Host kevin weems and of the National Review, the latest book is called the smallest minority independent thinking in the age of mob politics. In this book you write that i come not to praise democracy but to bury it. Guest i dislike and reject the idea something becomes better or more important or more respectable just because more people adhere to it, a a certan idea, a certain point of view. Often its weird being a writer but that because writers are treated as politician. Sometimes people say who do to speak for . Hoosier constituency . Who do represent . I always say nobody. Im not running for office. We live in a time of politics as team sports, and a team sports aspect has really displaced almost everything else, all the other intellectual content, all the policy considers a trip consideration, tribal tribe action and its a question of whose game is bigger. I dont think its necessarily something that shows anything about whether an idea is good or not. The fact 50 of the population plus one like something, to me is more likely to bring its wrong. If you watch broadcast television or look at the actual bestsellers list, great big crowds of people i dont trust very much. Host the original sin of the journalist is his or her desire to be liked. Guest yeah. I see this a lot. I do a lot of uniforms like this at freedom fest we could shop for opportunities to invest in truffle farms and gold coin a lot of writers, particularly journalists who were unable to resist the urge to play to the crowd, deliver applause lines, engage in constituent service, that sort of thing. Act like members of the house of representatives running for reelection is kind of what they are like. I understand the desire to want to be popular because we had to sell books. Thats i pay the bills and you could sell a lot of books, its financially better than only some if you book. They want to be popular and with president ial candidates want to be popular. They want to have followers and part of the world. Theres a cliche kind true that in britain, journalism is part of the literary world. And the United States journalism is part of the political world. I think thats true in that journalists in the states are acting much like politicians. Host you spend quite a bit of time on social media, in your book. I dont think its been quite a bit of time on social media personally try to either use any. Host but in your book you spent spend quite a bit of time talking social media. Let me read a paragraph. If youve ever been to the monkey house and one of those awful downscaled sues that smelled very intensely when you imagine Bernie Sanders probably smells, faintly, these particular monkeys, they jerk off and fling who all day. General using the same hand for both and they dont do a hell of a lot else and less theres mcdonalds. All day, jerk off, link crew, jerk, fling poop, jerk, fling, jerk, fling. Twitter basically. Twitter, a lot like that i think. I dont think social media is the cause of our current toxic and eight that were toxic or i can beverages use but our current distasteful political culture. It reveals it. Social media is like alcohol. It doesnt change you are underneath but it makes it, lowers the innovations and a willingness to express what you are. I used to live near this temple in new delhi in india, and deli is infested with monkeys. You cant mess with the monkey there for religious reasons. I got to really dislike the creatures because new york subway rats with funds and higher iq so makes him a little dangerous point this tribal elastic social media driven political culture reduces us and makes us less human. It brings out the inner monkey in people and causes in the eighth in kind of primitive that the self gratifying, ugly fashion. Host but hasnt social media about everyone to have a voice more than we did before . Guest and thats the problem, yes. That i dont need to voice. In theory its good as one is like to speak. Im a freespeech absolutist. What people are able to do with what to do but the truth we learned with not just social media but the internet in general is a lot of people dont have a lot to say. A lot of people wanted anything interesting or useful to add to the conversation but they still feel a need to participate. Thats we get the cultural talking points, cliches, conspiracy theories, all the rest of the stuff that fills up the space because people feel compelled to speak and i dont have anything really to say. This is an old idea. A british philosopher wrote about that give individually as a burden to some people who dont, who are not really well equipped to make the most of it but they still feel the demands of it and so that you like to need to participate as individuals, participate in the conversation, participate in this exchange but doing so is not something their particularly wellsuited for in that something actually particularly enjoy. Its more of a burden than an opportunity. Host who is the smallest minority that you refer . Guest the individual. Thats a line i stole from ayn rand. I took it from her because she doesnt deserve it. It was a good life but shes not a very good writer i dont think. Ill take that back. Choosing good writer who misused her talents. Couldve been maybe a very fine novelist but he wanted to write propaganda instead, and so i borrowed that from her, one of her better offerings. The problem with our culture right now is we cant interact with one another as individuals. We only interact as representative of war and tribal groups and hands them monkeylike proof fighting and such. Host who are the tribal groups . Guest team read and team blue. Roughly liberals and conservatives, roughly republicans and democrats. These are shorthands for broader social groups. Weve got, largely but not exclusively coastal, urban, left leaning progressive culture. Weve got a largely world exurban right leaning conservative culture. The conservatives feel like they had been robbed of power. They have been diminished and progresses to like they have been given enough because they live and what they believed to be the most important places that have an argument for that. One of the way things about conservatives, they spent all this time but lets make America Great again but the parts america federally successful and influential unlike Silicon Valley and wall street and things like that. They hate these places, and hollywood. So theres this sense of a zerosum status game between these groups. The president is from team read that means team blue somehow diminished and feels humiliated and at the present it from team blue that means team read feels the same thing. They go nuts. This is part of why we have these inexpressible swings from bush to clinton to bush to obama to donald trump of all people, and this is not the result of a political culture that is being driven by policy or by reason or anything else. It is pure tribalism and identity politics. Host we do seem to spend a lot of time being outraged today thank you we do. I think thats performance art, partly group therapy. I dont think anyone is as near as angry as a begin to be. They are angry about other things. Its largely status anxiety. A weird part of time for rich people. We are financially, physically, medically better off than ever but our status is more, its less fixed and used to be. You dont keep a job your whole life. You dont associate yourself with a Big Corporation and stay with it for 40 years. That lack of certainty makes people really nervous and anxious, and what people feel anxious about the status they look for new sources of status and mean, new sources to fix it. Religion isnt going to do it. Theres been a decline in religion life and family life. People are much more mobile. They settle on politics and this based tribal form of politics my team versus the other guys and source of meaning and status and a place in life whether values are played out and expressed here that is the source of the anchor. Its not because people really mad at whether the top stack with will be 39 or 34 . Host Kevin Williamson one of the things you say in your new book, the smallest minority, is that both regresses and nationalists basically come from the same text try to yell. Its the idea we gain value in groups rather than as individuals. Its a very primitive way of looking at the world. This isnt me calling people racist but the same i think intellectual shape as that idea. Come from the same place, the desire to find something of which to belong to give meaning to ones self, that is larger and broader and hopefully immortal or closer to it. Host you have a word i would ask you the definition, [inaudible] guest this come from the greek term, way back to plato and against before that big essential it means mob rule but its a particular kind of mob rule us about it i did what you just different because talk about mongrel people think about the crowds of people we have bn having Rights Convention and things like that. Its more when the mob links on institutions what is Government Agencies and businesses or chus or things like that. To do the bidding for them. To say we want to say the respectable what the law says, with rules are whats right, this is what we want and we expect these agents, his attentions to comply with it. We seen a lot of this in the emergence of the employer as a unit political discipline, what people lose their jobs having bad political ideas. This is especially important in the case of people like me or professional involved in the ideas but people are managers of starbucks and people work at fast food restaurants are people who have jobs that dont touch on Public Affairs or politics in any particular direct way, who nonetheless are being chased out of the jobs for having under print an unpopular political and social opinions. Host examples are the key because they make examples of the sorts of people and the other people just never express themselves. They learned to keep quiet. They learn to conform. With this terrible culture of aggressive conformism and intellectual homogeneity that makes it difficult for us to deal in a useful productive way with complex problems and the complex thinking. Host does the social media aspect of the mob and onto this groupthink . Guest sure. Its a loaded gun, right . Its a tool that enables either bad behavior of the behavior to be propagated more efficiently. Thats what the internet is. They can be used for good things are bad things like any other instrument, like any other piece of technology. Social media has secure structural things that make it all worth. People dont go there to learn things. They go there to get affirmation and to get affirmation, the angrier more personal more ad hominem more outrageous you are, and i know as a writer occasion i write something that will report an thoughtful and nobody reads it or smaller number of people read it. You know in the digital number, if people read a story. Every now and then i will write something angry, 1000 times as many people will read those stories. If youre looking for that feedback and as i said if youre guilty of the original sense of desire for popularity, then youre going to go that direction, you would be more outrageous, angrier, more emotional, more ad hominem because unfortunately that is what people tend to respond best to. Host have you been the target of a social media mob before . Guest i did sort of famously look at the atlantic for three days and was fired at the end of that time for having, welcome not really so much for my political ideas, although it was nominally over that period was more about again internal status gives of people taking this is not a conservative outlet and so if we hire this conservative hes going to elevate our status amount and we are thereby diminished. Dust with that was about at the atlantic. But i came up with all the ideas about abortion, ideas about Capital Punishment and transgender issues, those sorts of things. It wasnt one thing is going to be the other thing. It was less about it was less about my political ideas because i believe the New York Times wrote about that and no one called him to ask about my opinion, you got hired by the atlantic. Did you show up at the offices . Guest i did. I wasnt originally going to work from officers. Its in the watergate building. I live in texas and the plan for me was to work there. I i would spin some have any offices someone to washington and i spent i guess three days at the offices and i was fired over breakfast. Host what was your experience . Guest a lot of institutions like that, their strange because the culture divide on the stuff is very strongly generation. There were a lot of older very, very leftwing senior editors at the atlantic who were mystified by people calling for me to be fired over having rightwing political ideas. We knew you were a rightwing monitor when we hired you. Thats why youre here. The older folks on the staff were a lot less angry and outraged and all that sort of stuff goes largely knuckleheads in the 20s relatively small group of them i think. It was strange because none of the people in the atlantic, the situation at the atlantic was entirely driven by staff, not social media stuff that with the pretax but no one ever spoke to me about it. No one said its talk about this. Jeff goldberg was the editor their planned a meeting we would get together and talk about this sort of stuff. Right before it is supposed to happen he said i cant do this. I cant put you in front of this group. I said im ready to go. Lets do it. Lets throw down. That was about. Host what did you write that got you fired . Guest well, nominally it host had you written it prior . Guest i have written one article for the atlantic and it was about how libertarianism is an unpopular political idea that no one likes that much. That was totally controversial. It was about a discussion i had on twitter years and years to four and went work for the atlantic. Im opposed to abortion. I think abortion ought to be criminalized. Im also to Capital Punishment that i have argued in the past that if were going to Capital Punishment shouldnt do this weird creepy medical thing when we do it through the flinch action and we put them on a gurney, a hospital sort situation. If the state is going to take life life and should do so in forthrightly violent men and use old traditional form of Capital Punishment like hanging or firing squads or Something Like that. These things came together as kevin wants to hang women who have had abortions, which is not exactly a fair statement of my views on the issue, but i was out, who instigated the attack . Guest partly it was folks like media matters, these professional leftwing pressure organizations. Partly people on the staff and they were the more significant ones although i dont know who. Its a star chamber type of thing. Host you write in your newest book, the smallest minority, that social media is mob politics many heads. You also talk about something called instant culture. What is that . Guest its the ways in which we have lowered the amount of work we are willing to do to engage with culture. Its the displacement of books by twitter, the displacement of essays by one of 20 characters. The displacement of long commitments to do with political ideas, of the kinds of intellectual development with whats going on right now right this second, right this minute. Instant culture is kind of a substitute for real culture. Its a world of Reality Television and social media and instantaneous transmission of things that dont really last. Its this shallow, snarky, sarcasm driven way of this kind of mode of communication which i think can be fun and useful for short periods of time. But its like if you had a world in which political oneliners delivered on latenight comedy shows were the only form of communication, you would be losing something. I think we have moved that direction. Host quote communication is only incidental to social media. Guest yeah. Again, social media start about exchanging ideas. Its about getting nice feedback, about people paying attention to do. Attention must be paid. People go there for affirmation, confirmation, to be told theyre doing the right thing, to be told the people they dont like our evil and wrong and political, adolf hitler and all the rest of it. They dont go there to learn things. You dont go to twitter to say there were some interesting ideas about useful information in in a market economy and by socialism wasnt able to avail itself with i can Exchange Information therefore make Central Planning difficult. Thats not likely to facebook. At some go to twitter its why you go to books and i wish people would spend more time with books. Host we have a president who has used twitter once or twice. Guest yeah, we do. Host what does that say to you . Guest against my last book before this one was called the case against trump which was ineffective apparently. I think donald trump is the perfect exemplar in some ways of the moment in which we are in because obviously nobody, no station being voted for donald trump because of his subtle and sophisticated policies. That is not why people went to donald trump. There are fine reasons to vote for donald trump or i wouldnt have myself but if youre conservative you say okay, donald versus hillary, okay fine. Thats a defensible idea. But people were to trump as a mascot. Trump as a wrecking ball and trump as a tribune, that there in washington and new york, places like that which of course trump lives on central park, nevermind that at the moment. And everything you off and condescend to you and im going to go there and make things right. Im going to do so by writing mean things about them onto it and giving them demeaning nicknames and things like that. So people who voted for this guy and made him president because they like the way he gave people schoolyard nicknames and they like the way that he trolls people on twitter and that sort of thing. Thats still why they like him. This is why im skeptical about the valley of democracy in some ways. Democracies useful for a utilitarian matter because its a substitute we have for war and become evident. But it can also bring up what our Founding Fathers called the passions, and he didnt like the word passion. They didnt like the word democracy to go back and read john adams. They were worried about it. Trump is a mascot of the democracy on adams warned us about. Host quote, personal democracy is a convenience. It has suffice the chimps in electric and gives us an alternative to ritual combat for the chimps in office. Guest yeah. So theres certain decision threat to make c