Jesse Singal (3:31)

Thank you for having me on Yasha.

Yasha Munk (3:33)

I feel like you and I are part of small and rapidly diminishing band of people who were very concerned about some of the identitarian accesses on the left, but are also very outspoken about some of our concerns about the way in which the Trump administration is attacking the institutions of American democracy and imposing its own culture war on the US how do you feel about the kind of intellectual landscape at the moment? How optimistic or pessimistic are you that there's still a space of people who can walk and chew gum at the same time? And how do you think this debate is going to play out?

Jesse Singal (4:10)

I mean, I'm fairly optimistic. Just because so many people are criticizing Trump. I mean, I actually think it was the tariffs of all things that really, like there's a subset of people who are maybe open to Trump and realize that there's just no one at the wheel. I've been disappointed in the way some sort of anti woke, anti woke publications and people have not responded, responded to this. And I think this gets tricky because as writers or in your case, as a public intellectual, I'm not sure, like there's some obligation to respond to every new outrage in the moment. That's sort of this, this Twitter idea that like, you know, five minutes after a mass shooting, why haven't you tweeted about this? Why haven't you tweeted about this? But the stuff that's happened early in the Trump administration, particularly the small matter of sending people to a Salvadoran torture prison with no due process in many cases, according to Cato, people who have done nothing wrong but seek asylum through legal means, it's absolutely grotesque. And I think if you're the sort of person who has written or thought about smaller scale cancellations, you had a classic story about a guy losing his job because someone thought he was doing this? I've written about some unfair Campus Crusades. Katie and I, on our podcast, we talked about, talked about friends of ours getting fired from media. Those stories are worth doing. I think the sort of epistemic and moral health of liberal institutions is very important and maybe their degradation contributed in some way to this moment. But excuse me, it can't possibly be the case that you care about what was your, was your an electrician or a plumber? I forget something like that.

Yasha Munk (5:54)

Electrician. Yeah.

Jesse Singal (5:56)

It can't possibly be the case that you care about an electrician getting fired under unfair circumstances. But you don't care about people getting shipped to a Salvadorian, Salvadoran torture prison under unfair circumstances. And especially from a free speech perspective. Now there definitely seems to have been something going on where, I mean, the administration at this point in terms of foreign students, I guess, is just sort of targeting everyone. I don't quite understand, but for a while it was absolutely the case that especially Rumesia Ozturk, I think is her name. The Tuft student just published.

Yasha Munk (6:30)

Co published, I think with several co authors. An op ed in the Tuft student newspaper. I have to admit I didn't read it. I'm sure there may be things in the.

Jesse Singal (6:39)

I read it sounded pretty anodyne way. Yeah, it's anodyne. And yeah, she's grabbed off the streets of Somerville and shipped off to Louisiana and she's free, thank God. But there's very clearly an attempt to target pro Palestinian or anti Israel activism. This was even before this interesting story came out of the New York Times about Project Esther or whatever it's called, Project 2025. Then there's this Esther Project. You can't claim to care about free speech and then not talk about a threat of this magnitude. And I do think some people are, technically speaking, someone here on a student visa or a green card doesn't technically have the exact same rights as an American citizen. But now that's slicing the salami too thin. This is clearly an attack on their free speech rights and it's horrific. So, yeah, look, the free press, which I think you and I both know people there and have a good relationship with, I have criticized them for not coming out swinging a bit more. They have done some good reporting on some of the ramifications of all this. But I think there's a big day and other people in that general space. It's tricky because if you're an anti woke figure or an anti woke publication, you're going to pick up some subset of folks who are either Trump supporters or burn it all down types or both. And I think you and I are fundamentally institutionalists. We don't want to burn it all down because we think however flawed institutions are, whatever rises out of the ashes will be worse. So.

Yasha Munk (8:16)

And that's the fundamental dividing line about universities at the moment. Right? I mean, I'm well aware of the serious shortcomings and failings of American universities. I think there's a real reason why they went from having the support of a majority of the U.S. population to only about a third of U.S. population. And I think professors and university presidents should spend more time looking themselves in the mirror and reflecting seriously about how they can regain their trust. But the project for any administration that wants to remedy those failings needs to be to reform them and strengthen them. And clearly what the Trump administration has done is to decide in a partisan calculation that is rational, even if it's not moral, that these places are always going to be somewhat hostile to them and they would rather weaken them by all means possible than try to reform them. And as you're saying, I'm not a burn it all down kind of a guy. And I think that is very bad for the people doing good work in those institutions, and it's very bad for the interests of the United States in the long run, not to speak of the interests of people who have cancer around the world who rely on scientific progress in various ways. Now, to speak to the space, I feel a little bit torn for two reasons. The first is that I certainly think that there's a bunch of anti woke figures whose identity, first and foremost, was always to be anti woke figures who have been shamefully silent on Trump or just outright endorsed him and outright called for his election and so on. I never thought of myself as part of that crowd. I mean, my first identity, the thing that I first became known for, was warning about the threat that populists, not only on the right, but predominantly on the right, pose to liberal democracy. Right. And one of the reasons why I was so exercised by the exorcists on the left was always that I actually thought that that helps reinforce, at least in electoral politics, those right wing forces rather than to weaken them. And I have to say that the people who I was closest to for the last years, the people who I felt most kinship with intellectually, have actually been very good. Oh, me too. Sort of. One response to this is to say, look, yes, the Dave Rubins of the world have completely gone over to Trump, but I don't even know him. I'm barely sure that I'm pronouncing his name correctly. Those are not the people who I was ever thinking of myself in the same category with, but a lot of the thoughtful center left and some center right thinkers who are concerned about these identitarian things, but also concerned about Trump in his first term, et cetera, I think have actually been very consistent. That's the same for institutions. Fire is an institution that every day on Blue sky or Twitter, somebody's going, why haven't you spoken out about X? And you look at their Twitter account or you look at the website and they already have spoken out about X because they've actually been very consistent.

Jesse Singal (11:01)

That's the thing. There's this view among. I don't even know what to call it, like sort of the blue sky blob that like folks like Matt Iglesias and you. I'm not, I'm not trying to be modest, but I'm not as big a name. But yeah, they lumped me in with that too. That we're all like secretly reactionary or fascist. And they've been, they've been saying that forever. But yeah, I think the folks I respect and, or in New York, like literally know in real life, folks like you, Mike Pesca, you know, Katie Herzog. Yeah, I think we've had the appropriate response. I think people remain very mad that maybe at a time of pushback to Trump 2016 to 2020 and real liberal cultural hegemony. Hegemony. I can't even pronounce the word. Or not even liberal. It wasn't liberal. That was the whole point. It was. I don't want to use the term wokeness because people jumped down my throat for that. But we were pushing back against some stuff that seemed really bad at the moment when it was bad. And some people haven't really forgiven us for that. And there's been a recent spate of five year retrospectives about the Harper's Letter, which to this day the response to that sort of baffles me, but I think there's like some. I don't know, it's weird. There's like a group of folks who are very. Remain very fixated on the center left as the root of all problems, which is crazy in 2025.

Yasha Munk (12:26)

And the Harper's Letter is a great example. I mean, that's over 200 signatories. There was an attempt to imply that most of them haven't spoken out about Trump. I think it's very hard to find anybody on that list who's not clearly opposed to Trump. I'm sure among 200 people, there must be two or three exceptions in a group of 200.

Jesse Singal (12:41)

Well, in one spreadsheet a lefty publication made, they put on Martin Amos. The problem there is that he died in 2023. So he has not spoken out against

Yasha Munk (12:50)

the deportation of people in 2025. How dare he? One other problem I have as somebody who makes editorial decisions in my own writing and in the podcast, is how to think about adding something to the discourse so I could write a denunciation of whatever the Trump administration did Yesterday, every day of the four years that Trump is in office. And by and large, they have something to say. And by and large, it would be fair to, you know, I mean, so far at least, they have done something pretty outrageous practically every day of the administration. Perhaps there's some Sunday where they got lazy and didn't do anything. But, you know, the problem is that a thousand other people are doing that as well. And so, you know, I. I'm not a primary news source, right? I don't think people go to this podcast or go to my writing to understand what happened Yesterday in Washington, D.C. i hardly recommend a subscription to the New York Times or for that matter, the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post in order to do that. Or you can look at BBC News or whatever. That is not my role in the discourse. My role is to add something to the conversation, to add a level of analysis, to speak to a subject that may be undercovered, to look out for some of the ideological blind spots within partisan bubbles. And so I find it hard to maneuver between those two things. And I basically try to write sort of an article that expresses my concern about what's going on with Trump administration. Every third article I write, and then try and do two articles that might be about just an intellectual subject that easily gets lost. As we're recording this, I just published yesterday an article about, I think the definition of extraversion is often misleading. And I propose a new way of thinking about extroversion. I think it's important to take that liberty to just talk about an interesting intellectual subject that's got nothing to do with anything. Then perhaps I'll do one article that tries to address this kind of ideological blind spot? But I find myself sort of torn each time. I'm like, do I want to write the article, which I did recently, about the attempt by the administration to go after international students at Harvard, which, having been an international student at Harvard, is also close to my heart. I don't think that article added that much to the discourse. I hope I put that as well as anybody else. I hope I made some interesting points in that article. But there was a huge outpouring of articles saying more or less the same thing. Steven Pinker had a very good article saying something similar in the New York Times. Or do I focus on something that people aren't as focused on, where perhaps I can add more knowledge, more perspective to my readers? But there's a danger of people thinking, well, why aren't you focusing on the most important thing? Why aren't you Denouncing enough. And so I try to sort of balance over time, but it's hard. How are you thinking about that in terms of what you're covering on your podcast and in your writing?

Jesse Singal (15:46)

Yeah, I mean, it's tricky. I think you and I both have the benefits of being known for other stuff. I mean, you're known for a lot of stuff, but populism in general. So that offers you opportunities to write about this through sort of like a more informed academic lens rather than being mad all the time. In my case, I don't know. I mean, I'm working on a book about the youth gender medicine debate. A fair amount of my newsletter ends up being about that. I think there's still room to criticize stuff on the left. But, yeah, once in a while, when I feel like it, I will chime in about Donald Trump. I think in my case, the people who pay for my newsletter are, the vast majority of them are anti Trump, but they're not paying me to hear another anti Trump opinion. And I agree with you. The most important stuff going on here is the tireless work of those much reviled mainstream outlets that at the moment, who else is going to produce news and break news about the Trump administration than the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Atlantic, whatever their flaws? So, yeah, I don't think. Well, the other thing is, like, it's not you and I and any other writer has one, but one life to live. And if I only focused on Trump, I would go crazy. It's just this constant source of outrage and moral grotesquery. But you just kind of like one example on the podcast, we talked about his meme coin scam, or the meme coin scams in general. That's an area where our podcast, which focuses on online culture, collides with Trump stuff. So, yeah, I think you need to pick your spots. I think some people have built careers out of being mad at Republicans and mad at conservatives, and they're doing their thing and some of them are making a good living off it. That's just not. That's just not what we do. And I think I have firm incentives in place keeping me from doing that.

Yasha Munk (17:37)

So you were saying earlier that you try to avoid the term woke. I mostly try to avoid the term as well, though it is the most economical way of communicating what we mean by identitarian politics on the left. Now, James Lindsay, who's gone through an interesting journey over the last years into various parts of a political spectrum, but has recently, in a slightly surprising and brave way, Pushed back against the most destructive and sometimes just the most outright racist and antisemitic corners of online right. He's coined this term of the woke. Right. And so the implication of this is that there's a kind of parallel both to the ideology and perhaps to some of the mechanisms of ideological enforcement that were strong on the woke left that has now consumed much of the right of the American political spectrum. What do you think about the term? I'm a little torn on it for reasons I might formulate in a minute. But how sort of do you think that's a fruitful term? What do you think that term helps to reveal? Are there any limitations to the term?

Jesse Singal (18:44)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's useful to point out that ideologues of all stripes engage in the same tactics and have a lot of the same cognitive tendencies. There's that famous line about how Nazi officers and Soviet officers ended up often getting along and they found out they weren't that different. That's an extreme example, but I guess woke, right is a useful shorthand way to talk about it. I've also. It's tricky to describe the MAGA movement because it's just this weird and I think, I don't know how historically unusual it is, but it's just resentment. There's no there there. And I found it's very useful to sort of track responses to Tariffs go up, that's great. Tariffs go down, that's great art of the deal, all that. And this is also a community that like the far left has like a set of sacred beliefs. So I think like this sort of John Haitian view of sacred beliefs is very useful. So, you know, wander into MAGA social setting and try to explain that no, there isn't some insane immigrant murder crime wave in the United States. And actually that's overstated whatever you think about the migration problems under Biden. So I'm not sure woke right is as useful as just sort of like these pre existing frameworks we have. But I do think there's something to it in the sense that if you violate one of their sacred cows, they will, they will freak out at you. But I also think that the problem is you and I, when we interact with MAGA people, it's mostly on X and that's not who matters. That's like, that's not who tipped. The people who tipped the election were as always, probably lower propensity, lower information voters out there in the parts of the country we don't see much. And yeah, I don't know what they're thinking. I think some of them are going to turn on Trump. But, yeah, I'm not providing a coherent answer here.

Yasha Munk (20:45)

Yeah, I think I have a similar instinct, actually. So let's separate out a few different things. I think there's sort of two similarities between the woke left and the woke right, and one dissimilarity. And I think the woke right is kind of a good shorthand to call attention to the similarities, but I think the similarities are actually shared with a broader family of political movements, making the term a little bit less useful than it seems. So let's start with the similarities. I mean, one is just that you brought up a kind of imperative of loyalty, right? Like, if you are part of the right in good standing, you gotta like Trump, and the moment you criticize Trump, you're expelled. Now, the left is often less good at loyalty, but there's an element of that as well. Right. I'm listening to the Jake Tappan Thompson book about Biden recently. You know, anybody who suggested in 2023 or 2024 that perhaps Biden is not quite up to the job got a loyalty response from a lot of mainstream Democrats who I don't think were woke. That's more like a partisan loyalty instinct that is particularly bad around Trump because there's a particular personality culture on Trump.

Jesse Singal (21:57)

But in, you know, in the ideological loyalty of, like, things like, you have to say, black lives matter, which, of course, black lives matter. But it got, even in mainstream lefty places, pretty culty, and folks got elevated as thought leaders who didn't have much to say or who weren't particularly rigorous. And that's that same sort of conformity and, say, the line bar, like that kind of thing, I think definitely happened in mainstream Democratic spaces. And on the right right now, it's all just centered on one guy. There's no. The only, like, ideological prerequisite is a belief in Trump. There's really nothing else there except maybe, like, a dislike of most immigrants. Except if Trump changed his tune on this tomorrow, which he won't, I really think they would just follow him and they would say, now we like migrants. So it's a strange movement.

Yasha Munk (22:52)

And so that's a similarity, but it's a similarity that is shared with many highly mobilized political movements in polarized societies. I mean, if you criticized AMLO in Mexico, you would get the same kind of response. If you criticized Modi in India, especially if you were somebody who was formerly a supporter of his, you would definitely get the same response. And you can sort of keep giving other examples like that. Right. So there is a similarity here between the work left and the woke right that is kind of a subgroup of a much broader thing. I think the same is true about some of those constellation mechanisms. Right. So you know something that I've argued all along about, I think the deeply illiberal culture of how to deal with minor disagreements on the left is that not the punishments, but the mechanisms are reminiscent to other moments of moral panic or other moments of ideological enforcement in human history. The extreme examples of that are the witch burnings in Salem, Massachusetts is the cultural revolution. There's milder examples of that where people also get kicked out of polite society in various ways, but without the gruesome consequences that it had in Massachusetts in the 17th century or in mainland China in the 1960s. And again, I think it's worth pointing out, I think the term has a genuine usefulness in saying, you guys are hypocrites, you hated this stuff on the left, or you said you hated the stuff on the left. And now if you disagree with Trump in any kind of way, or if you disagree with whatever his policy position, position happens to be today, or if you try and police the right so that the people who are making the most racist or the most anti semitic expressions are kind of isolated and you're saying, hang on a second, these are not part of our political movement, then actually you're not pure, you're not a member of our movement, and we're going to expel you and say that you're a horrible person. That's a horrible, horrible mechanism. But I think is similar to some of the stuff that happened on the left over the last years. But again, there's nothing specific to wokeness in that. It's just a subcategory of a broader set of human instincts we always have to guard against. I mean, the third point is that to me, the reason why I'm slightly skeptical of the concept of a woke right is that I think the woke left, not my favorite term for it, I prefer the identity synthesis was an ideological movement. I think it did have a set of actual ideas that, that stood at the core of it. And I think you can't understand the movement unless you understand the intellectual history of it and the actual ideas, et cetera. And I don't think that there's any real similarity between the ideology of a woke left and the ideology of a woke right.

Jesse Singal (25:28)

Well, I guess I'm not entirely sure what the ideology of this so called woke left was. I mean, it was broadly anti racist, anti bad things, pro good things. Sometimes some members of it would say abolish or defund the police, but then sometimes other members would say, no, no, no, we don't meet anything like that. So I'm not really sure exactly what the ideological project was, other than this weird grab bag of sort of bougie progressive causes. I mean, do you think there was more to it than that? I do think it was more ideologically coherent than Trumpism.

Yasha Munk (26:04)

Right. Look, no political movement has a set of very unanimously agreed political positions. And every political movement has some ideological range, even Marxist movements, which were very heavily coordinated in part with things like the Socialist International, and in part through very heavy repression, both within Marxist movements where there weren't in government, and of course, particularly in countries where there weren't government had real range. Right. There's a famous debate between Kalkowski and George Lukac about the right whether or not reformist social democracy was acceptable. You had to have a revolutionary strategy and so on. And obviously that's true as well. I think that 2 of the people we both like to criticize, and perhaps a little bit more, Robin Diangelo and Ibram X Kendi, probably have some significant differences in their views to each other. And certainly both of them are a lot less sophisticated than the founders of the movement, like Derek Bell and Kimberly Crenshaw and others. Now, I do believe that there are some fundamental commitments that broadly apply to most people, at least, who are in that tradition. And the first is that the primary prism, the primary way to understand the world is to look at it through identity categories like race, gender and sexual orientation. The second is a deep rejection of universal political principles. They are really founded in the rejection of movements like the civil rights movement that said, we've been excluded from participation in the facially neutral principles of the American Constitution. The founders said all men are created equal. That's certainly not what the black experience in America has been like. And the solution is to live up to these principles. And I think the core of WOKE ideologies is to say, no, the solution is not to live up to those principles. It's actually to create a society where how we treat each other, both in our private lives and even how the state treats us or how various institutions treat us should explicitly depend on the kind of identity group into which we're born.

Jesse Singal (28:16)

Yeah, well, I think this was part of the problem, was people said, don't use wokeness. What is wokeness? But if you were in progressive communities from. I don't know, 2015 on it was clear this set of rules and norms involving identity had emerged. And a lot of it really was whoever is more oppressed wins. And it sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but that really was how it worked. And it was always such a dead end because it's so complicated. First of all, the more oppressed person might just be wrong on the merits. Second of all, it's hard to figure out who's more oppressed. You need some sort of complicated intersectional matrix. But I think there was real when folks like us and look, there was plenty I was wrong about back then, but I think some of us identified that and wrote about it. Actually, Matt Brunig and Freddy DeBoer were two lefty thinkers who wrote about that very early on. They were just sort of ignored and we were ignored. And I think there's less of it today. And I think everyone's quietly embarrassed by it, but won't admit how bad it got and how off putting it was. And I don't think you can necessarily draw a straight line from that to someone like Trump. I do think anyone, and this is still true in sort of hard and lefty online spaces, anyone who encounters this who is just normal, the average American will find it so off putting this sort of oppression Olympics and the callousness with which people act. And look, the MAGA right is quite callous in different and much more consequential ways now. But yeah, we just, we were not able to have a left that was welcoming and open minded and could tolerate dissent and I think it just really corroded and at for time was really bad. I mean, do you think that now that there is the unifying force of Trump 2.0, do you think there's going to be an actual reckoning, at least within the Democratic Party? Because like one example is like Ezra. Ezra, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson like their book Abundance is not about wokeness per se, but it is about having a positive vision and not just being basically against anything potentially productive.

Yasha Munk (30:29)

And the book has quickly been condemned by huge numbers of progressives. I mean it sort of polarized what before that was a somewhat technocratic debate into these very clear camps within the Democratic Party. And I broadly agree with Ezra Klan and Derek Thompson on these issues. But then there's a lot of people in the broader Democratic coalition who have positioned themselves very strongly against it. Two observations. The first is that I share your sense that there hasn't been intellectual reckoning and I don't think there's been a political reckoning with those years, I rode the identity trap in part because I thought that this would be a serious intellectual debate for 20, 25 years. And I've sort of been struck that on many of the issues that were at the forefront of the debate five years ago, there's now this kind of weird silence. It's like, oh, nobody really ever thought that, and why would you really think that? And it's sort of just been shunted off without actually reckoning with those positions. Now, I think the problem is that's true on a couple of particularly toxic political positions, like the idea of defunding the police. But I think that the basic ideological infrastructure, the basic assumptions about how the world works, actually remain roughly the same as they were before. And so I think on the next political debate, we're quickly going to end back up in really unpopular positions, because both the basic structure of how a Democratic Party is organized, with huge influence of activist groups claiming to speak for underrepresented demographic blocks, but actually run and funded by very affluent people with very advanced degrees, I think leads the party in the wrong direction. And because they haven't actually reckoned more deeply with some of the ideological roots of how they ended up in those very unpopular political places. The second thing I'll say is that I worry that Trump being in office and Trump doing some pretty extreme things makes it much harder to have his reckoning. I think there was a moment in the immediate aftermath of the electoral defeat of Kamala Harris where it felt like we were gonna have that reckoning, and it felt like there was gonna be a course correction. But I think as soon as Trump took office and started doing pretty extreme things, there's the sense of, no, the only thing that certainly for a Democratic elected, you should be doing is not picking internal fights, is not trying to move where the party is, is not trying to actually revise its message so that it can reach new voters in 2028. It is just saying Trump is bad in this way and that way. And what we're doing here is wrong. And what we're doing here is wrong. And then often defending pretty bad positions or associating themselves with quite unpopular people. I think in a lot of this, we need some subtlety. We need to defend Harvard against the attacks of the institution. Institution, as I've done in my writing, and also recognize that there's some genuine problems at Harvard that need fixing. Right. We need to defend students who are being deported without any due process in some cases, for reasons that seem clearly spurious. And we also need to be able to say that some of the pro Palestinian protests, whatever the justice or the underlying cause, have broken university rules and likely broken laws, used coercion in order to intimidate members of a university community who don't agree with their point of view in ways that are quite worrying. And I think that level of subtlety is just very, very hard to sustain in the face of the attack from Trump. And so I worry that certainly in terms of what MSNBC sounds like today, but probably in terms of what a lot of CNN sounds like today, and it's a little early to predict, probably in terms of what the Democratic nominee is going to sound like in 2028, we're not really going to have distance ourselves from a lot of most unpopular positions. And perhaps on like, we can talk about that stuff in a bit, perhaps on participation of people who've undergone male puberty in female sports, perhaps not even sure about that, but not sort of one level further down.

Jesse Singal (34:48)

Yeah, I mean, look, there's all the dynamics of how the primary system works and you could end up with a not great candidate. I think I'm more optimistic just because there are so many people. Well, there's two things. So there's the groups, right? There's the activist groups who have sort of like done a little bit of soft extortion over the years. Like, I forget what, I think this came from an Ezra Klein column, but it's like, you know, it would be a shame if you disagreed with our group and we had to come out and call you racist. I think mainstream democratic types in D.C. are just not going to abide by that anymore. And I think those accusations have lost their bite. I also think there's a lot of people who really want, they want money and power. I'm making sort of a market based argument here, but there's a lot riding on Democrats ability to have power. A lot of people really want that to happen. And I think they recognize that what has been going on is not working. I guess what worries me the most is, you know, people saying, how could you say the Harris campaign was too far to the left? She was so, you know, moderate and centrist, which I find deranged because video exists. Like we know what she said in 2019 and 2020. So I just, I hope they can find someone who has just had like a long, steady career of being moderate. And being moderate doesn't mean you can't talk about economic unfairness or you can't talk about important issues like housing, but just, you know, Staking out these positions that are 80, 20 positions where you're on the 20 side. I hope Democrats start to see that as like, if you've done that, you're not a good candidate for national office. Like, and I'm worried that there's, there's, you know, there's the top down thing versus the grassroots and who the like, maybe even the grassroots will continue to think AOC is like a really promising presidential candidate and that's where we'll be at. I just. I hope not.

Yasha Munk (36:43)

You know, it's interesting. I actually think it's less important where you were in the past. I mean, ideally, you're not deeply defined and marked by very unpopular positions you've taken in the past. But I think it's more about being willing to take on the parts of a party that are wedded to very, very unpopular positions. I don't think the problem with Kamala Harris was that she said really unpopular things in 2019 and 2020.

Jesse Singal (37:08)

Oh, that wasn't the only problem, to be sure.

Yasha Munk (37:11)

Right. I think a lot of the problem was that she wasn't willing to proactively distance herself from them in 2024.

Jesse Singal (37:20)

The malpractice of not being able to say what you would do differently and not throwing Joe Biden under the bus, which was her only path forward, will be, I think, written about for just as a massive world historical. I mean, it was horrible.

Yasha Munk (37:33)

That's absolutely true in relation to an incumbent, very unpopular president at the time. But I even mean on cultural issues. Right. It's just not enough to say, well, in 2019 and 2020, I was speaking in ways that were read as very unpatriotic and so on, but now I'm like, saying that I'm patriotic. I think you have to actually be willing to say, hey, I was wrong about these things and the people in the party who are taking these positions are wrong. And I think there's so much concern about coalition management from the Democratic Party, which is understandable. It's partially rooted in the American political system where you just have to wield these very broad coalitions. But I think what people are thinking is, look, she seems afraid to go on Joe Rogan because her junior staffers are going to criticize her. Right. She seems afraid to criticize those positions that she's not taking proactively, but she's also not telling us explicitly, but she's not going to take them. So she just seems to be beholden to those parts of the party. So how can I trust her when she's in office to look out for the interest and to reflect the views of ordinary Americans rather than still being hostage to those things. And so I think the most important thing for Democratic candidate in 2028 is going to be, hey, I have values that are in tune with those of the majority of the population. Perhaps in some things I have a slightly different view and I'm going to be honest and outspoken about that, but I'm actually going to be saying what I think. And part of that is that I'm going to be saying some stuff that's going to piss off the left of my party, and I'm not afraid of that. And I think that both that level of authenticity and that level of courage is important. One way to think about this is a costly signal. How can I trust a politician to actually stand up for common sense? Because they're willing to take some incoming in order to do that. And I think the problem is that Harris campaign never wanted to send any costly signs signals. And so people didn't trust her on that.

Jesse Singal (39:21)

Yeah, she was sort of caught in this place where she had said certain things in the past and they were just lingering there, and if she couldn't address them head on, she was stuck. And I sort of think, I don't know, I mean, with someone like aoc, given who her base is, we're looking ahead. It's probably going to be someone we're not even thinking about today. But like, I'm having trouble imagining AOC giving this speech or speeches where she says, look, I got too far out over my skis on these issues because she would just deal with. There's already people on the left who think AOC is not far enough to the left. Like, she's regularly criticized in sort of socialist spaces, I think someone like her would be in a very difficult position to tack back.

Yasha Munk (40:01)

No, I agree. I think. I'm really not a fan of aoc, and I think it's a sign of poverty of the Democratic Party's bench that on some betting markets she's currently the favorite for the nomination. And there's even a lot of moderates saying, oh, perhaps she wouldn't be so bad. I do think that if she. I don't think she's likely to do that. I don't think that's where her ideology is at and that's her character. But I think if she was willing to do that, if she was willing to say, hey, you know what, I was wrong about a bunch of this stuff, and I've always been authentic. I'm going to speak to you honestly about how I was wrong about this, just as I was advocating those positions when I was unpopular and much of a population. I think that actually could be an interesting political positioning. I don't think that she's likely to I want to touch on two things that you've written about a lot and you are writing about a lot. Let's start with social science. You wrote a book a number of years ago about the replication crisis in social science. Both for people who haven't heard that conversation, what is the nature of that crisis and how serious is it? And then for people who did listen to that conversation, who are curious, what's the update on that? Do you feel like 10ish years after we first really started to grapple with this academia is doing better at avoiding those pitfalls? Or do you think that a lot of social science is still quite compromised by this challenge?

Jesse Singal (41:27)

Yeah, I mean the argument was simply that a lot of published scientific findings because of the corner cutting researchers do, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, and because of these certain basic facts about statistics that were underappreciated that make it easy to confuse noise for signal. A lot of social science findings and some very popular ideas that found their way to TED talks turned out to be maybe not true. And then when other researchers or the same researchers would try to replicate the original findings, they failed to do so. That's the replication crisis. Do I think things have improved overall? No. I mean there's still a lot of good discourse about it. There's centers dedicated to replication, so maybe mild improvement. Part of the problem is that since then my next sort of larger project has been this book on youth gender medicine where it's a mix of medical research and psychology research that underpins the practice of giving kids puberty blockers and hormones and sometimes so called top surgery. And the stuff I've found there, which is all these are recent papers published mostly since 2020. It's just awful. There's a lack of quality control at top journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, including the Journal of the American Medical association journals, which is just astonishing. I try to be the hedgy, reasonable, Yasha esque guy. So when I say astonishing, what I mean is that you read these papers and you don't. I'm not an expert, I'm not a methods guy. I just had a little bit of training in this in grad school and I know the right questions to ask. These are like the sorts of errors and exaggerations you would be taught about in your first three months of a grad school methods course or maybe an undergrad's methods course. It's just really, really serious exaggeration of the available evidence.

Yasha Munk (43:24)

So give us some examples of that. What is a particularly striking and influential paper that had some of those methodological flaws?

Jesse Singal (43:30)

Sure, there was a New England Journal of Medicine paper, the lead author, Chen, I wrote a couple pieces about this. And you had basically they pre registered it. And I might not have the numbers exactly right off the top of my head, but they pre registered. They said they're going to look at these eight variables and they predict that when kids go on hormones, these eight variables are going to improve. Now first of all, they didn't. These were kids at gender clinics, many of whom were also getting psychotherapy or pharmaceuticals if they had anxiety, depression, the other symptoms often associated with gender dysphoria. So right off the bat, if you don't control for those other factors, if you just take someone at times t equals 0 times 0, time 1 times 2 times 3 and you trace their trajectory and they improve or they get worse for that matter, you don't know what's causing it. You can't use causal language. And yet first they used causal language. They said the hormones helped. Meanwhile, they preregistered eight variables. Anxiety, depression, trauma, body image, suicidality, six of the eight variables, if I'm remembering correctly, something on that order just disappeared between the pre registration and the paper in the paper.

Yasha Munk (44:44)

So what that means is that they said we're going to look at these eight variables and then the idea of preregistration is precisely to make it possible for people to check that you're not setting up the model and the research design in order to make it seem more significant than it is. Adding random variables that somehow get you to a significant result or dropping things that look like they don't really fit in with the rest of your analysis. So the point of a prejudiced study is to say, look, we're not going to play around to make it look like a significant finding after the fact. We're telling you before we have the numbers, before we have the data, which eight factors we're going to look at. And then the published results, they say, hey, these two factors improve. But they don't talk about the six that were in the pre registration, which presumably one can only guess didn't improve, otherwise they would have also been included in those published results. Is my understanding right?

Jesse Singal (45:40)

Yes, they also changed their hypothesis, which is harking hypothesizing after the results are known. So that way you can search through the data. Any result you find that moves in the right direction, you can say that was our hypothesis all along, which is not an honest way of doing science. So between this other issues, including the fact that some of the improvements were so small we don't know if they were clinically significant. If you have show notes, I can send you what I wrote about this. It's not no big deal, but it's just this is not some podunk journal. This is the New England Journal of Medicine. And these are errors that jumped out to someone like me, who again is not an expert. So in terms of my overall view of the state of science and the replication crisis, I'm biased by the fact that I've been poking around in an area that has profound problems and I think fairly high stakes. I mean it's not 20 million kids who are going on these treatments, but they're serious treatments and anyone considering these treatments deserves good data. So I've been quite disturbed by that and also disturbed by the fact that the researchers. Look, I think at this point the researchers know who I am and know that I'm writing a book that might be somewhat skeptical of these treatments. But there's something very broken in public intellectual life where you can publish stuff that's this shoddy seeming and then just not answer any follow up questions about it. But at root the problems with the gatekeepers, the problem is with the New England Journal of Medicine for not, for example, they wrote in the paper we followed our pre registered study plan, which is just not true. And the New England Journal of Medicine let them write that, they let them make these causal claims that are completely not warranted. And if the editors at the New England Journal of Medicine don't take their job seriously, where does that leave us?

Yasha Munk (47:25)

The other instance I was struck by, and I may be misremembering some of the details here, is that there was study which had significant taxpayer funding to look at the very important question of suicide risks among gender dysphoric people. And I believe that it tried to look at whether that suicide risk would decrease once they were getting cross hormone treatments or perhaps even gender reassignment surgeries. And as I recall, the principal author of that study found that it didn't lead to the improvements that she had hoped for and then sat on the study and didn't publish it for many years. And I think even publicly acknowledged that she didn't publish the study in part because she was worried that it would influence legislation in this issue in a way that runs counter to her views of what would be preferable.

Jesse Singal (48:23)

Yeah. So a few of those details are slightly off, but it's actually the same team as the one I just described, this federally funded team that published the New England Journal of Medicine study. The woman in question is Dr. Joanna Olson Kennedy. The puberty blocker study was sort of the study I just described in New England Journal of Medicine was on hormones. This was the puberty blocker sort of equivalent study. And yes, she told Azine Ghreshi of the New York Times, we just didn't publish it because we didn't, you know, we were worried the results would be weaponized. I should say this same woman who is one of the leading advocates for these treatments. Yeah. As far as the broader replication crisis, maybe there have been wonderful advances in some other areas of psychology, although I'm skeptical. But from what I'm seeing, these are still major problems. There was also a book called Doctored put out by Charles Piller that's more about medical issues. But there was a huge scandal in the world of Alzheimer's research. This involving outright fraud rather than the sorts of corner cutting I'm talking about. So maybe to tie things together a little bit, I think this all the crisis in expert authority is a disaster in its own right. Like we should be able to trust the studies that are published. But one of the knock on effects of it is it does fuel folks like Trump who take the burn it down approach. And we're now at a situation where RFK Jr. Who is himself a conspiracy theorist, is talking. I haven't looked in depth at these comments, but he's talked about the replication crisis and he's not entirely wrong. But we should not be in this situation. And part of the reason we're in this situation is because experts have screwed up so badly so often.

Yasha Munk (50:06)

Yeah, I mean, I guess there's two different questions here about the broader social science question. And I want to go back to some of the specific things regarding youth, gender. Metzen. The first is just that in any area of research that is highly ideologically polarized, I now have significant concerns about the trustworthiness of academic findings.

Jesse Singal (50:31)

As you should.

Yasha Munk (50:32)

Yeah, I think we see that in all kinds of tests. We see, for example, that on certain questions as to whether various groups, women, ethnic minorities, religious minorities are discriminated against or not, studies with a positive finding, which is to say that there is discrimination, tend to have a much lower number of observations and by some other metrics tend to be much less rigorous than studies that find that there's no discrimination. And so that just systematically biases our estimate of how much discrimination there really is in the world in one direction. So there is some genuine discrimination. But the state of the literature just seems through the selection effect of what makes it through the publication funnel to be pushed in one direction or another. The second kind of problem is just what is the science that ends up going through not for particular ideological reasons, but because it's kind of headline grabbing or something like that. So there's a famous case of Francesca Gino, professor at Harvard Business School, who ironically was working on academic and other, who ironically was working on various forms of dishonesty, who now appears to have been fired by Harvard Business School over outright data fraud in her publications. And so those studies attempting and making the republic sphere because they're headline grabbing in some way, that's not really ideological, but that just makes for interesting headlines and then can go through in those kind of ways. And the third, I guess is just the concern of careerism. The Alzheimer's study I think was neither particularly headline grabbing at the time, nor was it particularly ideological from what I understand. But it made somebody's career and gave them a lot of social status and standing in their field. But it led research on Alzheimer's down force rabbit hole for 20 something years because it posited a biological mechanism as the root of Alzheimer's, which now turns out to likely be mistaken. So that 20 years of research was based on trying to tackle and attack that biological mechanism has basically been in vain.

Jesse Singal (52:45)

Yeah, right. And it's important, and I mentioned this in my book, there are those sort of non political factors, to the extent anything can be non political, where a favored theory in an area of science that, that doesn't have a huge number of experts, if a favorite theory catches on early, it has sort of a first mover advantage, especially if it does grab headlines and then it becomes very hard to speak out against that theory. So yeah, we're talking about the amyloid plaque hypothesis of Alzheimer's. And I don't, I'm not privy to the full history of how it caught on. But yeah, for 20 years research into Alzheimer's has been dominated by the idea that these plaques you see in the brains of Alzheimer's sufferers cause the disease when it could just be that there's some third factor causing the symptoms and the plaques, the plaques themselves might not be causing the symptoms. But yeah, I mean, according to the biggest critics of that theory, there was Almost this cartel of researchers who kept out folks who disagreed with it. I saw something a little bit similar. It's not as high stakes, but in the implicit association test, which is this idea that you could give someone a quick computer test that reveals their level of implicit bias or sort of unconscious bias against different groups, there was just this flood of early studies, and then it was off to the races. And pretty soon you get the ABC News special, you have millions of people taking the test at home. And maybe that might be a similar situation of 20 years of effectively wasted research, because in 2025, you look for practical, rigorous applications of the IIT and they're just not there. So I think it would be a mistake to view this as strictly political. Although I do think a version of the IAT that found most people weren't racist would not have caught on, because that's sort of not what the liberals who dominate science and media want to hear. But I don't know. I mean, I think if all this work has taught me anything, it's just that science is really. It's like any other human enterprise. There's nothing unique about science or scientists. There's nothing incorruptible about it. Science done well can bring us knowledge and insights and advances. Nothing else can. But it's hard to do it well.

Yasha Munk (55:00)

And there's a way, actually, in which I think these two debates connect slightly. Surprisingly so. Our conversation earlier about whether or not the Democratic Party is going to be able to move away from some of the more identitarian political assumptions and this debate about how it is that even in a not particularly politicized field, like the roots of the biological causes of Alzheimer, you can end up getting this allegiance to one theory long beyond when it's justified. And I think that's explained by Thomas Kuhn and the structures of scientific revolution. And what he says is that when you look at Isaac Newton's explanation of mechanics and of gravity, which explains most things on Earth, but turns out not to explain some things, like the way in which Venus makes its way around the sun, how is it that scientists come to slowly accept Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which improves upon it, and his description of it is that you start getting these anomalies, you have a scientific model that seems to help to explain a bunch of things, but there's some ways in which it doesn't really predict what happens in the world in the right way. You try to measure how quickly an apple falls to the ground and Newton is going to give you the answer. You try to measure what happens in some of those things in outer space, and suddenly those mechanics don't work anymore. And he says that even as scientists become aware of these anomalies, they have real trouble letting go of the original framework, because they have no alternative. They have to have some way of thinking about the world. You have to have some way of trying to figure out how natural forces work. And if the best theory we have is Newton's theory, then we're going to hold onto it until there is a real alternative. And of course, even once there is an alternative, there's going to be a lot of people whose careers and lives depend on holding onto the old theory. All of their contributions have been in refining the old theory. And if they suddenly acknowledge that Battle theory doesn't work anymore, they're likely too old, no longer the mythological frontier, too invested in the reputation, the old idea that this is going to be left out in the cold. And so that's why, in order for us to give up on a paradigm that turns out to be erroneous in some important ways, we both need an alternative paradigm. And even once we have an alternative paradigm, that shift happens, as Kuhn famously said, one funeral at a time. And I'm connecting these two things in this perhaps slightly surprising way, because I think what the Democratic Party needs to actually speak a different language is an alternative paradigm. And why I think the Democratic Party has started to recognize some of the shortcomings of the current paradigm. I'm not sure that it's quite embraced this other paradigm. And then again, when it comes to science, I think some of the problem is that even once people start to recognize, oh, well, we're not really making a progress on using this seeming biological mechanism for Alzheimer's, et cetera, until we have an alternative hypothesis that's actually useful to us, we're going to end up sticking to it. And the person who made the career on writing that paper that posits that natural cause is going to try and defend that as much as they can, because they recognize, especially if they've committed some scientific fraud, that they got to hold onto it for the sake of their careers.

Jesse Singal (58:16)

Yeah. And I think there's something to the idea that there's this sort of new class of Alzheimer's drugs that were touted as, like, the first meaningful advances in a couple decades, and they just don't. They do very little, frankly, as far as anyone can tell. And in one case, there's a bit of a scandal over FDA approval where it's complicated I'm going to mangle the details, but I think that idea of clinging to a theory long after you should, especially in the absence of an alternative theory. And with something like Alzheimer's, it's particularly tricky because this isn't just like, okay, Newton's theory is basically okay, Einstein's does a little bit better at the margins. This is the feeling you have to almost start from scratch. Or maybe Alzheimer's isn't one disease, but is a bunch of interrelated conditions. Or maybe it's sad to think about. Maybe there's just never going to be a cure. Those are all possibilities. And you can think of all the sociological and psychological reasons people would rather CL cling to a flailing theory than to admit it's wrong. And it's just again, science is very human and we shouldn't forget that.

Yasha Munk (59:30)

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, I ask Jesse to explain the really intricate debate about youth gender medicine. Why is it that young patients have some reason to start taking puberty blockers earlier rather than later if they severely gender dysphoric? But why is it also that a lot of people are concerned about the lifelong side effects and the adverse medical consequences that that decision can have? How is this regulated in the United States? How many people are there who actually do undergo those treatments? And how does that compare to the decisions that countries like the United Kingdom have taken in the last years, putting more restrictions on these practices? To listen to that part of the conversation, please go to jasamunk.substack.com become a paying subscriber that'll help us continue to run this podcast and it'll give you ad free access to all full episodes of this podcast. That's yashamunk.substack.com thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to good fight part good fightpodmail.com that's good fightpodmail.com this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.