like non Muslims are cattle.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And you can say anything to them and treat them anyway and you know, but he has the right to say that. I would never.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Sure.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I would never. You know, I think one of the most hair raising and appalling things I've ever heard a politician say was when J.D. vance guest hosted Charlie Kirk's podcast and encouraged people to inform on each other to their employers if they, if they heard people engaging in wrong speak.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

What kind of wrong speaker are we talking?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He said if celebrating, he said tell people's employers if you hear them saying anything bad if celebrating Charlie Kirk's death. That's insane. I mean you can. Can we not?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, this reminds me of the Home Depot lady, right. Who was like gloating over the libs of Tick tock. I wish the bullet hadn't. Mr. With regard to Trump.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

This is speech.

[Anna Khachiyan]

There was a level of. Yeah, but there was a level of tolerance I think with the Trump attempted assassination where people said whatever you can say you wish they bullet.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Because that's, that's the beauty of living in America.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, you're allowed to say, you're allowed to say that you wish the bullet hadn't missed. You're allowed to say that Charlie Kirk got what he deserved. I don't agree with either of those things, but you're allowed to say it.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

As some and post Soviet shorties. You cannot be comfortable with people informing.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Random Civilians, JD Vance, is that they're.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Telling you to condemn people to their employer. Yes, but that's crazy.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But I, I make a special carve out for people who are part of like the academic and media complex because they are effectively political influencers.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I. That shouldn't matter though, right?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, no, if you're deciding the principle hate and violence, that's the same thing the left says, right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

To prohibit speech on the right is that it's incites hates and hate and violence.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

We're in a moment of this is. This is the woke. Right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, we're at a moment where.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

We have to figure out how we're going to handle this.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

This.

[Anna Khachiyan]

We're like rel.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

We've always handled it very well. By having a First Amendment and having a maximum free speech culture in your book.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Or maybe I think you're quoting someone. Maybe. But you talk about how, yes, even though we have legal protections for free speech, you're not exempt from consequence. You can't just say morally important things and not expect there to be consequences.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You raise a good point. I think that there, there is a distinction between things that have achieved a kind of consensus. Right. So, like, I think that actually Holocaust denial is something that you're probably going to get fired from your employer if you, if you just go and say like the Holocaust was fake and not.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Even because you're besmirching the memory of all these murdered Jews, but because you're infringing upon the current state status quo of Jews being a special interest group.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, in Paris, it's. In France, it's a literal memory law. It's a codified law. Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

In England. So like when you talk about, in your book and elsewhere about how like we're, we're slowly sliding into authoritarianism and we're at equal risk from the right and the left. Like, I have a hard time really grappling with that because it's clear that like in Europe, the left prosecutes, persecutes, people who are guilty of like wrong think and wrong speech. Like there was like the famous incident of like the rape, the Pakistani and Indian rape gangs. Right. And how like in the UK and how like mothers and fathers who made like racist or Islamophobic Facebook posts or given like jail sentences.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, yeah, but for these cultures, we, we're lucky to be in America when it comes to speech or we have been lucky. I mean, this is really new to have the kind of stance towards speech that Trump and Vance and this administration have.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

What I'm Saying is like, arguably your, your adopted countries, they seem to be changing is much more authoritative.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And this is actually when like fools like Lomez and these fools on, on on Twitter actually started to care about speech. Just when Pam Bondi said that they were going to prosecute hate speech and that you don't have the freedom to. Of course, the First Amendment does protect critique of Israel. No, no, no. Pambani was saying that hate speech is to say anything negative about Charlie Kirk.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And that the government.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And then you finally had like Ted Cruz and like these fools like Lomas say that that actually was like a bridge too far because they want to protect the right to have hate speech. But of course, hate speech actually is. There is no such thing as like a distinction between speech and hate speech under the First Amendment. It's all protected speech. So this administration is pushing into a kind of. It's interesting, JD Vance went to Munich, went to the United Kingdom and lectured Europeans on how they didn't have a free speech culture. And then come comes home, guest hosts Charlie Kirk's podcast and tells Americans to inform on each other to their employers and contradicts himself royally. It's actually this is the kind of insanity of a woke right that Christopher Rufo I actually don't have principles. I simply want to use power when it's available to me.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, he's pretty open about that, I think.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But I think they're, they're grappling with a core problem which is like, like hate speech also is like one of these things that like muddles the, the field. It makes no sense because what we're really talking about is one side having again, like, institutional backing, institutional power, and the other side being disempowered. And one of the critics.

[Anna Khachiyan]

They'Re politically empowered, but they're not.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They're not really because we're talking about a relatively new administration that is putting down roots, right. And they have to figure out in real time how to deal with these problems without violating any kind of democratic or constitutional.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Would you be comfortable with President AOC taking these precedents and deciding what you can say?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, but again, that's implying that the right and the left are evenly matched not only in terms of power, but in terms of ideological content, intent, that they're like, ideologies are parallel to each other. And I've always thought that the like, ideological principles of the left were just like a moral inversion. They're evil, they're hateful. And that, I mean, you say, okay.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

There'S a point I am really critical of the left, but like, I think we have to be, we have to be able to.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes, I agree with you. I mean I said this on the last episode that like, okay, like what happens if, if the, the right is actually able to seize and consolidate power semi permanently. That's also scary because it is any, any system of governance is a man made system that is liable to make errors and to opportunistically persecute like foes and enemies or whatever. But there's a point in your book where you talk about how we have to return to the fundamental political unit that we have, which is the family. And my question is like, is that even possible when the left has like institutional dominance and control? Like, you know, two of their leading issues are transgenderism and abortion.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's, that's been, they're leading. Defeated.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, and all of their leading intellectuals, people like Amia Srinivasan and Andrea Long Chu and Sophie Lewis literally wrote a book called Abolish the Family.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I don't think, I hope those are.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Those are like relatively fringe.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That are amplified, as you say, by like an ideological capture of the institution.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. And so things are being slowly pushed.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But the left has lost control. Not because the right has gained control, but because the institutions are falling apart. Apart.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yes.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And also, and also their like ideology has been revealed as like.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I don't think Andrea Longchu has the people behind them.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, no, I'm not, no, I'm not saying that these specific people are like bedrocks of like power, but they definitely like, do enjoy like tolerance and even endorsement in the mainstream media.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I would even say indulgence.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. And like some, someone I don't remember who now made this really great point that trying to appeal to the left to take it easy on their like gloating and bloodlust on the grounds that Charlie Kirk was like a husband and a father is because it's not going to get any sympathy from them and would even make matters worse because they literally hate husbands and fathers.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They hate everybody.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They think abortion is rad.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Think about the person that hates as a client. They can't exist in society.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, right.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

If you hate Ezra Clan, how do you walk out into the street?

[Anna Khachiyan]

I didn't even realize.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I kind of hate. I kind of hate. No, but I don't hate anybody.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Dangerous and has bad idea. How do you walk?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I think, I think he's dangerous and has bad ideas. Not because he's too centrist, but because he's too left wing. Because he'll capitulate to guys like Ta Nehisi Coates who don't really know.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

What is clear is that he will capitulate to the guys.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I don't want that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That is clear. That is clear.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And I don't want like, you know, it's like the outrageous thing about a guy like Mehdi Hassan is not even.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That he's like, he thinks you're cattle.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, it's not even that he's an Indian Muslim. It's that he's also.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He's not India.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, he's an Indian Muslim. He's not a Pakistani. It's that he is also a former British citizen who sought citizenship in the United States just so he could be a subversive hate monger. Like, why does a person like that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Have a place here?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And like, how do you deal with a guy like that without suspending democratic principles and constitutional controls? That is the problem that the right is trying to grapple with in real time.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No, but you can't.

[Anna Khachiyan]

This is a very serious. I agree that. Yeah, I didn't watch. You're the only person I know that watched Pants. I heard that. I did even less numbers than Jimmy Kimmel.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Way less. Way less.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, yeah, it's. I don't, I didn't, I didn't tune in and I was kind of like invested. Yeah, but I agree that it's wrong. I don't believe in informing on people personally. Does not inform on someone. Of course, obviously I don't. But he's not talking. He's not jailing people for speech. He's simply not simply. Obviously it's more nefarious than that. But he's advocating for a kind of like civic model of accountability for speech that same week.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He's saying there are consequences to your words.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

A consequence culture. That sounds like wokeness to me. That was the same thing that the woke left was saying. It's insane. Like this. Not cancel culture. This is consequence culture. What are you talking about?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, but that is not true because again, you publish like Senator, it is. No, it's not true because it presumes a power parody and it presumes an ideological parody and those things don't exist. And I'm interested in how you.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I think it is true. I think it was bad on the left and I think it's bad for.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But no, I, I have. I'm not delusional. I'm not like a magatard. I think that you're too, you're too smart for that. I think that like the, the right being in permanent power will create its own monsters. Of course it has already.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, Donald Trump is a monster.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Oh.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But he's, you know, he's interesting and he's better in many ways than the JD Vances and people under him because he's funny and he's an individual and.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He'S original and he's not homophobic or racist.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No, he's an original. He's not. He's not a Stephen Miller or a J.D. vance.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I don't think J.D. vance is even that bad either.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He's not. He's not authentic.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, yes, that's the biggest thing that people wield against him.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Trump is authentic.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's true.

[Anna Khachiyan]

He was a never Trumper cultural heroine.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. And he's, he's kind of a striver.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I've said super strive.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And I'll say it again, like, I think that his history is a little bit embellished.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Totally.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Meemaw and Peepaw or whatever and all this crap. Like, I'm sorry.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But why is Trump a monster?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Trump is a moral monster. Well, because, you know, that was one.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Of my questions I wanted to ask early on, actually.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Per year after he so bad. But I want to hear.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You're like Joe Rogan at this stage in your life. You can, you can take a break.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, I want to hear your answer as to why Trump is a monster.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, yeah, per year after.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But I don't think you really believe that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

In a bubble I am where just that comment would never be like asked for a follow up, everybody. Of course he's a monster. No, I mean he's a monster because he's a kleptocrat. He's robbing the country blind and lining his pockets and his family's pockets.

[Anna Khachiyan]

More than a doubt. More than a doubt.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

With them painting more.

[Anna Khachiyan]

More than.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

More than Biden, like.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, clearly he's made more money than them. He. He has like since.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. But in his pre political career, he's.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Made more money post political career. Like the meme coin alone would have been the most important story of any president.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, that's an unregulated market.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

That is.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, it's the, it's called the free market is.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Is the biggest scandal in American history.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I'm a liberal, so I believe in the free market. And I think shitcoin should stay unregulated. I'd like to say that. And to buy Dasha Coin.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

How is Dasha Coin doing?

[Anna Khachiyan]

It's flopped. Everyone let me down.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Did you cash out at the right time.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, I made some money. Not as much as I could have if I was tech savvy in any way.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, I have a coin.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, you have a coin?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, yeah, I paid my rent.

[Anna Khachiyan]

We did a whole. We had shkreli on a.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

We're gonna be arrested for financial crimes. Don't you worry.

[Anna Khachiyan]

No, no. None of this is criminal because it's unregulated. It's all good. But that. A monster. Sorry, a meme coin makes you a monster. Come on.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Before he was in power, but he's a kind of endearing monster.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Why?

[Anna Khachiyan]

Why?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

What is.

[Anna Khachiyan]

What is actually monstrous about him that differentiates him from your standard fair Democrat, liberal from.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

This man has multiple baby mamas. He has multiple children. Nobody in his family and his clan has come out against him. You look at the Kennedys and the.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Biden family, they're always.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That's true. That's a testament to someone's character. If you believe in the family as the political unit.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

RFK is more of a monster by that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, but. Okay, the Kennedys and the Bidens are always, like, logging onto Twitter or substack to, like, complain about their relatives. And, like, that's never happened with Trump. And he's, like, so tight.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He keeps it.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He runs a tight shift. How is that monstrous? That's like.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Wait, what was the question? I was.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

How is he a monster? I mean, I. I think Donald Trump has conducted himself as a monster, but I also see how that guy is funny. Like when he said, you still believe in Santa Claus?

[Anna Khachiyan]

No. He's had a ton of bangers.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He is. Of course, you know them.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But I also don't find him to be uniquely, like, evil or monstrous more than any politician, basically.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. We're not. We're not also saying that he's, like, uniquely, like, unimpeachable and innocent, and we Stan him or ship him, like, no matter what. Like, I'm sure he's done things wrong.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I think you find him vulgar.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. Yes.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And aesthetically, he is hard.

[Anna Khachiyan]

In this book, I think you. Respectfully. I think you have nostalgia for the Obama era, for the Bush era.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I have nostalgia.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Wow.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That was eloquent in comparison. But if you're encouraging a crowd to hang your vice president, not intervening when they're trying to hang your vice president. I'll clarify. Is monstrous.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Wait, what?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. When Ivanka Trump was begging Donald Trump to intervene and stop Jan6, he sat for hours without telling people to stand down. They were erecting a gallows, a hangman's gallows to Mike Pence.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It's insane, I know, but you say so yourself. They were all dead eyed. They just were copying what they saw was like socially permissible behavior in the summer prior. You say this in your video.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I definitely think that it exists in a continuum that was going on with the summer prior. But I think Donald Trump, his own daughter was saying, you've got to intervene and he didn't do it.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Wait, by the way, I'm, I'm a Jan6realist and Tucker Carlson Jan6Truth. No, I think the truth is that like those people did do something like bad by storming the Capitol. I get it. But like at the end of the day it was like a drop in the bucket compared to the reaction, like the orchestrated, organized reaction, whether people know it or not, to the Summer of Floyd where people again, like, I think.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The Summer of Floyd was very bad. But you admit that like attacking the seat of American political power is really bad and threatening the vice President.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It's bad but crazy. It's more coherent as a political act, as a gesture. As a gesture to go to the Capitol to put your feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk and pick up the phone and pretend to make a phone call. Is that makes way more sense to me than like burning down some black owned or Chinese pharmacies.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, like shooting two black teens in the car.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I'm not gonna defend that. That they stole a washing machine. Died. So I'm taking this washing machine.

[Anna Khachiyan]

What I was gonna say was. Yeah. I think that you have some probably well placed nostalgia for George W. Bush. Well, okay, in the book at least even for Obama.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But like, honestly, I think you're too smart to buy into the myth of, of Obama.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I think you have instincts against the incoherence of progressive politics that you are you.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I do.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You explain very thoroughly in your book. But you find the right wing to be vulgar and you want a return to a kind of like polite liberal society. That's just impossible.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Correctly. Can't throw your chips in with the right because you're aware of like very.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Comfortable like with conservatives. Like, but I don't think.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You'Re not exactly allergic to conservatives.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Not at all.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You want a polite liberal order that's like refined and kind of French maybe.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But, but that's based. Who did the most damage to that liberal order. It's liberals themselves, certainly by getting in.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Bed with the left so obvious they bear much responsibility.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. It's not Donald Trump.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Like I don't think that. Yeah. Donald Trump is a symptom of other things. But when you look back at the way that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama debated, it's astonishing from this vantage point to look at how they spoke to each other and what the political stakes were and how Romney conducted himself. When you look at how George W. Bush conducted himself after 911 and he immediately went to a mosque and said, you know, we're not at war with Islam. And the way he spoke, I think.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He said it was a beautiful religion.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. The way he spoke in complete sentences and the way he didn't tweet in all caps.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Oh, come on.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Come on. But the main thing is that he's a contemporary.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Donald Trump is a contemporary person.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But Also, what did 911 lead to? LED to the terrible abuse of, like, civil liberties, and it led to untrammeled, unchecked Islamic immigration.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, that's why states. I'm evoking, like a polite liberal order where you say, Islam's beautiful. I love this mosque. Then you. Then you wage war on the Middle east and, like, make the lives of Muslim Americans, like, highly surveilled and police. And there's just like a disconnect in what. And I agree, because, yeah, I think we do need, like, a nice, noble lie that we can all.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, but all this comes down to, like, the core problem, which is that this is. But the veils, a question of, like, racial and ethnic incompatibility and what you're going to do about it.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, the toothpaste is out of the container.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You take that red pill, you can't.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Ethnic society. So what you. I mean, Stephen Miller's fantasy, he's gonna. We're gonna. You're not gonna make this an all white society. So what is.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Nobody wants to make it an all white society because you look at guys like Stephen Miller and J.D. vance and, you know, like, Stephen Miller's a Jew and J.D. vance is married to an Indian woman. They're not like, anti immigration, and that's.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

With Gavin Newsom's family compared to Jada.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

That's the big hard right criticism against these guys is that they're like ethnically impure or race traitors or whatever.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, that they're not white national.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. Yeah. And what everybody is like dog whistling to at the end of the day, which is like an uncomfortable and inconvenient truth, is that in America, we like our society to be, like, basically modeled on a white Anglo Saxon European society, because that's what benefits. That's the vast majority of people Work ethic. Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, not know. Which is very different from France.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It does. I agree with you.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Which has a more baroque.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's why I work here.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Catholic.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Because you can't work over there.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That society is too loud.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Thomas. I feel like you don't work there because you probably don't. Can't write in French.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, but they. I write.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They can translate you.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. No, I want to work in a Protestant culture, not a Catholic culture. For sure.

[Anna Khachiyan]

See, I'm the other way. I'm different. I've got more of a Catholic or Catholic. That is to say. Not.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No, but you're. You're getting paid the Protestant way. You're a self made entrepreneur. You don't want to actually live in a Latin country. I don't think you want to be in a Protestant marketplace.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I think I want to be in a free marketplace. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But more the kind of. There's an essay. I forget who wrote it.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I think it's from the 70s. It's called the protest. The bourgeois mind in the Catholic spirit or something like that. It's like it's about. No, no. How it's about how the. The Protestant work ethic is actually like. Because it prioritizes like efficiency and materiality is like almost diametrically opposed to a Catholic. I wouldn't even call it a work ethic because it's more kind of baroque and passionate and like it's not about this earth.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Because they're more. And that resonates.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You are a little bit of a Francophile.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I. Yeah, I mean I am, but I have. Okay, so one of. I cooked up a hot take because I saw you on the Daily show sort of advocating for a model that is a mix of American and French liberalism. You said. What did you like, you said that the French maybe take it a little too far.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You can.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah. But my take that I want your counter take on is that France is kind of originally fundamentally woke that because the French Revolution was so ideological and that's formed the basis of their recent culture which has been about. Yeah. Like creating these like. Yeah. Secular like citizens. And then you have things like, you know, the memory laws about the Holocaust and slavery, the Armenian genocide. Never mind, they take that one back.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

She mentioned that they like instituted. I looked into against denying the Armenian genocide and then rolled it back because clearly like the. The. The new axis of evil, which is like Israel, Turkey, Azerbaijan pressured them to like take it back. I mean it's a. It's a very interesting Footnote. Right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But so, right, the woke thought policing is kind of like embedded into French society. In America it's more diffused and corporate.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

In France it's more state. Yeah. State enforced.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And yet the French are, are more chauvinistic.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You can't wear your hijab. They are.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They are.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Can't wear your hijab at the beach.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Woken up on the beach to be made to strip.

[Anna Khachiyan]

They make you put on the bikini.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

In France, they make you strip. That's an incredible society.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's insane because they're such sex perverts.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They're like, you have to take off the hijab and the rest of your.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And your panties and give me a.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Kiss or you have to go home.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They're like, this is for Purple magazine. Are you a pervert like me?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The Francis is an interesting society, but I think there's a middle ground, you know, between fetishizing identity and this French thing, which is that you, if you're a Jew, you keep that private in your house and you can't be a Jew outside. You can't be a Muslim outside.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, that would be the ideal. Right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It's like, well, that's a whole.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The French society is the one I think you would have to embrace. But in practice they haven't solved all the human life is complex. Right. You know, you have to actually, even no matter what the law says, you have to stop yourself if you're waking up a 55 year old woman on the beach and telling her that she has to remove clothing.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You know, there's something. You must feel that there's something gone wrong with that.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But don't you almost feel like American woke is and you say something to this effect in your book that it is almost downstream of like French thought because they had a little too much liberty and then came up with critical race theory, whatever you want to call it. So they're kind of like the original like operational system for wokeness. And then America just put like a more like puritanical corporate spin on it.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Very. Yeah, that's true. Somebody made this point that I thought was really interesting where it's like the way that the ideas went back and forth started in France, came over to America and then, you know, France is combating the wokeness that comes from America. That was rooted in a French kind of critical theory.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That's a fantastic thing.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They compared it to pizza. Like pizza started in Italy. At some point you get a Pizza Hut back in Rome after pizza was in America. It's like, what the fuck is. What is this? This has nothing to do with, with the pizza that we were doing in, in Naples.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But you, you can also make the case that like the real, like, source of this, like Anglo tolerance and individualism, because they kind of did it to themselves by.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, they're not Anglos. That's the difference.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, I know, but I'm talking about like in America specifically, which was like traditionally an Anglo society up until like the, you know, the 60s, like heart seller. Right.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, it's interesting, like Albert Murray and would say that America was always fundamentally white. Anglo, Saxon, Protestant, African, Native American.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. Those are like the three spokes.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They are. Yes, it was. And there are elements. You know, the whitest, most blue blood Americans always like, took pride in having a drop of Native American blood.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. But even the most inveterate racists will admit that we have a moral obligation to the African descendants of slaves in America. Which is why they're so like, against.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Most of whom have been here longer than most whites.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Which is why they're so against like the Ilhan Omars and Mehdi Hassan's of the world, who again, like throw their law in with the plight of the oppressed blacks in America.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, that's why they came up with bipoc.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Because POC wasn't cutting it. They had to say, no, no, black, indigenous.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But you, you.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Sorry, stop. Asian hate.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, I mean, that's why I'm more sympathetic to Ados than, you know then.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, you have, you have a core problem, which is that like, you are the descendant of American descendants of slaves.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And on my mother's side. Old white Anglo Saxon Protestants.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. Yeah. Owners.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No, no, no. Massachusetts.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Nice.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, they have those in Massachusetts.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yankees.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Eli told me a funny story about how his elementary school was renamed from some white guy who like owned the place to like a gay black opera singer who never attended the school because.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It turned out America's insane.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, it turned out that the guy, the original guy, was a slave owner, meaning he owned two slaves in Massachusetts and freed them.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, really? He was like a nice one of.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

The good ones and like, he didn't have like a plantation or an industry or whatever.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I'm not really in favor of just looking back indefinitely into the past and judging and castigating and punishing the past based on contemporary sensibilities. I really don't think that's fruitful, but.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, but that's what, like, wokeness.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I know about this didn't come.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I'm going to quote you in your book in my favorite chapter, which is about like the globalization of anti racism, where you are, you're doing some panel on Wokeness. Wokeness or whatever they call it in. I forget where it is.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's at the Chateau de Tocqueville. Is that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That guy you love.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Exactly.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

This chateau is crazy. The. The descendants of Tocqueville are still there. And they're like, it's annoying. Our original ancestor in the year 100 or whatever was like best friends with this guy William. And it's right on the channel and you're like, william, let's go across there. And that's William the Conqueror. Like, and that's, that's the Norman invasion into England. Like, that's how old, that's how long they've been in that house.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

That's crazy.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They're still in the house. And so.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, you're there with like a panel of people discussing.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I was in the audience for this panel. Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Okay.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I think he's finally answered the question of whether you can dismantle the master's house.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Apparently not.

[Anna Khachiyan]

No. We still don't know.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

One of the most interesting things about that is that they've done studies that actually the like 75% or more of the last names of Oxford and Cambridge are the names of the descendants of the Norman conquerors.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Okay.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And not of the native Britons that were. So you see what I'm saying? It's hard to actually overturn, like, once it gets going. It's very difficult. They still are on top. Yeah, but the Normans that came over a thousand years ago are still mostly the ones at Oxford and Cambridge.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, but you have to, you have to like, budget for the fact that like all premier black intellectuals in the United States are equally the descendants of like prominent Anglo Saxon houses.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You've probably looked into that more than I have.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I mean.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I know some like Welsh dude named Williams had a lot. There's a lot of Williams.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They're not like down market ethnic white names.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They're.

[Anna Khachiyan]

They're not Polish.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, you, you get into this.

[Anna Khachiyan]

They're not slow.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I was, I was looking up Ta Nehisi Coates on Wikipedia and his dad.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Paul Coates is interesting. Paul.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It was William Paul Coates and he named his son Ta Nehisi. Paul Coates.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah. I wonder. Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Tanahisi is some Egyptian something.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's not even Swahili. Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Rasta vibe.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But Paul Cotes sounds very grand and fine.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

There are videos of if I was.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Tan I. I would go by Paul Cotes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

How come black people don't name their kids Haley after they do? They do.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They do.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Okay.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Okay.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I don't. I don't know. Sorry. Oh, oops. I'm gonna read, so.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You should. I. I would if I. If. If I was thinking more strategically, I would have had. I would have hired you to do the audiobook. It would have sold more.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Did you do the audiobook?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I did.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Oh, no. You have a nice voice.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You have a nice voice.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, but.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

So you're discussing kind of these, like, incongruent and inconvenient feelings you have about this woman, Rokaya Diallo, and she's cool.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You should have her on the podcast.

[Anna Khachiyan]

She's French, Senegalese, and she's kind of. She's Muslim.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

She is.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And so she's sort of this lone voice. She gets kind of, like, ganged up on in this town.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's amazing. This. I've never seen something.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, it's really. It's actually very interesting. But you say it is no exaggeration to say that wokeness is also a destroyer of virtue and beauty. It makes a slogan of the ineffable, betrays every secret, spoils the ending of every tale. The politics of identity that undergirds the obsession with social justice, obliterates every marker of individuality and subordinates every psychological ambiguity to the stark and inflexible dictates of abstraction. It's max of deterrenism, blah, blah. Later on, you have a good Churchill quote about liberalism that says you have no head if you wholly embrace it, but if you categorically reject it, you have no heart either.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I really feel that.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah. That seems like kind of the.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And that seems to me like I. I know you. You. You. Of course you would.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That's like, a central idea, I feel.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

In your book. But I was wondering if you could say more about Wokeness as, like, a destructive idea.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, yeah. Well, I think it reduces every question to things that don't always matter the most. You know, it reduces every question to, what is the group identity here? And what is the power imbalance? And we have to rectify every abstract grievance, and individual rights get trampled in the process. You know, if you think about, like, the way that people cavalierly accepted that some innocent men would just have their lives ruined because we are making an omelet, and me too, you know, that's. That's actually monstrous. You know, it was. But it's so Cavalier. That's like whatever. If somebody gets like fired. Like men have been getting jobs they didn't deserve for decades or centuries. You know, like it was so cavalier the way that Wokeness treated the kind of casualties, the destruction of real people's lives.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. And well, that's it like really did a disservice to the gravity of the actual crime of rape.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And. But by like lumping all these random.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Azizans.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Infraction. Yeah, like whatever. Misdemeanors. Infractions. Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's crazy. And you know, in every way it's like just this kind of inability to see the complexity of, of human life and relations and the idea that also just this idea that, that the wound is everything and that the wound that you didn't even experience yourself but are in somehow proximity to matters more than everything. Because a lot of it is like not first hand experience.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But don't. Do you think that Wokeness is not a kind of like slippery slope symptom of liberalism?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, oh. Of neoliberalism.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Okay, well, whatever you want to call it. Like, you know, I think that this is. We can't return.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, this is where the racial and ethnic component comes in because it seems.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Like you've been reading Christopher Caldwell.

[Anna Khachiyan]

No clue. Never heard of him. I came up with these ideas all by myself.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Works in a high trust, ethnically homogenous society. So left are very fond of bringing up the example of Scandinavian countries which is falling apart. Like, you know, socially democratic. They're like socialist leaning. And why is that? It's like the, the determining operative factor is not that they're socialists, it's. It's that they're homogeneous. Right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But they're also going up in the euthanasia pod.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

So different.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Sweden, which was one of the, the poster nations for this, has recently, since 2015 or so.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Experienced enormous instability from having like an enormous a million in a country of 9 million bringing in a million immigrants.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

From mostly from Islamic countries. And that's, that's another problem.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And the high trust society is really straining.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's falling apart because any, any. Why are human system doing that? Socialism, liberalism, fascism can work.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I'm serious.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Ethnically homogeneous society, this is serious.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Why did they.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, why, why let in a million people from Islamic countries? Why in France, as Islamophobic as it.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Is with the hijabi laws between Sweden and France, all these countries have different stories. France has former colonies. Sweden did not.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Okay.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Sweden was, from what I understand was, you know, there was enormous upheaval in The Middle east and Syria and places like this under the civil war where you know, immigrants were flooding into Germany and other. Some European countries I think were trying to do something quite high minded and was to give amnesty to quite a lot of refugees. Denmark decided not to. Sweden decided to do it. And Sweden, Sweden's society has really been strained by this.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But no one forced. No one forced.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

France is the most multi ethnic society on continental Europe because of the scope of France's former colonial empire.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

The holdings. Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Coming to the Metropole, back from the colonies and they have a claim on France in certain ways that other people don't have. On Sweden.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Okay.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

If you're coming. If you're in Algeria, you have a claim on France. If you're in Morocco, you have a claim on France.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. You were colonized.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yes. And yeah, and now you're, you have a different relationship with the society that had colonized you. Same reason why Pakistanis go to the UK of course.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And you know, but, but the Scandinavian countries have no such precedent, no such history of colonialism. No such history.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And so you think just out of like a, a good faith, high minded gesture, they let in a million.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And now they're now there. You see this with like the Israel Palestine conflict where people will be like, well, why don't the neighboring Muslim countries absorb the Palestinians? It would be a demographic disaster for them because they can't afford millions of new migrants flooding into their countries. So why would they do that?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Bungled, of course. A society can't take an unlimited amount of immigrants in a very short amount of time.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And people don't seem to understand that this like fundamentally changes the cultural fabric, the financial incentives, the capacity of the state to provide for people. Like people talk about welfare state, it's like, well, okay, welfare state is only possible with trust. If there are limits.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Limits and with trust.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

In France even. This is a society that believes in the social safety net but weakens when the society too quickly changes. People don't want to actually fund generous welfare states when they believe funding strangers that's justified.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Why would they? And, and it almost like, like it obviates the whole like racial and ethnic angle because basically like you can set that aside and say like, okay, like different strange people are coming into my country and I feel like a stranger in my homeland and I no longer have the safety net that I originally enjoyed. Like this doesn't have to even be like a racial. Do you see what I'm saying? It does not have to be a racial or Ethnic conflict.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I don't think it has to be racial. I would say that America is a fundamentally different society than these European nations. Well, that we're talking about.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And in America, like, historically, like, people from different demographics assimilate better than they do in, like, the European countries where they're, like, siloed and together.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Where. It was a nation. Yeah, it was.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But all of this rests on the fact of the matter that, like, by the way, like, okay, like, I'm like a Slavoid trash immigrant to America.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

To New Jersey.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

To New Jersey. I have no claim upon the Anglo Saxon birthright, but, like, come on, I've been hammering on this, like, for years.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Me, a black man here, descendant of slaves. I have a claim on that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You do, you do, you do. But there is going to come a point. There's going to be a tipping point. Who wrote that book? Malcolm Gladwell.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Welcome.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Glad.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Where, like, the culture that you came here for no longer resembles itself. I don't understand why people don't understand this.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

There is. But I would say that's much more the case in a. In a. In a real, like, ethnic ethno nationalist. In America. America has always been in flux. There have always been Chinese people here in the colonies. There have always been.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Specifically. Well, no, no.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But Mexicans.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

There have always been.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Been.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Manifest Destiny included.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Very different society.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, no, I. Like, I had this thought recently because I was, like, in Berkeley, in San Francisco, like, a couple of days ago.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

What were you doing that you were lecturing?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I was like.

[Anna Khachiyan]

We went to a party.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

We went to some. We did some gay. But.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Okay, we don't want to get.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And I saw, like, Chinese men in, like. Like, Carhartt, like, painter jumpsuits blasting Sigs.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Different culture out there than here.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, it is. But like, any Chinatown, like, Chinatown is like a state of mind. You run up in there and there's, like, a Chinese guy ripping a Sig and, like, cursing at full volume anywhere you go.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah. Riley and I were walking around Chinatown in San Francisco, like, is this. He was like, is this a desirable neighborhood? The way I was, like, it's not the same in New York. In San Francisco, though, the Chinese have more of a stronghold, I feel.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Whereas, like, in New York, it's like a cool, trendy neighborhood to live in, whereas in San Francisco, not so much, because it still is, like, very predominantly Chinese.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But even here, it's like.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I guess you're. It can be working class in parts of here. But I was gonna say, like, in. In San Francisco, like, You'll have like a Chinese cab driver and things like this that I feel like it seems different than in la.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You have an Armenian cab driver.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They look upon me. Yeah, I have a problem with this.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Like, dichotomy is higher.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Ian is the higher, more assimilated chick.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Kardashian.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. They're like the Watertown slash Glendale Armenians. Yan is like the former Soviet bloc Armenians.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I got you and I wanted to ask you a question. Why are you so mad these days online?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I'm not mad. People think I'm mad.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Why are you so mad? Because you're so nice and lovely. Why are you so mad?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I'm not that mad. People have a problem with this. I'm not actually mad. I'm actually a mild mannered, conflict averse.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But online.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But online, online, you have a Persona.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's not even a Persona. I just, like, feel more comfortable because I don't have, like, people actively glaring at me or trying to talk to me to, like, air my opinion. I'm a fundamentally shy person. Obviously. I'm a gay nerd. And I'm not mad. I'm just righteous.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You are righteous. You have a moral indignation that I respect.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I am the birthday twin of Stephen Miller.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, my God.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

This is Leo Virgo Cusp. We are attention whores and moral fags at the same time. And we're just. I'm autistic for the truth. I want the truth to come out. I have, like, I have no particular, like, racial or social or gender animosity. I just, like, don't like lies and I don't like being forced to bear witness to them.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I think we can all agree with that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, I can definitely agree with that. I find that's probably why I'm a writer.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And I was thinking about this because people are always like, oh, like, something horrible must be going on in her personal life or she's like, personally unhappy. And it's like, that's not true. Like, since we've been doing the pod, which is like seven years, going on 8, 423 episodes. Yeah. There's been ebbs and flows. I've been happy and unhappy. I'm currently pretty happy. But, like, no, I just feel. I feel angry.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You don't.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Unrighteous. I just, just. I feel like there. This is a pivotal moment and the assassination of Charlie Kirk really brought it to the fore.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Were you paying attention to him before that?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Not really, but he did follow me randomly on Twitter, like maybe a year or two ago, and I was like, oh, that's weird and interesting. And I kind of looked into him and like had a vague impression.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Did you follow back me?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I don't remember.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I think the count is I'm gonna.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Follow him up right now.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That like Bart Simpson Avi left us that got stabbed by the.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh my God.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Member? Yeah, I remember another horrible snuff video we got to see. He followed me. I realized, yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Sheets or the other one?

[Anna Khachiyan]

I don't remember. Probably the other one. But I. Yeah. And then after he died, I said, oh damn, can't follow him back now.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, that would be wrong.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I think he was a private account too. So just gone. Gone sands of time, but. So you don't think there's any corollary between how you feel and how you behave online? Cuz I sometimes I get mad.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Hold on, there definitely is. Okay.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I get mad. I act out online.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. Or when I'm, when I'm hungover or PMS thing.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Bad time to be tweeting.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I go online and stir up. For real. Like obviously I antagonize and alienate people, but it's like truly never that deep. And I'm literally just like seeking understanding and relation. Whatever.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I feel like you really understand the psychology of post staying very well. Yeah. You understand why people do things. I don't even understand. Sometimes tweets take on a life of their own and you don't understand why. But I, I, I, I posted something about how I really felt. You know, not even.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I know people really understand like what.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

This memorial service looked like. It just, I felt very foreign from it and people were like, they took such a Christian angle and I wasn't even talking about the Christian.

[Anna Khachiyan]

No, the Christian angle is actually major, apparently, Thomas.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I mean like.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I've never seen evangelicals before. It's not the same. It's. They have, this is like a.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You have to understand that people have a perception of you as being like one in the same with like a Nicole Hannah Jones or a. They see you as like a subversive mulatto. Right. Who's like going online.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I like that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, for real. I think it's cuz going online and like trying to like undermine the core construct of the United States of America. They don't understand that you're like a thinking and feeling insensitive individual. This is understandable. It goes for all of us here. People like, like truly misunderstand you. That's what social media is for.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's what social media is for.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. I forgot where I was going with this. But they, they do not understand. Like, I think we all felt the same way.

[Anna Khachiyan]

This is like us here. Yeah. We all thought it was weird.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Fireworks at the memorial.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Like fundraising at the memorial.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Fundraising at the memorial.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Like, I don't even nakedly not even like way like straight up being like, text this number. Any donation will get you a Charlie Kirk wristband if you do this and that.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Fireworks too.

[Anna Khachiyan]

By the way, my hu. Husband wasn't raised evangelical but did spend. Was became like a Pentecostal in his teenage years where in the Pacific Northwest where there was a kind of. He's a little older than me. But there was like a kind of like Bush era revivalism that people are now saying that Kirk's death is ushering in a new revivalism. That's what they mean is the revival of like, like evangelicalism. And for a lot of Americans it's. They do. They are at the worship concert. They like, this is not. It's not. It doesn't feel weird to them at all because this is like reverent. This is that their equivalent of like a reverend religious service is already at this kind of like mega church.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Like rockified concerts.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But it wasn't even for me the Christian angle. It was Donald Trump's talking about tariffs on stage.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, he, his remarks were a little off.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

B.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, people misunderstood what he was trying to say because it was like Eric going on stage and being like, I forgive the killer of my husband and then him being like, I actually don't and I hate. Because I hate me and I hate my enemies. And I actually like, I thought that that was a sweet and self deprecating comment because he was kind of doing 40 chess and making fun of himself.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You think so?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. Yeah. He's obviously capable of self deprecation, which people don't really get about him because he's so braggadocious and like seemingly egomaniacal, but he's. He actually just like makes fun of himself at every single turn, which I find relatable because I do too. I'm like, like I'm annoying and Jewish and a moral fag and like, whatever. And people really don't get that.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, Trump's. Yeah, his. The also the memorial was like seven hours long.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Exactly.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I had been kind of like vaguely it had. I had it on the background for like hours before Trump even took the stage. And prior to that it was like this very. You know, we're putting on the armor of God.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

We've got the hedge of protection. These very Like Protestant evangelical talking points that were very. I mean, as Catholic.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's very foreign. I went to Catholic school. My whole life is a different aesthetic experience.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But as an American, I can, you know, I. It's from. It is familiar, though. It's not my aesthetic preference. And for a lot of Americans, that is their like, Like.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. Experience of my feelings. Second guess it and not counter signal it because it's, like, fair and I get it. And fundamentally, I think, like, Charlie Kirk at the end of the day, was a force for Good Israel. Well, that's a separate. That's my big issue.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's the issue for y'. All.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Oh, no, that's my big issue with Nick Fuentes because, like, like, okay, but.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That'S a big turning point agenda. That's not like a new. That's not like, it's not like, they're.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Like, not a minor detail.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah. They're not like, remixing his legacy to, you know, continuing.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Nick Fuentes is making the better points than Charlie Kirk on this issue.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. Yes, supposedly. But I think that he's also, ultimately, at the end of the day, he's not gonna like me for this. He's mixing metaphors and comparing apples to oranges. Because as I've said many times, the biggest threat facing America in this day and age is the cultural and institutional dominance of the left. And the biggest challenge is the permanent and definitive defeat of that. And Israel is its own separate problem that we all agree on and that we can tackle later. We don't all agree.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's clearly the country doesn't all agree on it.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I'll agree on it.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, the people who get it got it. Real heads know.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But all I'm saying is Turning Point USA is a, like, naughty.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's a.

[Anna Khachiyan]

It's a. No, it's. It's, you know, it's a Israeli lobbying body.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Is that.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, fundamentally, because I don't even know. Because evangelicals are Zionists. It's like, in lockstep with that. It's not. They. There is no dissenting opinion within that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Sure. Body politics strategy has to be stepwise. It's like you tick one box and you tick another and, like, obviously, like, the problem of Israel transcends the geography and, like, comes down to, like, prominent, influential Jews in America and Europe. It's a larger separate issue.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But when you say Charlie Kirk was a force for good.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, I think he was to the degree that he was, like, challenging the left.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And was saying, like, hey, like, abortion isn't rad. Immigration isn't cool. We want, like.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, you. You think immigration isn't cool, period. Like, as a daughter of immigrants.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, this is, like, a thing that people like to lob at any immigrant where they're like, oh, like, don't you owe your loyalty to other immigrants sense, like, tacitly, implicitly.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You want to shut the door.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You want to shut the door. And my mom actually gave me. My mom was, like, drunk.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

When I shout out to.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

She was like, yeah, I want to shut the door.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Because right up.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

These people who are coming in are fundamentally culturally different from me. And she's right. She's not wrong.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

She said that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

She's so based for that. Yeah, of course. Because if you have too many immigrants, the idea. The ideal of America ceases to be. And you. You have to have very strict controls and vetting mechanisms.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I don't even think they have to be that strict. I just don't think the fossum faucet should be, like, full throttle. Like, we just need, like, very. I'm a moderate. I just want, like, a very. Some immigrants, I'm not, like, point first.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Like, blankets, saf. Love it. Love.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But, like, I'll eat some halal food. I live by the un. I love multicultural. I live by the un Okay. I love nations, all kinds.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

For the sake of all the immigrants flooding in into this country, you do not want to tip the demographic balance too much, because then it.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

A nation has to have borders. I agree with you.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Ceases to resemble the country that you originally moved here for. Come on, guys.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Immigrants not thinking.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

All nations are always in flux.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Of course they're not. And I don't blame them.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Except for Japan.

[Anna Khachiyan]

They're not thinking about the demographics. They're thinking, I got to get out of this country. I got to go to America so I can achieve generational.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

That great tweet that was never racist, that you forget that white library are the problem. Because he's right about that. Because at the end of the day, it's like, you can't blame people like Ilhan Omar and Mehdi Hassan for doing what they do. They're only doing what comes natural to them. You have to blame the people that not only tolerate, but endorse them.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

More rich white libs.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. I can't imagine who Mehdi Hassan's audience is if it's not like that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Like, who is his audience?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Who is his audience? And apparently there's a lot of them. But who is. Yeah, Omar's. I don't. Yeah, I'm with you on that. And I'm with you on the idea that a nation has to have borders.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But also like checks and balances, vetting mechanism, immigration.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Everything is enough.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Is enough.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Everything. No, but everything in. In reason and moderation. I mean, immigration is also, you know, I'm glad that your parents came. Same here. You make New Jersey a richer place to be from.

[Anna Khachiyan]

So true.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You do. And you make Nevada so much more interesting.

[Anna Khachiyan]

No, I mean, I'm really glad I'm in America. I love America. Really glad I'm here. I want some immigrants here for sure. Not. No one's. I'm not, you know, I'm not like. I don't want to lock it down. I don't even like Anglos. I got a different.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Too many angles. You're just. You're in like Bristol or something.

[Anna Khachiyan]

No, that's why. Yeah. Even, you know, prior to like, you know, mass subcontinental immigration, when America was more of a melting pot of like, you know, different kinds of European. That's pretty interesting. You know, I don't want all Protestants.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Get some Catholics, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That used to be considered a different race face.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Even some Muslim. I like Halal.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Would I say this? But that's not entirely true.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You should read the. The Anglo Saxons take on it.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They don't.

[Anna Khachiyan]

They're. Yeah, they're not, they're not fans.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They were not always fans.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, the other crazy thing that bears repeating, which I'm sure you're aware of, is like a biracial person, is that like every, like, serious prominent black intellectual or pundit in America is like at least 30% white.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, for sure. Well, the, the, the. The average is 80% African, 20 mostly white Anglo Saxon products.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But of course, most many people are on the other side of that, which is much more.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, I want to see like, Ta Nehisi coats as well. 23.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I'm sure he's not.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

He's 30% white, easily. Yeah, I mean, his father for sure.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But, you know, that's the beauty of America. You know, if it is, it is.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I'm. I'm not like anti immigration or anti multiculturalism. I'm just like, anti the idea that society will be better if you, like, import everybody here.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You're realistic about demographic change? No.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I think so. It's like, very obvious.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

So you subscribe to the Great Replacement, do you not? I mean, well, I guess I should say. What do you mean by subscribe to the Great.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, I love when they question. Well, like my mom, they were like what do you think of the Great Replacement Theory? And he's like, what? This is not a theory.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, my parents are liberals, love them to death. But I, they came to visit me recently. That's why I was not at your book launch party. I was having dinner and we had been avoiding kind of like political. Because we, you know, are like hot headed Slavic people who, you know, when we tread into some territory, we'll start like screaming in Russian in front of my non Russian speaking husband. Which we try not to do for his benefit. But eventually we did kind of get into it. My mom said something where she was like, there's, you know, we're not. That people aren't reproducing enough. We're not, you know, so we have to import people from another, from other places to tip the scales because we're.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Not at like, mom is woke up.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, both my parents. Whoa.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

She's actually.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying, actually.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Technically. Right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But no, I'm like, I'm like, oh, so you do believe in the great replacement, but you think it's actually great. You think for you it's a great, good replacement. And. But that's exactly what people don't want is to like not be reproducing enough and then be replaced by people from other places.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But that's like my thing with like, you know, like, you've heard this phrase, the woke or. More correct.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, no, I hadn't. Who, who says this?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I think it originates with Twitter user Kofi Fianon, but it's become like a. I don't know, I think maybe he coined it, but I'm not 100%.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But it's when they say something like, what do you think the decolonialization means?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And they, you know, they're like speaking to a specific audience, but then they're actually articulating a truth, which is that people that do want to decolonize are like calling for violent action.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Ta Nehisi Coates and Ibram X Kendi, who are basically race segregationists. Like, they believe in, in the fact of like, race being a real thing, race being like the operative factor. They're kind of saying the quiet part loud, but they're coming up with like the opposite insights that you would want.

[Anna Khachiyan]

How so you meaning Thomas?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Like one a classical liberal would want, which is like a seamless, raceless, multicultural society where everybody gets ahead on the merits of their own individual capabilities.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean, in a, like it's a long time ago now. In 2017, I profiled this French writer Renaud Camus, who coined the term the Great Replacement. I wrote this long piece in the New Yorker about it and I was actually critical of aspects of it, but in other ways sympathetic to it. Because there is a truth in that a society can't actually completely have porous borders and allow a new population. It doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter. The point was that it's actually not about race. Society cannot completely allow.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. The specific ethnic or racial makeup doesn't matter if the society is being demographically overpowered by foreign point.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The change itself is what is. Is at stake. And of course there is. There's truth in that. But it's always about like, how do you. How do these questions get addressed in ways that are actually humane and they're not like scapegoating people or stereotyping or.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, you can say that the change is inevitable, but the fact is, when people used to come to America, they. I guess, I mean, that's not. Even the Chinese don't assume. Haven't assimilated so well. They've kind of ghettoized. I was going to say that people used to go and they used to assimilate to America and now they come and they have a more hostile disposition.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

New York is such an incredible place. You see it every day. You see. It's astonishing how people, like everybody gets.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes, it is actually like, very beautiful and like, it's fulfilling. Sorry to sound like a gay.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean, your neighbor is insane. It's amazing.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Actually, you should come up by the un.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

We got diplomats all from my. My neighborhood is specifically interesting because it's like black poverty colliding with Chinese poverty.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And Armenian hustle and everybody.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

One random doesn't even see herself as Armenian. But the question is, like, how do you assimilate people? Should you assimilate people? And what happens if you let in too many. The rate of change is too high. You cannot assimilate people. Yeah, that's the problem we're talking about. We're talking about like, the rate of change.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But the problem is that actually, I think this is actually a key point. The problem is that we never have conversations that are measured and about balance. It's these extremes where online, like, people are railing against immigrants, immigration, have no borders. And both of those positions are absurd. And nobody wants to hear a kind of compromise in between the two. That's like something that doesn't work well online. Actually, they have a point that actually you can't have open borders, but that's Also a point that individuals can come and that's great. And you can assimilate people.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, Bernie tried to say that and they crucifier.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yes. Is this kind of.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But then, yeah, with, with like the Arena Zakutska murder, I saw people talking about remigration and I was like, she was killed by a heritage American. And I don't think we got to send the Ukrainians back. Like, what are you talk. Like they all have to go back. It's like, who are you talking about? Because this was an immigrant that was killed by African American. And I understand, like the directional point that they're making, but it still is. Like, there is like a ton of incoherence.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

There's a ton of incoherence. And it's very difficult to have a measured middle position that respects the kind of truth that exists on both sides, which is no one likes centrist. No one likes liberals in this moment.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, okay, so where we've done.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

We've done some time.

[Anna Khachiyan]

We've done some time and I have. And I want. My last question is towards the end of your book, you sort of boil all this down to. And say genuine liberals, as well as their moderate and center right partners, have no choice but to reclaim the abandoned moral high ground. We must identify and disown the means of extremism, even when they manifest themselves in pursuit of ends we may agree with that is the most basic prerequisite for democracy. So my question is two parts. What do you mean by genuine liberals and what do you mean by the means of extremism?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. Thank you for. I'm appreciating your questions.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Thank you.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Genuine. Genuine liberals are people that don't believe that everything is a zero sum game and that anytime my opponent gets any kind of advantage, it means that I have suffered a permanent loss. And, you know, liberals trust in process, in norms, and the idea that progress. Yeah, and progress. And that, you know, even if I lose now, that power will change again in the future. And I will just try to persuade people to my point of view. But it's not a catastrophic loss. And, you know, giving up on the kind of extremes means that I really think that when you get in power, you can't do what Chris Rufo said and write a piece saying that for the past 10 years I was pretty much against cancel culture, but now actually I see that we have like a majority and I think that actually, fuck what I had said, but like, this cancel culture shit makes some sense now. We should do it. That's. That's the worst possible politics you can pursue. And I think it's really short. Short sighted because I think he's young enough that he's going to see it swing back in a way he doesn't like. And I would advocate for the people on the left who rule at some point well, but that regain power, that they would try to steady the pendulum in the middle.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

That's what Barry said when she was like, well, aren't jawboning. Aren't you right wingers concerned that when the left regains power, they're going to use the might of your mechanisms against you? Yeah, sure. But to push back on that, it's like they've already defaulted on the norms and virtues of liberal culture they already don't respect.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, that's right.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Somebody's got to make the first move and, and somebody's got to, you know, some.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And also you have to keep in mind Chris Rufo is married to like a Thai woman. So he's not like a race essentialist or.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I don't think, I think he. No, I think what he actually is is a failed elite, like motivated by resentment, going to fake Harvard and people who. And he devoted his life to trying to sabotage. He's very good at, he's very ambitious. There's a classic Russian type in these novels, you know, like the, the Superfluous Man. And then he wants to, he wants to sabotage and you know, he's very good at that. But it all comes down to real people at Harvard didn't acknowledge him and now we're all living in his kind of world.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But you have to ask, like, this is a classic. Well, that's. Yeah, you have to like Chris Roof.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Go ahead.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Whoever. You have to ask, like, what are these. Nick Fuentes, what is best went to.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Really.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Sure. But would you ask, like, what do these people want? Are they capable of. You're such a credential high ground that's above their own personal self interests.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I don't think that that's going on a lot.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Rufo doesn't seem to be.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I think it's resentment. I really think it's like a Bologno character. You know, the failed elite is a powerful force in history. But no, but I, I think that somebody has to come along that wins power and doesn't decide to exert it to its full extent on his opponent.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, that's why I ask about the means of extremism, because I do think that for democracy to function, you do need polarity, you do need extremes. And the idea Right. Is that we'll meet somewhere in the middle. But you need kind of people on the fringes to push to create the ideological pressure to create like a meaningfully democratic consensus in a two party system.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I guess you do have this polarity.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But like, but the means of extremism is different from extremism on its face. Like I don't think we need to eradicate like extremism per se.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

What do you mean?

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, like what I said is that you want people to be, to have the freedom as a liberal. I want people to have the freedom.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

To exercise, exercise their freedom of speech.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Of course.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, Freedom of. Yeah, you know, you don't want like.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

A dull, non dynamic culture because that's not democracy.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Right. You don't want people self censoring.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But the means of extremism is something else.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, the means of extremism are just what we're seeing now, which is a kind of like no quarter given to your opponents. Just a complete like.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But okay, like an authoritarian demolition of.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

To play devil's advocate, these people are kind of not, they're not exactly in permanent power and they're just reacting to the circumstances that they were dealt.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's what they say.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But it's, it's true. And I, I'm not like, I have a hard time like articulating this because I'm not exactly behind all of the specific like personages and figures who are leading the New Right, but I am behind their core mission.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But they all have different. Yeah, yeah, that's a scary thing that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Nobody will acknowledge or deal with that. They, they also have like very personal goals and agendas.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Some of them are motivated by, yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Grievances, grievances from their 20s, some like that. But you know, somebody's got to be mature and, and, and move beyond this stuff. It's. We are governed by people that are some of the most immature leaders we've ever seen. I mean JD Vance is essentially governing for a kind of niche audience on X. It's actually crazy. We don't have leaders that are putting the country first. That's really a problem.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, he wasn't elected.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's true. But one of the things that I thought was interesting about the Ezra Klein TA Nehisi Coates debate is that, and I don't even think that Coates is necessarily right. I think Klein is probably more right that you have to actually think about what gets you elected because it doesn't do you much good to have these ideals and principles if you can't use them. But Coates was quite clear that some principles really matter. And right now we're in a kind of. I think we're in a very disastrous space where it seems like nobody actually has the moral high ground.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, I wanted to ask you about this question of moral clarity that you bring up.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Because it's become like a buzzword among liberals. We're like, oh, you should lead with moral clarity. And that seems to, like, subvert the original goals of journalism, which are, like, transparency and activity. What does moral clarity mean? Where did this term come about? Who coined it?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It feels like Wesley Lowry.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It feels like empathy, where they're like, oh, like, yeah, you should have more empathy and compassion. And every time I hear empathy and compassion, I run for the hills because I'm like, okay, you're just trying to, like, strong arm people into, like, agreeing with what you believe.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Which is something that you had handed down to by other, like, progressives. Like, what. What the is moral clarity? I mean, we all know in our daily lives where we stand morally, I would hope, but when liberals use that term.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

This was an enormous mistake in the summer of 2020, you know, and after James Bennett was fired at the New York Times, you know, Wesley Lowry wrote this op ed in the Times saying that for too long, journalism had tried to do this kind of fake neutrality and objectivity that was always a lie. And what we need is a journalism grounded in moral clarity. By the way, Wesley Lowery has multiple, like, credible allegations, allegations of being like the Pill Cosby of journalism after this, that come out in the past year.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

So he's the last guy you want to listen to about moral clarity. But he had this op ed, this phrase caught on, and, you know, this idea that there was a view that was clear. And I think that this is a huge mistake because, you know, if you think about it for even a second, this is a juvenile way, thinking about the reason why you want neutrality. People dispute. What's the moral clear position.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Right.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The morally clear position.

[Anna Khachiyan]

But the idea is that it's clear because there's an inherent, like, white supremacist.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Whatever, bias, which is already a mistake. And, you know, you can think that.

[Anna Khachiyan]

So it's based on a false premise, and the clarity.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Stormed the Capitol believe they were operating from a position of moral clarity. ISIS believes they're operating from a position of moral clarity. It's. It's so juvenile to think that there is a moral clear, morally clear position, and you can then impose it. And that would Be better than restraining yourself. That's what I'm saying. Like liberalism is the only way that safeguards everybody's interests because everybody feels they're operating from a position of moral clarity. You don't. The only way that you can impose that is through a kind of authoritarian imposition. And of course, that only works as long as you're in power.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Which negates the whole idea.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Exactly. So immature. And it was. It was a huge mistake. But I think that there is a real movement on the right, a woke right kind of desire to have a moral clarity of their own that is going to disappoint people just as much.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

How do you define the woke right? This is like a James Lindsay ism and he's in a subversive.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You. You reject the idea of a world right.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I think James Lindsay, based on what little I know of him, is an evil retard. Yeah. Oh, I don't know what I like, I don't understand what woke right means in the sense like.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Okay, can I.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes, go.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I think it refers to.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

The.

[Anna Khachiyan]

A right that is empowered to use as Thomas. As the means of extremism. Meaning, like cancel culture.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Means of the left. Yeah, its opponents.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Exactly, exactly.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

That's what it is. That they're.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Because it's a kind of state of exception where they get to. They have a grievance and you know, the normal kind of.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But again, this business presumes the parity of power and a neutrality of content. It presumes that the.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You're big on the unlevel playing field.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. It presumes that the left and the right are equally matched and it present. And it presumes that the left and the right have equally valid arguments and they like, don't.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Do you think there should be affirmative action for conservatives?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

What does that mean?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

To level the playing field?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, no. To give. No, but I think, I think that, that, I think affirmative.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. Should we have more talk shows for conservative.

[Anna Khachiyan]

They should put Sasha in more movies.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Should we put. Should. Should Dasha get in more.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I think I should get cast a little more.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Correct to correct for historical injustice.

[Anna Khachiyan]

There was something dei we all know is unjust. There were some people who got some parts that maybe could have gone to.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Me, but, but, but all jokes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Okay, we can make that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

All right now, jokes aside, like, obviously the ideas that are coming out of the so called presumptive right are more organically popular than the ideas that are coming out of the left.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Wait, what you think that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes, because like, at base the right, which is everybody who's not a open leftist. It's. It's like guys like Steve Sailor who are like pro Ukraine and pro vax and. Or classical liberals at the end of the day being like, Steve Sailor's pro vax. He's not a. He's not a right winger. He got adopted by the right because he had no. He was like politically homeless. I get you, like, obviously, like, the ideas that are coming out of the so called right, which again is. Anybody who has not left are much more reasonable and common sense.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, I.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They like literally are. And there are a lot of people on the right who are like.

[Anna Khachiyan]

The right is not more diverse. It's diverse.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

There's people on the right who don't want things that are common sense because.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It involves people who are just like, not leftists. It literally is like a. A basket and umbrella holding term for anybody who's not on the left. Like, I'm sure people think that you're a right wing.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, my God, you read the New York Times.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

People think Ezra Klein is right wing.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They think he's a fascist.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, they think anybody who's not like Sophie Lewis or Ta Nehisi Coates is right wing.

[Anna Khachiyan]

So you, Sarah, saying the barometer just.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Shifted so much a basic.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, no, it's always about which side gets to persuade the kind of vast, sensible middle to align with it. Because you're talking about a lot of people getting coded. Right. Who are actually centrist, centric.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Not right at all.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Like, I mean, I'm knowing you, I'm a liberal. Yeah, but we're. I think Dash has gotten kind of woke recently.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

What?

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah, no, Yeah, I think we're like.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Classical liberals woke in a pejorative sense. I mean, like, I feel like you're. You. You've moved a little bit left.

[Anna Khachiyan]

No, no, I've always been slightly right of center. I would say.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, we. We are. By virtue of being.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

We were pushing back against Anna on the last episode about.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, I took a. I had to take a hardline stance because I've constantly referred to myself as a free speech absolutist.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, you did. You.

[Anna Khachiyan]

So I can't, like, roll it back.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

She would. Yeah, she would. That's the. That's one of the points. She was going to restrict speech.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I'm not a free speech absolutist.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I'm not.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

So you're more of a liberal?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, no, I am a free speech absolutist in a vacuum. You guys don't understand. I am a free speech absolutist in a vacuum. But we don't live in a vacuum. We live in a reality where one side holds more power historically. Historically than the other side and has inflicted a bunch of like, harm and damage on society by.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I agree with that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Promoting ideas such as, like gender and race aren't real when they really patently are. Like on.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I think gender and race are very different. Or sex and race are very different. I don't know about gender.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Sorry. See, I'm like even caving to the horrible word gender. But yeah, sex. Sex and race are obviously both real. Are they like a determining force? Are they a death sentence? No, it's like when. It's like when you do the 23andMe and they're like, well, you're prone to like cancer or like blindness or osteoporosis. Is that a hard and fast truth? No, but it's like a guideline that you have to live by. I believe in generalization stereotypes. Generalization stereotypes, generally.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Do you believe, do you believe that Slavs are white?

[Anna Khachiyan]

No.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They'Re not white in the same way that like WASPs are white, but they are.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

What's the difference?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Commonwealth of like the European tradition or Asiatic too. Yeah, they're like, we're a liminal case. I think like Armenians are a liminal case. They're like literally between being white and non white and like the like Russian, Russia's east. Yeah. This is like an ongoing, like literary and sociological trope. Like, what are Slavs? What position do they occupy? They're like a secret third thing.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Do you think Jews are white?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I don't like. No, I don't actually. And like a lot of my close Jewish friends don't necessarily feel themselves to be exactly white.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, there's affinity between Slavs and Jews for sure.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But the non white people voted and they said Jews are white. And the Jews took umbrage to this.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Because they want it to be a special interest group, a special category.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Because if you're, if you're, if you're just under the umbrella of monolithic whiteness, why are you being persecuted and attacked in certain ways?

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, that's why I think the Israel palace to the kind of narrative in your book, because it is something that kind of like remixed.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Remixed a lot of it. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And the oppressor oppressed that there is amongst, like very vocal American. You actually put it very well when you talk about the Columbia protests. The way they like barricaded themselves in the building and then said they were being stuck, starved. They are. They are in Gaza in. At Harvard.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They're in the Gaza of Harvard.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah. It's like the way that people map their, like, proxy oppression complexes onto, like, global conflict.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And the way that it's played out in the aftermath of, like, America's racial reckoning. I think a lot.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

The Jews are also weird because they claim to be a religious category for, like, polite civic purposes, but they have essentially manifested their chosenness by becoming a racial ethnic category. Like, it used to be that, like, if you were. If you called yourself a Jew in, like, biblical times, you were like, under the umbrella of a religion. But in recent times, they interbred so much. There's like this, like, genetic bottleneck. Right. That they created their own race of Ashkenazi people who now purport to speak for all Jews across the world because they are the majority population of the Jews. So they.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

They literally are the majority.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. By far. I think, like, ashkenazi are like 90% of worldwide Jewry. Like, Sephardim or Mizrahis are a small percentage of that. But, like, Sephardics are like, ethnically different. Like, you know, as Eleanor is fond of saying, I'm an Arab. She's ethnically an Arab. Right. She's like Egyptian and Syrian.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Shout out to Eleanor.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And Fernando.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah, true.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I forgot to shout them out.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. But like, they really create, like. And there are more, like, sophisticated, less vulgar anti Semites on the right, such as, like, second city bureaucrat who like to do the thing of, like, denying Jews the ethnic basis of their victimhood. But actually, at this point, they do have an ethnic basis.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No, it's an interesting. I mean, it's like if you human life is complicated and it is complex and can't be reduced to these, these, these abstract categories.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

You know, it's like when. When I was pregnant, like, Eli is 97% Jewish, 3% West African, randomly.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Oh, that's right.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Eli. Jazz.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

And he's good at jazz.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

And I'm.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

He's good.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I'm 1 8th Jewish. But they tried to submit us to.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

On your maternal side or paternal side?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

On my maternal side, but through her father. So I'm actually like, are you more.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Jewish than Elizabeth Warren is Native American.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I don't know what her breakdown is.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I think. I think you probably are as very. It's not 1 8th.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yeah. But like, 18 doesn't mean anything. It means that you, like, know the people enough, but are distant enough from them to be fully anti Semitic.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, you could Become a citizen of Israel. I would like in a way that I could. I could. I could not.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I don't. According to Nazi statutes, but because the father of the child is fully Jewish, they submit you to Jewish genetic testing in any prenatal, like normal prenatal care.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Really?

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Okay, so there's a gen. Like, there is like an like ethnological genetics for Jewishness. No, I mean, I knew, but like, he. He's Jewish.

[Anna Khachiyan]

She means testing for like genetic.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's when you found out that you had the ancestry.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No, I mean, I knew, I knew I had. I. I done been known that I have the ancestry. This was like one of Cuddahy's great points that he was. He made the point that like, you know, they like to hide behind this kind of tolerant, religious, civic basis of their special group interests. But really they are an ethnic block. They are.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

They are like a category, a separate category of white people.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Of white people.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I mean, they are white because they're mostly like European.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I mean. But then this is so strange because everything is a bureaucratic kind of decision.

[Anna Khachiyan]

You know, if whiteness is about power.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

But Arabs are considered Caucasian on the census.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, Levantine Arabs, but not Gulf Arabs. And everybody like, lie also.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Like, do you not think that in like the sense of like American, like racial discourse that when we talk about white and black, we talk about brown bodies, white whiteness, White supremacists get coded as well. Is about power.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's. Yeah, that's why, that's why I.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, even the. Frustrated with the anti racist when. Because, you know, American, like Western leftists like to view the Israel Palestine conflict as a conflict of like white brown versus white people. But the fact of the matter is that Israel is probably more ethnically brown than Palestine. If you break it down because the Palestinians are ethnically Levantine Arabs. They're white for the most part. They're Caucasian. They're. Yeah. They're probably roughly the same thing as like Armenians or Turks or Iranians, where they're like, kind of liminally white for the most Ethiopians. But then you have like Gulf Arabs, Yemeni Emirates, who are like, more brown.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah. And you have, you have African Jews.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Who are in the area.

[Anna Khachiyan]

12 tribes, I've heard. Should we wrap it up?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Just breaking down the ancestry of this was. I. I love talking to y'. All.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

This was great.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I'm gonna. Yeah. Refrain from making any more. Not even just to circle back really quickly to moral, Moral clarity. Christians have moral clarity.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, that's true.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And like Charlie Someone like Charlie Kirk had moral clarity because he had a, you know, coherent worldview based in Christianity.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

That's why I would say that we need to have a realm of neutrality.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, I.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Because everybody. Ta co is operating from moral clarity, too. We have to.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Is he Christian?

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

No.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, then where. Where does he get. But that's not. It's not just about, like, a random person's vision based on their experience. It's based on, like, a moral law.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

The word.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That is, like, biblical. Yeah, the word brother.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, when people. People try to.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Like.

[Anna Khachiyan]

In the beginning was the word.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Well, when people are like, oh, like when they come down on Charlie Kirk and he was. And they're like, oh, he's anti this and anti that, and it's like, well, he's operating within a co. Consistent, coherent Christian framework.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Well, not the Christian framework.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

My mom, judging by his own comments, like, they're like, plenty of receipts where he's, like, on podcasts and doing interviews, and he's like, yeah, like, I don't have a. The problem with, like, gay people or, like, Muslim people specifically as individuals. I just don't think that this is what America stands for. He's making, like, a broader case. It's, like, thoroughly consistent and in line with what he believes.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Well, and the problem with liberalism, as your book kind of describes, is that it is. It's incoherent. It claims that, like, reclaiming a moral high ground that's not based on anything except for liberalism is going to.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

It's based on certain principles, but that can be subverted by the. The very fact of his tolerance. Right. But I would say that, you know, someone like Charlie Kirk, he has a vision of Christianity that is not everybody's vision of Christianity. There are devout Christians who would say they don't recognize their Christianity or their faith in the way that he was going about his faith. And so I think that there's always. There's a. There's a danger in saying that one person represents the Christian view or something like that.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I mean, there's a lot of things, even theologically, I would disagree with Charlie Kirk about, but I'm just talking about, like, the internal coherence of his world, the clarity of.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, I mean, I really don't know. I never really thought about him very much. He was somebody that was like a Twitter figure to me before he died. And I don't think that anybody who talks about ideas publicly and saw that could feel anything but horror that you could. It was horrific. It's insane.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Yeah.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

But that's what freaks me out when like these political and media figures try to qualify it and they're like, yeah, what happened to him is like. But what.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

No. And. And if that happened to Mehdi Hassan, I wouldn't qualify it. It's like there's no qualification.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

For that.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's not necessary.

[Anna Khachiyan]

And that's a kind of moral clarity. We can all agree.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Yes. So true. Queen.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Yeah, There we go.

[Anna Khachiyan]

I didn't mean to.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

Nobody. Nobody should. No, no.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

I actually just.

[Anna Khachiyan]

We've done a three hour.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

Morally clarify or qualify.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

You should not morally qualify that their assassination. Well, night scares for the children.

[Anna Khachiyan]

That's right. Thank you, Thomas. Thank you, Thomas, for this wonderful three hour long.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

We did three hours wait.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

What?

[Anna Khachiyan]

That's so crazy.

[Dasha Nekrasova]

It's so fun.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams]

I can talk to y'. All. Y' all are amazing. I. I'm a huge fan. Thank you for having me back.

[Anna Khachiyan]

Likewise. Thank you for coming on the show. We will see you. Huh.