This article is part of a series of articles titled
Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing — and changing us.
Mehdi Hasan is confused about Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s strategery.
Hasan, who writes for the Intercept and hosts its weekly podcast Deconstructed, joined Kara Swisher on the latest episode of Recode Decode to talk about the state of media and politics, including Democratic leaders’ reluctance to impeach President Trump. Calling Pelosi’s public comments about impeachment to the press “ridiculous,” he said, “I think history will judge her very badly.
“One of the assertions Pelosi makes for herself I find most ridiculous is, ‘He’s goading us to impeach him. He wants to be impeached,’” Hasan said. “No. 1, that’s absurd. The most thin-skinned president in US history, who wants to be compared to Abraham Lincoln, does not want his legacy to be, he’s up there with Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and is one of only three men to be impeached.”
Another argument against impeachment is that the Republican-controlled Senate wouldn’t achieve the necessary two-thirds majority to convict Donald Trump of impeachable charges and remove him from office. Hasan said that’s probably correct, “because Republicans are all profiles in cowardice,” but wondered why that’s such a bad thing to have on the record when one-third of the Senators voting are about to be running for reelection in 2020.
“Why not put Susan Collins and co. on the defensive, Gardner on the defensive, and say, ‘Why did you vote against impeaching a man who clearly demonstrated he committed high crimes and misdemeanors?’” he asked. “Why is that bad for the Democrats? This weird kind of self-flagellating, self-loathing, ultra-cautious. Always, ‘What about Trump’s base?’ Fuck Trump’s base! What about your base?
”The Democrats bring a knife to a gunfight. The Republicans bring a rocket launcher.”
You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Overcast.
Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with Mehdi.
Kara Swisher: Hi. This Kara Swisher, editor-at-large of Recode. You may know me as someone who thinks SoulCycle instructors should just read mean tweets at you, but in my spare time, I talk tech and you’re listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today in the red chair is Mehdi Hasan, a columnist at the Intercept and the host of its weekly podcast Deconstructed. I’ve followed his work for a while. We’re going back to spend a part of this interview to talk about a podcast I did with Sam Harris back in May, which is how he got here. He said, “Why don’t you have another point of view?” And I said 100 percent, which I think will drive people crazy just the way they did the Sam Harris thing. Mehdi, welcome to Recode Decode.
Mehdi Hasan: Thanks for having me, Kara.
So I love your accent, by the way. I know people say that. I’m sure they say that to you. But in any case, I’m not trying to charm you.
I’m a Brit in the US.
I’m trying to make you comfortable before I attack.
I’m a British journalist in the US and I keep getting compared to Piers Morgan, which is always painful.
You’re nothing like Piers Morgan.
I’d rather get compared to others but anyway…
God, that asshole. Anyway, so let’s talk a little bit about your background. I’ll get into the Sam Harris thing later. But I did want to actually talk to you because you’re also someone who has very strong points of view on things. You’re a columnist. You do a podcast. You’re very active on Twitter. Talk a little bit about your background, how you got to where you are right now.
So I’ve been a journalist for nearly 20 years now. I was in the UK until 2015. I’m British. People still ask me, “What’s the accent?” I’m like, “British.” I moved here in 2015. I worked for a bunch of media organizations in the UK. I was in TV for a while, and then I made the transition into writing and running my mouth. I always joke I literally have no skills apart from running my mouth.
So it’s great being a journalist. I worked for the HuffPost in the UK. I worked for the New Statesman which is like the British version of the New Republic. I did political journalism there. And then just before the 2015 election, I moved out to the US for the 2015 UK election.
Why?
There’s a couple reasons. One was, I just enjoyed the challenge of doing something different. I was working … My wife’s American. That’s the other part of the equation, and you know what they say: Happy wife, happy life. She did 12 years in the UK.
Americans are two types. I find they either love England or they hate it. My wife’s a bit of a hater, not of the people, just didn’t really like the lifestyle. It was hard for her to transition. Always wanted me to move back to the US. I said, “What is a left-wing, British, brown, Muslim journalist going to do in the US media environment? Where is there a home for me?” So I dodged it for a while until I went to work for HuffPost and she said, “Now you work for an American company, AOL, move!” Arianna was very gracious to consider letting me move, but before I could do that, Al Jazeera English offered me an interview show in DC, which was a dream job.
Sure.
I thought I’ll go to the US for a couple of years, follow the Hillary Clinton presidency. It’ll be an interesting time. I arrived here shortly before the guy came down the escalator at Trump Tower to declare his candidacy and call Mexicans rapists.
Among other things. So you were here to just do US politics?
No, I still do a show.
Right.
I no longer work for Al Jazeera English, I work for the Intercept, but I still do a show for Al Jazeera called UpFront in Washington, DC, which is a weekly magazine interview show. It’s a global affairs, everything. But we’ve done lots of American interviews, which have gotten lots of pickup. I actually do everything. It’s fun.
But you were …
One week we do the Kenyan foreign minister, the next week we do a Trump adviser.
Right. But initially, you were here to cover the US politics.
Yeah, initially, initially.
Talk about that. Talk about what you were …
So I’ve always been fascinated by American politics, most British journalists are, especially those of us who are politics junkies. It’s very hard not to follow what’s going on on this side of the Atlantic. I was married to an American. I spent a lot of my time here visiting over the decades through the Clinton years, the Obama years, etc., etc.
Yeah, I came right at the end of the Obama era thinking it would just be very, very straightforward. I mean none of us … Well, most of us did not think this buffoon would win. It’s been fascinating because I’m still here, by the way, four years later. I thought I’d come for two years and to my mother’s great disappointment, I’m still here. Yeah. It’s just taken over my life, professionally and personally.
Right.
The Trump era just dominates my waking and sometimes sleeping moments. As a journalist, it’s — as you know better than me — it’s exhausting to cover this stuff.
It’s meant to be exhausting.
It’s never meant to be like this. I can’t believe any …
No. It’s meant to be exhausting. It’s meant to exhaust you. But go ahead. You’re right about this one.
On this level, it’s something, just to say, I’ve just never seen anything like it. For me, I’ve just thrown myself into it for many reasons. Yeah, every time you want a day off, there’s a tweet, there’s a … something happens, etc., etc. Yeah. I’m lucky because I have all these platforms. I mean, I’m very … I shouldn’t complain. I’m in a very enviable position where I get to do podcasts, I get to do a TV show, I get to write a column for the Intercept, I get to run my mouth on cable news. So it’s fascinating. There’s so much to comment on. I always say it’s a great time to be a journalist, horrible time to be a human being. I’m also a Muslim immigrant in Trump’s America bringing up two daughters who are British-American dual nationals.
Right. We’re going to get to that.
And it’s very hard.
We’re going to get to that. So what prompted you to want to do journalism in the first place?
So I went to university in the late ’90s. I was at Oxford. I did the classic degree that politic junkies do, PPE, which … With a PPE degree, you either go be a conservative prime minister like David Cameron or you tend to go work in banking or management consultants. I remember being in my final year at Oxford at Christ Church and thinking I don’t know what I want to do. Friends of mine were already on the track towards various consultancy …
Banking.
Yeah. Graduate training schemes. My sister is a journalist. We’re both great disappointments to our Indian parents. My mother’s a doctor. My father is an engineer. It’s a cliché of South Asian parenting and neither of their children did science or engineering or medicine. So I thought, look, I’ll give this a try. It was either that or law, and law seemed quite hard.
So I just went to work for ITV news, which is the British version of NBC News, as a news desk assistant. Just the lowly … the lowest level of the newsroom. I thought I’d try it out. It worked for me because literally, I’m not trained to do anything else. Although, I always wonder, as you do, I give talks. I speak to students. As you … everyone wants to come and [ask], “how did you get into the media?” I just think, “I can’t give you any advice because it’s so different now.”
Right. 100 percent.
I would never get a job in the media today.
Right. Yes, you would.
I’ve got no skills.
Yes, you would.
I’ve got no skills.
That’s not true.
I’ve got no skills.
Come on.
I can’t do anything.
You have skills.
I’m a complete Luddite. I’ve been doing a TV show for 10 years. I have no idea how it’s made.
You don’t need to know how it’s made. Do you know how your car works to turn it on and drive it?
No.
Don’t worry about it.
I mean, I’m not a great driver.
Don’t worry about it. All right. Then don’t drive.
But that’s a different issue.
All right. So what was the idea about how you wanted to do it? Because you have a much more … just like a lot of journalists from Britain, it’s much more which is … The US press has turned that way, become much more advocacy, much more personality based, much more point-of-view based.
Yeah.
Talk a little bit about that.
So this is very interesting. The point-of-view point is interesting. You guys have cable news with these every night, people shouting at you or giving their opinions at you. Some good, some bad. I mean, the weirdness of Fox News apart for a moment. But you have cable news since Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, do whatever you want on TV. Then you have the very, very, very sober print press, over sober. I mean some of the headlines in the New York Times, you just want to kill yourself.
Then we have the reverse because we have what’s called Ofcom in the UK, which regulates broadcast media. So you can’t do opinionated programming in the UK. You can’t have a Sean Hannity every night on British television.
But you do have the British tabloid press, in particular, which is the equivalent of your cable news. The Daily Mail, of course, which many Americans now know, but also the Sun and the Mirror and … Across the board very opinion … the Guardian a very opinionated progressive … but much more progressive in its editorializing than the New York Times.
Sure.
So that’s the kind of ugly stark differences. For me, the big difference that I felt a lot and I’ve been pushing this for a while is culturally there just seems to be this massive difference whereby — it sounds very patronizing and critical and I apologize in advance — but American journalists, especially political journalists, White House correspondents are way more deferential to people in power.
It’s really weird because you guys had a revolution to get rid of the Brits, to get rid of monarchy, to get rid of all of that stuff. And yet, we in the UK, for all our many faults and sins in the British media — and I’m no fan of the British media either. You wouldn’t stand up in the room if Tony Blair or Theresa May or David Cameron comes in. In the White House, the White House press corps stands up if the president makes an appearance. I’ve made this point before. You get to keep your titles, which journalists seem fine with. You have guests coming on as Mayor Giuliani, Governor Romney, Secretary Clinton. Of what? They have not held those titles for years. This weird culture and the … You see that in the Sunday morning interviews.
Right. I would agree.
They’re very softballs, friendly, the lack of a follow-up. It’s not as disputatious in media culture as you might like to think. Whereas American journalists withhold themselves. To get back to your earlier question, why did I become a journalist? I like to argue and the British media is definitely a space where you can have a good argument now.
Right.
We’ve told ourselves in the US, especially in recent years, how we’re polarized and there’s … but actually when you scratch the surface, a lot of it is …
So you’re thinking…
There’s a lot of consensus.
Right.
And a lot of avoiding of the big issues, a lot of dodging what’s in front of our face.
What’s interesting is a lot of … when you talk to an American journalist, they feel like they’ve gone too far. I don’t think they have.
Yeah.
I don’t think they have at all but …
The editor of the New York Times this week said he doesn’t like using the “lie” word because he doesn’t want it to look partisan, which is a bizarre statement to make on many levels but in particular in a climate where you have a president who’s told more than 10,000 falsehoods according to the fact-checkers. Yet that’s not partisan. Call a spade a spade.
Right.
I’m someone who in my journalism, whether in the UK or here in the US, has always used the L-word if it’s appropriate — lie – used the R-word if it’s appropriate — racist. And the American media still dances around both of those. Everything is “racially tinted,” “racially charged.” It’s racist.
They feel they’ve gone too far. You know that.
Yeah.
They do.
Yeah, I’ve seen the memos.
In fact, they’re on … for American journalists, the way they talk on Twitter now, for example, has become … You and I are very forthright and we say the things we feel like saying. So I must be British. But most of them are saying things they never would have said before.
Yeah. But it’s not our choice, as you and I discussed. If you’re a conservative or Trump supporter listening to this you’re saying, “Aha, this shows the liberal bias that we have complained about for years.” Actually, it doesn’t show that. It shows the exact opposite. You and I know that they’re not comfortable at all.
The White House press corps would love to get back into an old relationship with the president and his press secretary. They would love not to be in conflict with the president and his press secretary. They don’t like the fact that they have to fight with Sarah Sanders. Remember, to be fair to journalists, defend my trade now, this is not their fault that their … it’s not their fault that the president says mad shit on a daily basis and that they sometimes feel they have to point that out to their readers. Sometimes CNN has to put on it’s chyron that this is false. Nobody’s comfortable with that situation, I would argue in US media, including in the liberal media.
Right.
They don’t want that. You saw that with the whole White House press corps debacle at the correspondents’ dinner. It happened a couple years ago. Michelle Wolf the comedian called out Sarah Sanders in a very mild way, I would argue …
I would agree.
… and everything she said has stood the test of time in relation to Sarah Sanders, who no longer even holds briefings. White House correspondents fell over one another to defend Sarah Sanders and throw Michelle Wolf under the bus. For me, that was a turning point. That was a reminder that these people are not equipped to deal with the era we are now in.
Well, talk about the era we are in. How do you look at it now? In some ways that’s … Trump’s been good in that regard. It’s pulled the …
There’s a silver lining to every cloud.
Every now and then I’m like … I was telling someone, so what’s a good thing to say about Trump? I said, “He questions a lot of things that I do think need to be.” Why don’t we view it that way? And of course …
A Trump supporter recently asked me at an event, “Why do you only bash him? Why can’t you say something nice about him?” And I said, “You first.” And she said, “He’s brought jobs back to the Negroes,” which led — literally — people in the room to do a double take.
Oh my God!
Economic anxiety. I would say, yeah, every cloud has a silver lining. I sometimes try and remind myself of the silver linings. One silver lining is this: Trump is so polarizing that he’s forced liberal centrists, cautious types to get off the fence and take a position. For example, an issue I care about greatly, the occupation of the West Bank in Gaza. Israel and Palestine and the US, never covered properly either in politics or in the media. It’s forced Democrats who would never dared to have taken openly anti-Israel government positions to really … a combination of Netanyahu and Trump has forced them to move way to the left.
I see that in candidates who would never … you’d never imagine them in a previous election cycle to be saying the stuff they’re saying because … Why? Because they feel they have permission to do it now because Trump is so brazenly in the Israeli corner or the Saudi corner. So that’s helped. When Trump takes a position, he taints it automatically. So the more positions he takes that I don’t like in a sense is strategically fine. When he said in his State of the Union … when he did that whole thing attacking socialism I was like, “Great.”
Socialism or capitalism, versus. It was just on Fox last week.
But I was thinking that’s the best thing that’s ever happened to American socialists, getting attacked by Donald Trump. They probably got a membership spike overnight. So in that sense he is useful. But then I have still to remind myself, we’re living in an industry with hot takes and contrary takes. We can all do that. I can write a piece promising, here are all the good things that you don’t realize that happened because of Trump. Then I have to remind myself a bunch of kids were left in vans overnight.
That’s right.
I just think, sorry, this is a horrible, horrible moment and we’re only getting worse. Talking of Twitter, I just tweeted recently about Fox News is laying the groundwork for the shooting of refugees. Every night we’re being told about invaders, invaders. It’s only a matter of time.
Someone just said in a previous podcast, I was talking Joi Ito, he was talking about machines and how the social media stuff that’s going on, and we’ll get to that. But one of the things he said that I thought was really interesting was that we’re in a horrible relationship with ourselves. I thought that was actually exactly right. We’re in a horrible relationship with ourselves, not just each other, but with ourselves, which I thought was an interesting point in time.
In terms of our consumption of politics, news …
Everything. Just everything.
Just across the board.
Across the board. We’re in a horrible relationship. I’d like to break up with myself.
I’m not going to flip back and forth.
Okay.
I’m going to go back to silver lining. And say when you say something like that, which is quite a stark statement.
I’m just saying I thought it was interesting.
No, no. It’s an interesting point. I would say look, I have to … if I lose hope and I’ve got nothing left, I have to remind myself that actually, again, the silver lining to the Trump era, I’ve seen massive activism. I’ve seen people coming together in ways I never thought people would come together again. I have to remind myself as a Muslim immigrant that in January 2017, tens of thousands of people went out to airports to stop that original version of the Muslim ban.
A Jewish friend of mine, we always laugh: Trump’s a great divider, yet he’s brought Muslims and Jews together. I mean, in a way that we wouldn’t think possible recently, where I’m writing joint op-eds with Jewish friends of mine about how the enemy’s against us all. We’ve got a common front. So yeah. It’s horrible, but it’s also forcing us to reassess ourselves. It’s forcing us to think again about issues we never really thought about that we took for granted. Yeah, this psychopath has blown everything up.
So would you then call yourself a journalist or an advocacy journalist? The Intercept is sort of … I mean, everybody’s an advocacy journalist in a way.
Yeah. This is my problem. It’s like, who’s not an advocacy journalist? Is a New York Times White House correspondent who’s presenting not just a view of what the White House says but a view of how we should cover what the White House says, is he not advocating a position? Is he not taking a… Is he or she not presenting a particular line of thinking? This whole debate about the view from nowhere, I just … I’m torn on whether — because the Britishness is still in me from the BBC, because I worked at the BBC as well — I’m torn on whether, do we just have everyone just put their biases on the table and then move from there? Would that be better? I don’t know the … I can’t be confident and say the answer.
Sometimes I think it would be preferable if everyone just … we knew where everyone stood. Because the people who pretend not to have a view end up … Go back to liberal journalist point. Liberal journalists, the media, I would argue they overcompensate. We see that. The conservatives have worked the media refs for years and we see that in the way that they bend over backwards towards any kind of implicit conservative criticism of their…
I agree.
They don’t give a damn about the left or both. They mock …
They’re playing us all the time.
Yeah.
All the time.
Yeah. All the time. The left criticisms are ignored. I see that across the board. I think that’s a problem. I don’t think there’s any easy solution to any of this. I think this whole idea, to come back to your earlier point about people being uncomfortable, they don’t like it. I think that is a problem.
I think, No. 1, whether you’re an advocacy journalist, a neutral journalist, whatever journalist, your job is to hold truth. Your job is to speak truth. The power of your job is to hold the powerful to account. Your job is to afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted. Cliché after cliché I can come up with. But that is your fundamental job. If you’re not doing that, you might as well retire and go do something else, be an accountant. Not that there’s anything wrong with being an accountant. But that is fundamental. In a Trump era, if you’re not doing that, then I’d just …
Okay. Okay.
I mean, it’s just that there are kids dying, right, at the border.
Oh, you’re doing the kids dying thing.
Six kids. I’m going to do the kids dying.
What can I say?
I’m going to do kids dying. There are kids dying at the border and we flit around. By the way …
Yes. Okay. Right.
Again, I don’t want to sound too negative about journalists. In defense of journalists, it is very hard to cover this president who produces 17 new scandals on a daily basis. I have to remind … Trump years are like dog years. I have to look at last week and say, “Was that last week?”
It was last week.
It feels like it was eons ago.
Yes.
That Trump said that ridiculous thing.
You’ve forgotten a lot of things.
Exactly.
You’ve forgotten a lot of things.
Amy Siskind’s list. If you go back and look at the chapters again, wow.
Wow. Exactly. We’re here with Mehdi Hasan. He’s a columnist at the Intercept and a host of its weekly podcast Deconstructed. Talk about that for a minute. Tell the listeners what you do.
This is a podcast that we set up at the Intercept when I joined them …
The Intercept. Explain the Intercept to people.
I love that. “Explain the Intercept.”
Well, because people might not know it.
The Intercept is a media organization based out of New York. I’m in DC, in the DC bureau.
Funded by Pierre Omidyar.
Funded by Pierre Omidyar, eBay man. What is he 40th, 50th, 60th richest man in the world?
He’s rich.
No, he’s very rich. And he lives in Hawaii.
He founded eBay. He does.
Which is kind of cool.
He lives in a very modest home in Hawaii.
I’ve never been to Hawaii. I need to go to Hawaii. It’s on my list of places to go in the universe.
It’s lovely.
The Intercept set itself up, it was mainly known as national security journalism, whistleblowers, leaks. It was set up by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras as a way of getting the Snowden archive out, building on the stories that they’ve broken. The Pulitzer Prize they later won for it.
I think then it came up with a very specific ethos of adversarial journalism, what we were talking about earlier, about not just sitting on the fence, but calling a spade a spade. Saying, speaking uncomfortable truths, not trying to be popular. Over the years, it’s morphed. I joined it a couple years ago. It’s very interesting now because Politico recently did a profile of the Intercept and Ryan Grim, our DC bureau chief, about some of the political journalism we bring, the space that’s occupied in the Democratic primaries has been fascinating. The Intercept was covering Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez …
Very close to her.
… before anyone else had even heard of her.
Yeah.
My colleagues Aida Chavez and Ryan Grim were out there covering her and others well before anyone else. So it’s been an interesting space and the political space it’s been occupied. I think Politico sold it as we’re some player in the Democratic civil war, which I think was slightly overheated. But yeah, we take great interest in what’s happening on the left of political journalism. We take great interest in breaking stories. Ryan breaks some great stories.
My colleague Alex Emmons has been covering the war in Yemen long before it was fashionable for anyone to say, “Why the hell are we supporting this horrific war in Yemen?” So yeah. We’ve tried to carve out some interesting niches in national security, whistleblowing, Democratic party politics, foreign policy. I do this podcast for them called Deconstructed. For me, it was really interesting because I wasn’t a big podcast listener when it was pitched to me. I do TV shows. I do two shows for Al Jazeera English, which are very serious, heavy interview shows, where I basically grill people. That’s what I do. That’s what I do. It’s a very tough, robust interview format. For the podcast, I have to change the style. Some people are still disappointed, like, “How come you’re not the guy from TV?” It has a very different format, as you know when we’re talking. So I try to have much more of a conversation, less of kind of bang-you-over-the-head, or a …
Score the win.
Score the win. Not that I would ever say that I was trying to score a win on my TV shows, although Erik Prince may take a different position.
It’s like a boxing match. Those are sometimes … Yes, that was a great interview.
That was a very interesting interview.
Talk about that one, just briefly, and then we’ll get back to the question.
Erik, I mean, it was a …
Erik Prince is the brother of …?
Betsy Devos, the education secretary. He was famous before her. Infamous before her, because he founded Blackwater, the infamous mercenary company, who has employees …
Very wealthy family.
Very wealthy family from Michigan, kind of Christian fundamentalist. A company accused of very racist and violent policies. Killed a lot of innocent Iraqis in various massacres. He came on my show at the Oxford Union called “Head to Head”, where we talked, where for one hour we went back and forth. I also managed to pin him down over some lies he told to the House Intelligence Committee. They’re now investigating him and seeing if there’s a case to do him for perjury. The question everyone’s asked me about the interview, “Why did he come on your show?”
I like that he did.
I don’t know the answer. I do like … I admire anyone who comes on that show, because it is a one-hour intense interview in front of a live audience. It’s not a Sunday morning chat show, and I think, I admire him for doing that, but I wouldn’t have done it if I was him, and I don’t think he quite prepared for the interview, or thought or knew what was going on. I can’t answer why he did it. Maybe, you know, people do it for different reasons, but I’m used to doing that format, and then we decided to do a different format, which is the podcast.
It’s been great to have common … because on that format, I never get to have people who I agree with. People will pitch people, and I’ll say, “But what would the interview be? I’d just be going, ‘Yes.’” So now on the podcast, I get to have interesting people who I like and agree with, whether it’s colleagues of mine, like Naomi Klein coming on to talk about climate change, whether it’s Bernie Sanders coming to talk on oligarchy, Elizabeth Warren talking about corruption. We’ve had Riz Ahmed, who I went to school with, the actor, coming on talk about Islamophobia and racism and diversity in Hollywood. It’s been some great conversations, as you know better than me. You’ve had even more on your show than I have.
One of the reasons you’re here is because of the conversation I had with Sam Harris about Islam. Obviously, Sam is a very controversial figure around issues around Islam. He’s made a series of declarations that many people agree with. Many people don’t agree with. Talk a little bit about that, because that’s something you do cover a lot.
Yes. I do cover Islamophobia a lot, although it has become fashionable these days to go, “Are Muslims the victims?”
Yes.
”They always want to play the victim card.” I would say, “I can assure you, if I could pick a career plan that didn’t involve talking about this, I would.” There is nothing great about the Islamophobia beat, especially when you’re Muslim.
Right, right.
It’s depressing to cover this stuff. You and I were talking before about some of the comments. I don’t really go below the line. I don’t read comments anymore on social media. I have to be careful when I read my timeline. There is mass Islamophobia out there.
Yes, you get it.
You know, people are losing their minds in a way that … I’ve been following this since 9/11, and you look at the Pew data. Pew did a study and found that there are more anti-Muslim hate crimes today, than there were after 9/11. I mean, it’s actually much worse now, and it’s gotten worse. I’ve seen it get worse in front of my eyes. So, it’s deeply depressing what’s going on in terms of anti-Semitism. I fear for the worst in the future. I think it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. I hope there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel is a very long and dark tunnel.
So yes, I cover this stuff. I try and call attention to it, both because it’s the right thing to do and obviously for self-preservation reasons. But it’s not just Islamophobia. We are living in an age of rising Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. In fact, some of the people doing it are doing both, including, I would argue, this president, but also, the men of violence. There’s no coincidence that the guy who attacked the San Diego Center more recently bragged about attacking a mosque beforehand.
The same with the guy in New Zealand. One study by Gallup found in the US, if you hold significantly prejudiced views towards Jews, you’re 32 times more likely to hold significantly prejudiced views against Muslims. So, Jonathan Freedland and I, my friend and Guardian columnist, we wrote a piece together saying, “Come on! Let’s get on the same page to stop all this crap. The white nationalists want to kill us all.” If that’s not going to get us focused, then I don’t know what is.
But the problem is, while it’s easy for liberals to come together and say, “Ah-ha! There is the Nazi, the skinhead. There is the Trump supporter in the MAGA hat, and there is Donald Trump himself saying Islam hates us,” and all the other nonsense that he says, that’s much easier to identify.
Since 2017, to be fair, lots of people have now woken up to kind of, “Oh! Islamophobia is real,” because before 2017, I was encountering people who said, “It doesn’t even exist. It’s all a myth. You’re just making it up.” Now, we’ve kind of moved beyond that, because it’s so brazen and blatant from the most powerful man in the world. But the bigger issue for me, which I try and push politely and reasonably sometimes, sometimes not, is the liberal side of the equation. It’s easy to pin it all on the right and the far right.
Right, right. Absolutely.
Islamophobia is both institutionalized and it’s kind of a form of an unselfaware cultural bigotry that we all imbibe, and there’s even internalized Islamophobia when you talk to scholars or Muslims who have these views about other Muslims, because they’ve absorbed so much media coverage and Hollywood movies and political rhetoric that we can’t … We’re not immune from it, either.
I think that’s what I try and challenge a lot. That’s where people like Sam Harris pop up on my radar, because people are telling me, “Oh, he’s a liberal. He’s a liberal. He’s not here. He’s not a racist. He’s not in the Trump mold.”
He doesn’t like Trump.
”He’s attacking the ideas.” Or, he was telling on your show, “No, I don’t think anyone hates Trump more than I do.” It was a very Trumpian statement, I thought it was quite funny. And he says … yes, loads of people hate Trump more than Sam Harris does. This idea that him and Richard Dawkins and others, the quote-unquote “New Atheists,” they are attacking the idea of Islam and “no idea should be…” and it’s just bullshit, because if it was that, I really wouldn’t care.
If you want to … if you carry … you call me on the show and say, “Let’s talk about the afterlife.” You telling me it’s absurd about resurrection, I’ll have that conversation all day long. You want to talk to me about prophethood? What’s the point of prophet…? Let’s do it. Funny, none of these guys ever actually want to talk about the ideas or theology. When you break it down, it is about the people. It is about the demographic trends …
And not the religion.
… and Sam is a classic example of that on your show. He says, “Islam, Islam, Islam.” I’ve confronted him on social media — he’s run away — with his own quotes. With his quotes, which he always says are out of context, with all the links and the context of where he said outrageous things about Muslims. About Muslims, not Islam. Things that if Donald Trump said, every liberal would lose their mind, but for some reason, Sam Harris and co. get a pass. That for me is a problem.
So when he says, “Muslim immigrants bring their backwardness to Europe,” when he says that, “The left are okay with white women being raped by Muslim immigrants,” which is what he said in 2016, that’s an outrageous statement.
So what happens then is you became engaged with … in this kind of thing, is they pull up your quotes. Talk about that.
Which is funny. So yes, in my 20s — and I’m 40 this year — in my 20s, I used to give talks to Muslim students, Muslim groups. I have a big mouth. I like to run off. People ask me to speak, I speak. In some of those talks, I said things that I deeply regret, partly because I just phrased it badly. You’re just running your mouth.
Out of context.
Not even out of context, just phrased badly. I mean, there’s some things out of context, definitely. So, I’ll give you an example.
Okay.
Sam Harris used to try and attack me, which is just funny because a) I’m saying they were bad and I’ve disowned them. He refuses to say he did anything wrong, so I don’t understand how it’s an analogy. It’s so frustrating. Yes, so for example, what is it? Oh! “You say, ‘Non-Muslims are cattle.’” I gave a speech where I quoted a verse of the Quran, that people who don’t believe in God are unthinking, like cattle. It’s a metaphor. I also said Muslims who follow the crowd, who follow, have a herd instinct, are like cattle. That isn’t out of context, because he clipped it. It’s only non-Muslim, sounds like I’m calling them.
On the other hand, did I make remarks about homosexuality that I regret? Hugely, big time! I was talking about Muslim history and I was quoting Islamic scholars saying all sorts of bad things, where all of these quote unquote, all of these things are put together, right? Different sins, that you know what classical Islam, classical Christianity, classical Judaism thinks of homosexuality. Now, 10, 15 years later, do I hold to it? Of course not.
What’s annoying is, you look at the body of work of my journalism. My journalism is on the record, right? I wrote a piece recently about Brunei. It’s interesting, I would argue, that some of us played a role in helping the ludicrous, odious Sultan of Brunei pull back from his absurd death penalty for gay people, for gay sex. I wrote a piece for the Intercept, saying, “This is not Islamic. This is not in my name. This is absurd.” I’ve been saying this for years.
I wrote a whole piece about homophobia and how Muslims can tackle it, because it’s not easy. I’m not going to throw Muslims under the bus, either. This is centuries-old doctrines, practices. I’m on multiple WhatsApp groups with leading Muslim scholars, actors. I’m grappling with this, especially in the West. How can we throw our gay brothers and sisters under the bus when they’re the first to stand with us against Trump and bigotry? These conversations are being had.
On the other hand, the text, the scripture is clear that this is a sin. So, these conversations are ongoing. I’m not a scholar. I don’t claim to be an Islamic scholar. I wish it was an easy subject. But, did I say things I regret? Of course. My No. 1 issue right now, today, is not about theology or religion. That’s for other people. My issue is we cannot afford to demonize and dehumanize other people. That is, for me, is a bottom line.
Except, that’s what happens when you get in this media. Talk about the media because you … the back and forth and you and him is just riveting, but it’s also disturbing. Because that’s what people do: they tit-for-tat.
Look, I like to be robust. I like to be robust. I’m not going to pretend that I’m some great, polite, friendly … No, I do tough journalism.
Right.
I swear. I am tough. I ask tough questions. I don’t fall back.
But I’m talking about in the Twitter setting. I’m just using Twitter as an example.
Yes, Twitter makes everything worse. There’s no debate about that.
Yes, that’s what I mean. Right.
There’s no debate. I remember I went see Glenn Greenwald in Brazil.
He loves to use the Twitter.
He loves to use the Twitter, but anyone who knows Glenn will say the same thing. But in real life, he’s very different to Twitter. My friend Owen Jones in the UK, who’s kind of a massive Guardian left-wing columnist, is always fighting with people because he’s one of the only lefties out there defending Corbin, defending socialism. Same issue. People meet him, and they’re like “Wow! You’re like the nicest guy, totally different to your Twitter persona.”
Oh, I hate that argument. “He’s nice, he’s okay,” whatever.
But it’s true. I’ve seen this. I said, you meet people and yes, Twitter brings out some of the worst of us, especially those of us in the middle of a fight all the time. You are ultra defensive. You’re in the middle of taking on 17 different people. The 18th says something mildly innocent and you shoot them down and they think, “Wow! What a prick you are.” And actually, that’s not what really would have happened in real life.
Right.
I was talking to a friend of mine earlier about, you know, it’s much easier to talk about things in person, when you have a disagreement with a friend or colleague.
Sure. Absolutely.
Texts, DM’s, tweets, WhatsApp, it just doesn’t work. That said, I’m addicted to Twitter, to my wife’s great complaint. I love it as a medium. It suits me. It’s where I learn a lot about the world.
Do you think it’s damaging? I’m going to get you in to tech a little bit.
Hugely damaging.
And what to do about it then? Hugely damaging, but you love it. It sounds like you’re like a crack addict.
So all I can say, I’m an addict. There’s no debate about that.
Right. Right.
It’s literally … I went on pilgrimage, and I wasn’t on Twitter for a while. It was really hard. People thought I had died, as I hadn’t tweeted for a few days. I talked to my wife about my kids, you know, kids on devices. All I can think is like, “Don’t do what I did. Do as I say, and not as I do,” because I think it’s too late for me, but I think …
Well, talk about its effect on politics. It’s coming, because you yourself are engaged in the arena, such that it is. Sam is. So is everybody. So is everybody.
Is Sam engaged? I’m not sure he’s that engaged.
Yes, he is.
I think he uses it more as kind of a grande style, to kind of broadcast.
Let’s move away from Sam, or whatever. Lots of people are.
Fine. Like you, for example, after that Sam show.
Sean Hannity uses it a lot.
You, after that show with Sam, you engaged with a lot of people in good faith.
Yes, I did.
I don’t think Sam or some others do that. I think to engage in good faith, with people criticizing you in good faith, I think is a great part of Twitter. I think Twitter has allowed me to meet people and talk to people, both members of the public and celebrities, politicians, who I’ll never get to meet otherwise. And for that, I will — you know, clichéd — be grateful to Twitter. I don’t think I would be, professionally, I generally don’t think I would be where I am today, were it not for social media.
Okay. So what is the …
But, it’s hugely distracting. It doesn’t help me in my personal life at all.
What is the impact on politics and then journalism itself?
In what sense? I mean, there’s so many different facets.
What do you think it does? It creates a twitchy, hot-take mentality where you forget the last thing.
Yes, it definitely creates the hot-take, militant…
You came in today. You were like, “I can’t believe what …”
Yes, what Trump just tweeted. Yes. It’s so much.
… Trump just tweeted,” but yesterday, it was something else that was misspelled.
Exactly. That’s true. Well, there’s a big question. If you take Trump out of the equation? He’s so out-sized and oversized in this whole conversation. He’s so dominant on Twitter in particular. If Trump didn’t exist, would it still be the same? Would a President Hillary Clinton still …
No.
No, and I don’t think we will … Obviously, Twitter would still be doing it, but I think the way he dominates social media …
I’ve written about this a lot, yes.
… is slightly different, and I think that makes it kind of … he’s sui generis in that way.
Mm-hmm.
But yes, for all of us, it’s the hot-take culture. There were things I used to … would have written an op-ed about or I would have wrote an essay about, which I do a Twitter thread on, and my editor will say, “Why didn’t you write that as a piece?” “It’s done.” It’s done? It’s already had a thousand … I can’t write now. I can’t self-plagiarize off my tweets.
It’s in 16 parts!
Yes, I did. I did this amazing thread. It’s all being shared. So, that is a problem. You know, we do stupid things in micro-ways, but then again, that also has an advantage. The instant take also helps. It helps draw attention to a story. It helps cause genuine outrage. Sometimes, you should be outraged. If you’re not outraged right now, what the hell are you doing? So, in that sense it’s good.
I do think the way that politicians have been able to use it to bypass the media is problematic. In one sense it’s democratic, because you could talk to your constituents, which is great in theory. But the reality of, especially in the reality of US politics on the right, is it has been used to create this entire infrastructure of …
Sorry to point out, AOC is doing the same thing, and beautifully.
I don’t think she’s purveying fake information.
Oh, no, no. I got that.
I don’t think she’s questioning reality. I’m talking about the fact of using it as a propaganda tunnel to basically say … so, the New York Times breaks a story about Congressman X being corrupt with copious evidence. Congressman X takes to Twitter, and says, “Fake news. You can trust me. New York Times are lying.” They wouldn’t have been able to do that 5, 10, 15 years ago. Now, that genie’s out of the bottle.
And I’m not saying we should put it back in the bottle. I think that’s a fundamental problem for those of us who cover politics and want to hold people to account. Trump knows that. He says this openly, “They hate me because I can bypass all of them and talk directly to my base,” which is true, and he misleads when he does it and there’s no way of checking that. You can’t censor him on that, obviously.
Again, it’s really problematic that we have no … I’m very old-fashioned. This is my age showing. I did like an older … when I was growing up, when you had the water cooler moments, when everyone would watch the same news.
So, you’re saying you’d like it to go back?
I’m not saying I’d like it to go back, because I’ve just told you the things I love about Twitter. But, you know, it’s complicated. I do miss that sense where everyone could come together for a moment.
And be reflective.
Be reflective, but also having seen the same stuff.
Right.
I mean, we live in an age where literally 30 percent of the public in this country are not watching or reading what you and I are watching and reading. I don’t know how democracy survives in that.
Where are we going now then? Here we are. It’s been kind of a disastrous mess. It continues not to correct itself in lots of ways.
Are there corrections? No, there’s no corrections.
The other night, there were four things the Trump administration removed. I was like, “What?” It was sort of like, it just doesn’t end. And we’re going into this election with the Democrats sort of all over the place. We’ve got impeachment hanging over things, or maybe not. We’ve got Trump saying he’s won already, essentially. You know, there’s questions whether he can. There’s polls that say he can’t win. There’s others say he can. I’m kind of worried if he doesn’t win, what’s going to happen?
That’s what I’m most worried about, and I’ve written about that. I don’t think he’ll leave quietly.
No. Exactly.
I don’t think he’ll accept the result, and I don’t think we’ve prepared for that. Again, to come back to our earlier conversation, I don’t think White House correspondents sat around and talked, “How are we going to cover next November?” They don’t want to think about it, even though they all know. We all know. It’s like I say, the media coverage of Trump is like the emperor’s new clothes. We all know it, though very few of us are willing to be that child who calls it out.
Right.
It’s as if, for example, his mental stability. That should be the No. 1 story.
Well, a lot of people have written about that. George Conway, a right wing?
Exactly. Exactly. A right-wing husband of a White House aide.
Someone who’s conservative, not … He’s not right wing, well, conservative.
He’s Federalist Society, I would argue, right? Like everything’s moved now. If you’re not a far-right Nazi, you’re right wing.
Someone at a party was like, “Oh, I love …” It was Rick what’s-his-name, the guy who used to work for McCain.
Rick Wilson.
It was Wilson, and someone else at the party who’s a little more left was like, “He was never nice to me.” It was a person of color. “Never nice to us, and wouldn’t be if he was back in power again. So why are we liking him?” And it’s because he’s not …
Why does George Bush get a hug from Ellen?
I know.
… and swap cough drops with Michelle? Everything’s relative, right? Trump is so far right, and he’s made …
It was funny. Someone’s like, “Oh! Reagan is so good.” I’m like, “No, he was not. I am certain of the people who had AIDS did not think that. I recall, because I was around.”
The late, great John Kenneth Galbraith famously said about George W. Bush that, “He makes me yearn for Ronald Reagan,” and I used that line in a New York Times op-ed. In 2015, I said I yearned for George W. Bush. I hated George W. Bush. I marched in the Iraq War as a young guy. But yes, I look at Bush …
It’s true. The things have moved. Things have moved.
Things have moved.
So, talk about what’s coming.
I think you have to separate out the Democrats. That’s the presidential race, which is kind of in its own bubble. Debates kicking off, it’s starting to get serious. Hopefully, we’re whittled down from the kind of 776 candidates who are currently running. Then, there’s the House Democrats and Nancy Pelosi, who I’ve been very critical of.
Right.
I think I wrote a piece in November saying she’s not … she and Chuck Schumer, let’s be fair, not just her, a lot of misogyny only focuses on her. Schumer as well. Awful. Perhaps more awful.
Well, she controls the House.
In terms of general, congressional leadership of the Democrats, they’re both not the right leaders for the time we’re in. I don’t think they get the scale of the challenge. We have a white nationalist in the White House, kids dying at the border, and they want to talk about Infrastructure Week. I find that odd, to say the least. Pelosi on impeachment, unless she changes tack, I think history will judge her very badly. I think the arguments against impeachment are ridiculous.
All right, go for one. Defend one of them. They have all these marginal seats that they have to keep. I think about 46 of them that could be in trouble if they focus on impeachment.
Where’s the evidence that they’re going to be in trouble?
I’m just saying they’re worried about that.
I haven’t seen that. There’s a lot of assertions being made.
Right.
I’ve not seen evidence for this. For example, one of the assertions Pelosi makes for herself I find most ridiculous is, “He’s goading us to impeach him. He wants to be impeached.” No. 1, that’s absurd. The most thin-skinned president in US history, who wants to be compared to Abraham Lincoln, does not want his legacy to be, he’s up there with Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and is one of only three men to be impeached.
Yes, he is still mad about the inaugural crowds, isn’t he?
Yes, the idea that he’s okay … Yes, and he’s complaining and Fox News and Normandy about Nancy Pelosi saying he should be in prison. The idea that he wants to be impeached is absurd. Anyone who knows anything about his psyche, absurd. But even if that were true, no evidence is offered. It’s just stated as fact. I just don’t buy that. A lot of these statements are made, for example, “Oh well, the Senate won’t convict.” Probably won’t convict, because Republicans are all profiles in cowardice, but on the other hand, you’re going into 2020 Senate elections, which actually, they’re not. Whatever happens, and they’re not great for the Democrats. There’s not a good lineup.
Why not put Susan Collins and co. on the defensive? Gardner on the defensive, and say, “Why did you vote against impeaching a man who clearly demonstrated he committed high crimes and misdemeanors?” Why is that bad for the Democrats? This weird kind of self-flagellating, self-loathing, ultra-cautious. Always, “What about Trump’s base?” Fuck Trump’s base! What about your base? Right? This is just the Democrats …
You know, it’s been said often enough, I’ll say it again. The Democrats bring a knife to a gunfight. The Republicans bring a rocket launcher. That has always been the way it’s been, and unfortunately under Pelosi, yes, she’s great at clapping snarkily at him, but in terms of actually using the strongest power that she had …
She said recently that he’s not a well man. He’s got problems. She alluded to his insanity, and then she said, “I wish his administration, I wish his staff and his family would stage an intervention.” I wanted to shoot myself in the head. You are the House speaker. You can stage an intervention! It’s called impeachment. The idea that the fate of the Republic is in the hands of Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Melania Trump, and Barron Trump is absurd. Right? But that’s what she said, and she’s supposed to be this political genius.
So, what do you expect is going to happen then?
I think predictions are a mug’s game.
All right, but she looks like she’s not moving in any way.
At the moment, I don’t think she’s going to move, and in knowing what we know about the Democrats, I’ve talked to some House Democrats who say, who are up for it, but then it’s like, you don’t realize behind the scenes how many are not up for it. Just so wanna avoid it and talk about Infrastructure Week. Because they just don’t get the time we’re in, and because they have these weird kind of calculations about elections.
There’s this idea that public opinion is frozen. The biggest argument is, the public doesn’t want impeachment. Well, they didn’t want impeachment when Nixon was impeached, either. In fact, the majority of Americans only supported Nixon’s impeachment two weeks before he resigned, after articles of impeachment were written by the House Judiciary Committee. See, the idea that you can’t change public opinion, that the job of Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer is not to lead public opinion in a direction, seems to be …
But there’s never been a …
… a complete abdication of responsibility.
But Nixon was never quite as defensive of himself as Trump is good at. You know what I mean?
Oh, I’m not saying it won’t be harder, of course it’ll be harder.
Right.
I mean, Carl Bernstein made the point, if we broke Watergate today, it would just be “fake news.” You didn’t have Fox News in the ’70s. You didn’t have all the social media that we’ve talked about. No doubt it would be hard. There’s an argument, “Oh, it’ll be hard,” or, “It will rile up his base.” They’re already riled up! He just turned them on Ilhan Omar recently, before, and Colin Kaepernick. Next, it’ll be “doctors killing babies.” He doesn’t need impeachment to rile up his base. This guy can produce enough racist, obnoxious, dishonest tropes to rile them up.
For me, the arguments are all kind of not really there. The only argument that has any weight is that, “Oh, he won’t be convicted in the Senate, and therefore he’ll say he was exonerated.” I’m not sure I buy that argument. Also, the idea that by not impeaching him, that doesn’t have a cost, that he’s not … Harry Reid came out recently, former Senate majority on the Democrats, and he said this point. He said you can’t allow him to go into elections saying, “Well, I didn’t do anything wrong. Democrats didn’t impeach me.”
Right.
It works both ways.
Right.
Not impeaching him has a price as well.
Right. So do you imagine there’s ever gonna be a shift, or not? Do you think she’s not gonna shift?
As of this moment, I don’t think she’s gonna shift. I hope to be proven wrong. As I say, predictions are hard in American politics. No one can predict anything because life is so crazy. Seventeen Republicans ran for President in 2016, and the guy from Home Alone 2 won. I stopped making predictions after that. Brexit, I’m British, I mean, come on. I didn’t see Brexit coming, so two for two, failed on both those predictions. Even in the Democratic race I have no … I don’t know who’s gonna win. Such a long way away. We’re all making … Biden’s leading the polls.
Who do you like?
I like two candidates. I like Elizabeth Warren, and I like Bernie Sanders.
Smartypants. Yeah.
I think they’re the people who get the challenges, they’re the people who get the fight that needs to be had with the Republicans. They’re the people who’re actually gonna try and transform … It’s not enough just to beat Trump. You have to beat at least some of the underlying factors that produced Trump. Trump is not the cause. Trump is a symptom. Therefore, to avoid the next Trump, the next Democratic president has to be able to take the fight.
There’s certain things I like about Bernie Sanders that Warren doesn’t have. There’s certain things I like about Elizabeth Warren that Bernie Sanders doesn’t have. I think that the procedural stuff is so important, we’ve just been talking about it, the idea that you gotta get rid of the Senate filibuster. You gotta abolish the Electoral College.
American politics is broken. I say that as an immigrant to your great country. It’s batshit crazy the way you run things, the way that some of the stuff here … Americans have no clue, that’s my favorite part. They’re completely in the dark that other people in the rest of the world don’t do things like this. No other Western country allows politicians to draw up the boundaries of their own seats. That doesn’t happen anywhere but the United States of America. That’s mad.
When you’re going into this, talk about it globally, and then I wanna finish up talking about, what’s sort of tech’s responsibility in this. The rest of the world doesn’t look so perfect, either.
No.
You’ve got a mess in Britain, with it looks like Boris Johnson is about to become prime minister.
Oh, God.
I know, right?
Our very own Trump. The British Trump.
A little smarter.
Little smarter. Low bar.
Low bar. Yeah, low bar. But, also mad. Kind of mad. You’ve got stuff going on everywhere.
And Islamophobic.
Everywhere.
Yes. It’s deeply depressing. And that requires a left that is up to the challenge of pushing back against the rise of a far right, against fascism. There’s a f word that we don’t use: fascism. These people are not Populists. It certainly annoys me. Bernie Sanders is a Populist. Victor Orban is a near fascist. It’s a problem for me. Yeah.
Again, there’s no silver bullet. There’s no easy solution to this stuff. A lot of it dates back to the financial crisis. A lot of it dates back to the war on terror and 9/11. It requires people like Elizabeth Warren who are willing to take kind of a big-picture view of what’s going on. It requires people like Bernie Sanders, who’ve been consistently saying the same thing and were right about it, in terms of the oligarchy and rising inequality.
And foreign policy, by the way. One thing that Bernie Sanders has that no one else in the field has is willing to really radically challenge some of the underlying premises about US foreign policy, regime change, this obsession with militarism, the Pentagon budget. That needs to change. And actually, a lot of Trump supporters even think that needs to change.
What is the problem on the left, then? Criticize the left for me.
Internally divided. Always.
Intolerant?
Intolerant of what?
Well, that’s been one of the things. Just recently around lots of things.
Intolerant in a self-critical way, yeah, we’re all intolerant. I’m intolerant. We’re all intolerant. In terms of the … Is there a particular issue with the left being intolerant? No. We live in an age where the president of the United States says neo-Nazis are very fine people. The tolerance problem is on the right, and it’s all deflection to make it about campus free speech — absurd.
The same people who obsess over campus free speech say not a word when Victor Orban is sitting in the Oval Office. Sorry, take your bad-faith bullshit somewhere else. Are there excesses on the left? Of course there are. They’re everywhere. There’s excesses everywhere. But that’s not the same thing. In fact, the opposite.
The left now … The interesting debate on the left, especially in relation to Bernie and Hillary Clinton legacy and Trump is what do you do about some of these issues about culture, race, “identity politics.” There’s a lot of people on the left who think identity politics is bad, who buy into this Trumpian narrative. I think that’s absurd. I think we have to have it. Sort of pedantry. What you call identity politics is people, marginalized communities…
“This is what I am.”
… who didn’t have a voice before, now have a voice, and you don’t like that voice. It’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t fit with your narrative. Even on the left. Where if you just wanna talk about … Yeah, I think, too, that there’s been too much outsourcing.
I think, too, the minimum wage needs to be raised. But that’s not enough to deal with Michigan, Pennsylvania. You also have to deal with the fact that a lot of racist people, misogynistic people voted for Trump. And it wasn’t about the economy. You have to address that point. You can’t just park it. And I get politicians can’t do that, they can’t insult voters, but some of us journalists and commentators …
Right, look what happened when Hillary Clinton …
Yeah, you could argue that her proportion of deplorables was on the low side. I would say, if we don’t do it as journalists, commentators, writers, academics, activists, intellectuals, who else is gonna do it? And that is a global, you should talk about global problems. It is a global problem. Modi. My parents are from India. Indian Muslims.
This was explained to me.
India. Narendra Modi is prime minister of India.
He is.
Just reelected for a second majority. India’s very hard to get a majority. We’re normally coalitions. Hugely popular figure, has his roots in a far right Hindu Nationalist organization called the RSS, which was modeled on the Nazis in the 1930s. He is the prime minister of India. He oversaw a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. Reelected. And the economy did really badly, by the way. I would argue that, again, undermines the whole “this is all about the economy.” It’s not about the economy. It is about quote-unquote identity. Depends whose identity. It’s about majorities being unsettled by minorities having rights and voices.
But he’s gonna have a harder time.
He’s gonna have a harder … But you know who’s gonna have a harder time? Muslims and Christians in India, because he’s basically … It’s gonna be a window into what Trump would be like in a second term. Emboldened, unleashed, recognizing that now institutions can be even more irrelevant than they were before. Fake mandates, all of that stuff.
Right. And you could also look at Netanyahu and Israel, and now he’s gotta now have another election.
Because Israeli politics is the only place probably more batshit crazy than American politics.
Yes, indeed.
You’ve got the Netanyahu. You’ve got the Duterte. You got the Putin. You got the Orban. You got the Modi.
I wanna finish up talking about if all of these people use social media really effectively …
Yes.
Every one of them.
Yes.
In fact, someone was like, “The right’s against social media.” I’m like, “Why? It’s such a gift. Dictators love it.”
It’s huge.
It’s democracies that want to shut them down. Which is interesting, it’s Sri Lanka that turned it off, not India, not Duterte.
Yes.
Nobody loves social media like a dictator. That’s my feeling. Why not? It’s great.
The great double-edged sword. Yeah, the Arab Spring is a classic example for me, always. There, you had this built up on Twitter and Facebook and people sharing and organizing rallies in Egypt and Tunisia, and yet the same regimes using social media to allow fake media, to crack down, to identify dissidents …
To create fake … yeah.
To create fake news but also to arrest people and target people. We’re now seeing that the Saudis now buying this Israeli surveillance technology to go after people like the late Jamal Khashoggi. That’s a real problem, obviously. WhatsApp and the role that WhatsApp plays. Don’t even get me started on that.
No, please, get me started. Please.
WhatsApp, India, I don’t know how many people are aware of that. When you try and forward it …
Yes, I’ve written about it a lot. But go on.
Just for me, a lot of people don’t really when I tell them this, that when you try and forward a message to more than five groups on WhatsApp, you no longer can.
Yes, you can’t. They turned it off.
One of the main reasons for that is what happened in India, where it’s been used for kind of incite mob violence by politicians and mobs, spreading “actual fake news.”
Do you know when that happened? Because I complained a lot about that. They said, “Look! We did it! Aren’t we great?” I’m like, “No!” You had it before, that you fixed it, you don’t get a pat on the head for not fomenting violence.
Yes.
That’s not a good thing.
No.
What took you so frigging long, is my question.
Demand and supply, and the supply is on the social media side, the demand is us. This great insatiable appetite for this shit.
So what would … How do you …
It’s depressing as a journalist.
How much do you blame the tech companies for it and what should happen to them? Because right now, obviously this week, YouTube takes extremist content off, a lot of people are saying that’s free speech, but it isn’t because they’re not public squares.
So, I blame them a lot. I don’t blame them exclusively. I blame them a lot. When I look at … I’m no expert on this stuff but when I look at, for example, YouTube. Until a couple years ago, no, there wasn’t really a big flat earth movement. And yet one study found, interviewed 30 people who believe in a flat earth. And they said, why do you believe in a flat earth? Twenty-nine of them said we saw it in a YouTube video. The 30th said my kid saw it in a YouTube video. And where do they get that? Because we know about the YouTube algorithms. You know better than me about sending you to the next place.
I’m a Muslim. We talk about radicalization of Muslims. Where are these white nationalists getting radicalized?
Absolutely.
Some of the videos are crazy. Each video takes you to the next place. I think that’s the huge problem that YouTube has not really owned up to, either. I was on a platform with a guy from Google a couple of months ago. They’re kind of in denial still about how much still needs to be done.
I don’t think they’re in denial anymore.
More publicly. And maybe privately. And Facebook, we had the recent episode with Nancy Pelosi where the ridiculous executive came on CNN and tried to pretend that it’s nothing to do with us because we’re not content creators.
Yeah, that was not a good thing for Monika Bickert.
And the joke is, if that video had been a Mark Zuckerberg, we could all make a snarky comment about how long it would’ve stayed up. I think we know from all the leaks and the journalism from people like yourself that internally, they’ve known about this for a long time, about the addictive qualities, about the radicalization properties, about turning people down weird rabbit holes. They haven’t done anything about it. Until they’re caught.
And why do you think that is? Do you think it will permanently affect …
For profit-making.
You think it’s just profit.
Because they’re profit-making monopolistic companies.
See, I don’t think they don’t care. They don’t think about it. I don’t think they don’t … Not even care, they don’t think about it. Never occurs to them.
So when Zuckerberg originally after the election pooh-poohed the whole “we had nothing to do with it,” Russia, and later on came out and said we did, okay fine, I was wrong, what happened in the interim there, just pressure?
I think he didn’t … I don’t wanna say didn’t know, it’s different than didn’t know. It’s not that you …
Doesn’t even register on his radar.
It didn’t register, It’s like it … There wasn’t a problem with it.
Unknown unknowns and coverups.
Someone said, yeah, exactly. It’s like, “Oh, he didn’t know.” I’m like, “No.” Because if you didn’t know, but you knew it was bad, when you finally do know, that’s different than, “Oh, is that a problem?” That’s where you are with a lot of them. “Is that actually a problem?” Actually it is, to gay-bash people.
And then the PR people kick in.
Yes, it actually is a problem. Like this thing that’s going on with YouTube right now.
One thing I would say on the tech front that I feel very strongly about based on our conversation over the last 45 minutes, this idea of working the refs, right? Before it was the New York Times, it was CNN. Now it is social media companies and they’re completely out of their depth when it comes to politics, when it comes to dealing with the alt right, when it comes to dealing with the Republican Party. You see that, the way that they’ve now pressured Facebook, that you have this “anti-conservative bias.” Your news people have anti-conservative bias. Zuckerberg calls in a bunch of conservative news people to have a chat. I don’t see him doing that with the left, sorry. It’s overcompensation.
Jack Dorsey, classic example of that. Some of the stuff not to do: going out on Twitter and apologizing to Candace Owens because one of his, what is it, Twitter Moments team called her far right or right wing or whatever it is. Too polite for my view. Absurd, when you have liberals and leftists and people of color being doxxed and harassed, hate mail, death threats, and I don’t see Jack Dorsey going on and apologizing to them publicly.
And again, why did you go on Sean Hannity? Because it’s overcompensation, overcorrection. We’re liberal West Coast tech people. We must be biased without really … Therefore, we must — and the conservatives play them. Play them for the unfortunately naïve fools they are.
Right. Last question. I thought you’d be perfect for this question. I’m thinking of doing a column on this. What would happen if Trump was thrown off Twitter, or Twitter didn’t exist?
That’s such a good question.
Isn’t it? Would it be a good column? Twitter was like, don’t write that column. No no, yes, yes, yes.
I’d be able to take … I’d be able to do my shave, shower, shit routine in peace in the morning and not log on to @realDonaldTrump, which is what I do every morning like every other journalist in America. Yeah, I’m torn, actually, because on the one hand, I see people saying, well, this is a violation, when he threatens war and violence.
Yeah yeah, they’re not taking him off.
Yeah, they’re not. He’s violating their standards. He’s a special case.
They’re not taking him off.
They’re not taking him off, but should he be taken?
But what if they did? Just one morning, Jack Dorsey shaves his beard and eats a waffle.
Yeah, and says, “Screw the conservatives.”
“Wait a second, I haven’t been eating!”
Yeah, screw the conservatives. We need to get rid of Trump. I don’t care what the conservative battle should be. By the way, there’s also a genocide in Myanmar. I would say that Trump would lose his mind. Conservatives would lose their minds, and Twitter would probably reverse it.
Where could they say it?
Conservatives would still be … People would still be on Twitter, what if you banned them all? What they’re all gone?
Some of them.
They’re all gone. Kellyanne. There’s a purge.
She doesn’t have the same impact.
Hannity.
Doesn’t have the same impact.
He’s got 4 million or 8 million something followers.
Still not the same impact.
No, no. But they’d make a noise.
Yeah, but would it be a loud noise?
As we’ve seen, but Kara, as we’ve seen …
Or would it be like a Horton Hears a Who noise?
But Kara, as we’ve seen, relatively speaking, the conservatives don’t need to have that much impact to get the bang for their buck. To get the return.
It’s just interesting.
And I think that just on the series of “should he be kicked off,” I’m always torn, because on the one hand, he’s polluting it, he’s violating it, he’s using it to hate. What he did to Ilhan Omar. He could literally get Ilhan Omar killed, when he shared that video in that way, that horrible video. So in those moments, I’m like, this is outrageous. On the other hand, wouldn’t I rather be hearing him say this shit on Twitter and actually get an insight into it?
Haven’t you heard enough?
I’ve heard enough, but at least I’ve got the evidence now for those people who might still be in denial about how completely off his rocker he is, about how racist he is, about how much he wants to be a fascist. Twitter is a great kind of repository. By the way, what will you do with the … Would we lose the Trump archive? Can’t lose the Trump archive. There’s always a tweet.
There’s been an art installation about it.
There’s always a tweet.
There’s an art installation showing them. You ever seen it?
It’s history. No, I haven’t seen it.
It is. It’s a fascinating history. Do you imagine any other future president being able to do this? I think the only other fantastic tweeter is — well, besides George Conway — is …
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Cortez. But she’s different.
I know. She can’t run for president for two more elections, sadly.
I said she speaks it natively.
She’s brilliant. When she did …
She’s a native speaker. He’s a broadcaster. He’s a blunderbuss.
When she took out Lindsey Graham was astonishing. She actually makes me feel good about being on Twitter.
Is it going to be good for politics going forward?
I hope it is, as a tool of social activism. That, for me, is the No. 1 reason it could, as someone on the left.
What about political influence?
In terms of affecting political change and political influence, I hope that’s how it can be used. That’s how it would be in an ideal world. I do think that, in terms of the future question about presidents, the only thing that keeps me hopeful is that Trump is so unique that there is no person, not just good at it, but he’s so bad at things as well. He’s so bad at being a fascist that he can’t actually bring in fascism.
Incompetence is what has saved us so far from full-blown fascism, and I wonder what would happen if you got a fascist who was not nuts, who didn’t say shit about the porn stars he had slept with and paid them off, who didn’t go mad about mad stuff on Twitter, who didn’t go to the D-Day Normandy signing and sign his name at the top of the paper.
A little less, a little more…
Someone who still has the same agenda but does it with a smile and with less overt racism. I think we’d be in serious trouble, because we’ve seen this appetite for it.
It’s interesting. I had a discussion with one of the big companies and one of the founders of one of the big companies, and I said something they didn’t like. I said, “I’m worried about someone crazy running your company. That’s what I’m worried about. Someone who’s really, truly evil.” I said, “With all the information you have and all the control you have, that’s what I’m worried about.” “Well, that’s never going to happen.” I’m like …
Have you seen who’s in charge of the NSA, the CIA, the Secret Service, the DIA?
I was like, “Literally, it can. It can happen. That’s not true.”
What we haven’t acknowledged globally, collectively as a society, is that he’s now changed the rules for everything.
Absolutely.
We’re just talking about presidents, but you have CEOs, you have media organizations, you have academics … across the board, it’s now, “but what about the president of the United States?”
Except others do suffer when they do things on it. Only one person doesn’t suffer. It’s a really interesting thing. When others do tweets, or the guy that hit the guy at the basketball game, he suffered.
Like Ted Cruz. If he was president today, he might have the same Islamophobic, misogynistic, etc. agenda. He wouldn’t be able to get away with saying the kind of crazy stuff that Trump says.
It’s interesting. I was just saying, the guy who hit the guy on the basketball court. That guy got in trouble because that clip went over and over.
Which keeps me hopeful that some of this will end with Trump. A lot of it won’t. There’s a whole generation of young people, young kids, who’s seeing this in high school. You’ve seen the racist attacks, you’ve seen the level of bullying is going up. There’s a whole group of kids being brought up thinking, “This is fine.”
There’s also a whole group of kids that are not like that.
Exactly.
My kids aren’t like that. It’s interesting.
My kids aren’t like that, but who’s going to win?
Yeah, we’ll see. Anyway, this has been a lot of fun.
We’re going to win, Kara.
We’re not winning. I’m just going to leave. That’s what’s going to happen. Anyway, we’re just going to be really irritating and be old people on it going, “Ah.” You know what I mean? That kind of stuff.
Like the president.
Or, I’m just going to disappear. That’s my plan.
No. Don’t disappear.
I’m going to become a hermit. I don’t know if you know that’s my plan in the end. Anyway, I appreciate …
As long as you have Twitter, you won’t be able to be a hermit.
You’re never going to see me again. Anyway, thank you.
Thank you.
Recode and Vox have joined forces to uncover and explain how our digital world is changing — and changing us. Subscribe to Recode podcasts to hear Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka lead the tough conversations the technology industry needs today.
Sourse: vox.com
