In 2008, we were told that electing Barack Obama president would put an end to centuries of American racism — and America did just that. And…yet, “unexpectedly,” racial tensions have only increased. During our interview, Harry discusses:
How a now-legendary sign at a 2009 Tea Party rally influenced the title of his new book.
How the Romney campaign should respond to cries of…”That’s racist!”, which will accompany every successful attack they have on on Mr. Obama.
Harry’s take on recent events, such as the media’s Trayvon Martin fiasco, John Derbyshire’s recent self-immolation, plus his thoughts on some of the leading black conservatives of the day.
And much more. Click here to listen:
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(21 minutes long; 19.2 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6 MB lo-fi edition.)
Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.
If you enjoyed Part I of our interview with Jonah Goldberg concerning his new book, The Tyranny of Clichés, yesterday, here’s the concluding half. In this segment, Jonah discusses how the left uses phrases such as “diversity” and “social justice” to shortcut debate, and how Bill Clinton used the phrase “the middle class” to position himself as a very different Democrat than those of the George McGovern-era:
GOLDBERG: This is one of the more interesting ones to try and think through, you know. You have—Bill Clinton’s—the genius of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign was that—and it’s really shocking how forthright he was—he talked about how he basically was going to be the president for the middle class. And he used “middle class” in this really sort of brilliant dog whistle way. Because he was relying on survey data from Stan Greenberg and others that showed that something like ninety-five percent of Americans consider themselves middle class. Right?
So he’s basically appealing to the vanity of pretty much all of Americans, while seeming like he is doing something special for them. And in the process, he talks about middle class as if—in this sort of dog whistle way, where as if it’s—you know, middle class of Middle America, traditional values and all of the rest, about bourgeois, hard-working, Horatio Alger work ethic middle class.
And that was a code that was a way for him to appeal to the white working class in a way that Democratic candidates for several elections before him had failed to do; that he was a different kind of Democrat. You know, the whole welfare needs to be reformed as we know it; the government needs to give a hand up not a hand out; and all the rest. This was language coded towards appealing towards constituencies that the Democrats had been losing.
But at the same time—and ever since then, this has been the path that liberals have taken. You know, Al Gore; John Kerry; Barack Obama, they’ve all used the same argument, the same sort of language to appeal to the middle class. But in fact, what they’re doing is they’re proposing policies that undermine the middle class, that sort of sap the independence, the entrepreneurial spirit, the moral capital of the middle class.
We now live in a country where sixty percent of the households get more from the federal government than they put in. We now live in a country where the Democratic Party has gone a long way towards fulfilling its long-term dream of turning citizens into clients of the state.
And so they talk about middle class as if they’re appealing to sort of homespun cultural values and all of the rest, but the economic agenda that they’re selling is really one basically of widespread institutionalized bribery.
Crony corporatism, you might say — which brings us to Jonah’s previous book, Liberal Fascism. Jonah discuses how it was received by liberals, historians, and liberal historians, near the conclusion of our interview:
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(20 minutes long; 18.4 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6 MB lo-fi edition.)
Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.
A transcript of Part II of our interview begins on the next page. (Part I’s transcript can be found in that segment’s blog post.)
Perhaps the opening quote in Jonah Goldberg’s new book, The Tyranny of Clichés, from George Orwell — “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men” — unduly influenced me. But as I joked with Jonah at the start of our two-part interview, when I first read the galleys of The Tyranny of Clichés back in February, my first thought, despite how pretentious it sounds, was that whereas Liberal Fascism was the equivalent of Emanuel Goldstein’s “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” the alternative history book within the book of George Orwell’s 1984, The Tyranny of Clichés was sort of like the Cliff Notes to the Newspeak Dictionary.
As to the tyrannical nature of cliches, and how they’re used to steal bases in political arguments, Jonah writes in his new book:
I started to notice that the same thing happens in writing, on TV, in books; people invoke these clichés as placeholders for arguments not won, ideas not fully understood. At the same time, the same sorts of people cavalierly denounce far more thought-out positions because they’re too “ideological.” Indeed, in America, we train people to be skeptical of ideology. College students in particular are quick to object with a certain gotcha tone: “That sounds like an ideological statement.”
Such skepticism doesn’t bother me. Indeed, I encourage it. The problem is that while our radar is great at spotting in-bound ideological statements, clichés sail right through. People will say “It is better that ten men go free than one innocent man go to jail” and then stop talking, as if they’ve made an argument simply by saying that. They will take the slippery slope at face value. They’ll say “Diversity is strength,” as if it means something, and “Violence never solved anything,” as if that were not only plausible but so true that no further explication is required. “We are only as free as the least free among us” they’ll proclaim, misquoting Martin Luther King, Jr., or Elie Wiesel, or was it Captain Jean-Luc Picard? But of course, this isn’t even remotely true. It is a very nice thing to say. It’s a noble thing to try to live by. But it’s in no meaningful sense true. Rather, it is the sort of thing people assert in the hopes that it will win them uncontested ground in an argument.
Sometimes the problem is simply lazy thinking. But in other cases the lazy thinking merely creates the vulnerability for radical thinking. Some incredibly ideological ideas simply ride into your head like the dream spelunkers in the movie Inception— setting up, working their way through your programming— all because they’re wrapped in the protective coating of clichés.
Click below to listen to the podcast:
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(16.5 minutes long; 15.2 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 5 MB lo-fi edition.)
Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.
Watch for Part II of our interview tomorrow, in which Jonah will discuss the entomology of liberal clichés such as “diversity” and “social justice,” and how Bill Clinton used the phrase “The Middle Class” as a cliché he rode to victory in 1992. Plus a look back at how Liberal Fascism was received by the right, the left, and by historians.
A transcript of Part I of our interview begins on the next page. (Part II’s transcript will appear tomorrow.)
If you haven’t seen Whit Stillman’s latest film, Damsels in Distress, over at National Review Online,Thomas Hibbs has a great review:
Stillman has a knack for dialogue that exposes hollow, modern clichés. Concerning the supposition that great works of the past are irrelevant to the contemporary world, consider this exchange from Metropolitan. When a male character asserts, “Almost everything Jane Austen wrote, looked at from today’s perspective, is absurd,” a young woman counters, “Has it ever occurred to you that today looked at from Jane Austen’s perspective would look even worse?” On the admonition that the most important thing in life is to be true to oneself, consider this confessional speech from one of the characters in Disco:
Do you know that Shakespearean admonition “To thine own self be true”? It’s premised on the idea that “thine own self” is pretty good, being true to which is commendable. What if “thine own self” is not so good? What if it’s pretty bad? Would it better, in that case, not to be true to “thine own self”? See? That’s my situation.
Much of the humor in Damsels arises from the arcane, oddly formal way the young women speak and from their naïve idealism. Rose, for example, has picked up a British accent and expresses her suspicion of nearly every male by accusing him of being a “playboy-operator type.” One of the ways Violet and her friends show their commitment to others is through their volunteer work at a Suicide Prevention Center. As they approach the center in one scene, Violet picks up the sign reading “Prevention” and relocates it between the words “Suicide” and “Center” and comments, “We’re trying to make a difference in people’s lives. And one way to do that is to prevent them from killing themselves. . . . Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Prevention is nine-tenths the cure?’ Well, in the case of suicide, it’s actually ten-tenths.”
Read the whole thing, including one of the male students’ ruminations of “The Decline of Decadence.”
For a more palatable series of food — and drink — recipes than the topic we’ve been discussing for the past week, I have an interview over at the PJ Lifestyle blog with Judy Gelman and Peter Zheutlin, the co-authors of The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook: Inside the Kitchens, Bars, and Restaurants of Mad Men, available on dead tree and Kindle. Light up a Lucky, break out the Canadian Club, and tune in here to listen.
But it is the answer to some questions, of course — as when it put paid to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Emerson said, “Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.” A fine sentiment, but unfortunately not true — or not strictly true. Again, the Second World War is instructive. And you might say that understanding can lead a person, or a nation, to see that violence is the only way to put down a threat, and thereby keep or attain peace.
* * * *
It was widely thought that Mrs. Reagan wanted her husband to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in the worst way. And this had some Cold Warriors alarmed — worried that the president would make harmful concessions, in order to curry favor with “world opinion.” Indeed, “trying for the Nobel Peace Prize” became an expression of scorn and concern in hawkish circles. For some, a “Nobel” kind of peace meant, and still means, a paper or superficial peace, not a real one. As he commenced his diplomacy in the Arab–Israeli conflict, Tony Blair said to George W. Bush, “If I win the Nobel Peace Prize, you will know I have failed.” That is maybe the most stinging criticism of the Norwegian committee ever made.
Nordlinger discusses the history of the Nobel Prize and some of its more ignominious recent winners, such as Yasser Arafat, Al Gore, and, seemingly five minutes after taking office, Barack Obama, in this wide-ranging 13-minute interview. He also discusses the current culture war being raged by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner in his bid for re-election.
Click below to listen to the podcast:
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(13 minutes long; 12.5 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 4 MB lo-fi edition.)
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In retrospect hitching his star to Drudge was a brilliant decision. This was hardly a given in 1995. Political blogger Mickey Kaus, someone who understood the power of the Internet, recalled, “I first met Breitbart when he showed up at a panel I was on at UCLA. He told me he was the guy who posted items for Matt Drudge, and I immediately realized he was the most powerful person in the room. Nobody could understand why I was sucking up to the crazed hippie kid in shorts.”
The power of Drudge Report comes from the large audience it has generated. By 2007 it was regularly attracting over three million unique visits. The average visitor spent an incredible one hour and six minutes on the site, an eternity in Internet terms. The average visitor went to the site 20 times a month. The Washington Post, a popular link for Drudge, noted in 2006 that its “largest driver of traffic is Matt Drudge.”
Flash-forward to the fall of 2004, and Andrew’s behind-the-scenes power was very much in evidence, this time changing the face of television news. As Scott Johnson of Power Line noted at the start of the month:
I learned in the course of [my week-long visit to Israel in 2007 with Breitbart] that it was Andrew who changed my life in 2004, linking to our “Sixty-First Minute” post early that afternoon with the screaming siren on Drudge. He confided that Matt Drudge did not like blogs, but that he (Andrew) was a fan. On September 9, 2004, he was following the action online. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for everything.
But along the way, Breitbart also took detours into other ventures, such as helping to build the architecture of the Huffington Post, and co-writing, with Mark Ebner, their 2004 book Hollywood Interrupted. As I mention in the podcast below, I met Andrew in person for the first time the week of November 14th 2005, during the launch week of PJ Media in New York. After we both had returned to California, on November 28, 2005, I interviewed him by telephone for an article I was working on for Tech Central Station, now called Ideas In Action TV.com, aboutHollywood’s box office woes, which was published a week later and titled, a la Woody Allen, “Hollywood Ending.”
I loved Hollywood, Interrupted, and I was certainly aware of Andrew’s backstage work at the Drudge Report and the celebrity-oriented Huffington Post. So I definitely wanted to get his take on how the movie industry, a medium that we both loved, had been utterly transformed, and not necessarily for the better, since its golden era of the 1930s through the mid-1960s.
This interview was originally recorded onto a cheap mono tape recorder, originally for the purpose of pulling quotes for my Tech Central Station article. And while I’ve done a considerable amount of restoration work (employing both extensive amounts of Izotope’s RX audio restoration software and the noise gate plug-in built into Cakewalk’s Sonar program), it’s still much cruder sounding than the podcasts and radio shows I’ve produced for PJ Media in the years since. But with Andrew’s passing, I thought it would be worth sharing. So apologies for the sound quality, but I think hearing Andrew riffing on the topic of how the Hollywood of old became, as he would say, Interrupted, is well worth listening to.
There are several observations that Andrew makes here that have withstood the test of time. Early on, there’s a grimly hilarious remark by Andrew concerning his ailing grandmother, who emitted a piercing primal scream of terror, whenever anyone attempted to change the TV channel from her beloved CBS, the only channel she apparently ever watched, in sharp contrast to today’s world of hundreds of cable and satellite channels and millions of Websites and blogs. At about 17 minutes into the interview, he mentions the punitive liberalism and growing nihilism of Hollywood’s product, the latter of which being a topic I discussed extensively with Thomas Hibbs last month, the author of the definitive look at Hollywood nihilism, Shows About Nothing. And two minutes later, Andrew makes a great observation on the popularity of today’s show-biz-oriented reality TV shows as a sort of payback by the American people for today’s drug-addled screw-up stars abandoning the glamour they maintained during Hollywood’s earlier era. Near the end of the interview, you can sort of hear the Big Hollywood Website starting to coalesce in Andrew’s mind; a topic he and I would discuss a few years later on PJM’s Sirius-XM radio show in 2009.
A transcript of this interview, which I originally typed up in 2005 as raw material for my Tech Central Station article, and thus paraphrases some of Andrew’s more stream of consciousness remarks, follows on the next page.
Click below to listen to the podcast:
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(28 minutes long; 26 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 8 MB lo-fi edition.)
Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.
At his American Power blog, Donald Douglas links to yet another terrific observation by the late Andrew Breitbart.
And since I haven’t linked to it here, Breitbart was the topic of the first half my interview with another Andrew — Andrew Klavan — in a podcast we recorded on Sunday, and now online at the PJ Lifestyle blog.
Col. Austin Bay, longtime contributor to PJM and the co-author of A Quick and Dirty Guide to War, has a new book out titled Ataturk, Lessons in Leadership from the Greatest General of the Ottoman Empire. As Austin says during our interview, “You can make the case that Ataturk was really the 20th century’s most successful revolutionary. It certainly wasn’t Vladimir Lenin, it wasn’t Mao Tse-tung, it wasn’t Ho Chí Minh. It wasn’t Gandhi. I think it was Ataturk. It’s not that his legacy is all settled inside contemporary Turkey, because there are moderate Islamists that are testing that secular legacy of Ataturk. But he certainly established what has grown into a modern state.”
Don’t miss Austin discussing Ataturk on the C-Span2 channel this weekend. C-Span2 is covering the Texas Book Festival, and is scheduled to run the following panel at 4:00 PM eastern on Sunday:
4-5pm ET: Panel on the Arab Spring with Austin Bay, “Ataturk,” Robin Wright, “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World,” and James Zogby, “Arab Voices.”
In the meantime, click below to listen to our interview:
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(21 minutes long; 20MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6 MB lo-fi edition.
If your browser/Internet connection balks at the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, click on the player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.
For any of our recent podcasts at the PJM Lifestyle blog, start here and keep scrolling.
At the Lifestyle blog, I have a fun interview with Rob Long of Ricochet, National Review, and numerous television sitcoms, including a little-known cult hit called Cheers, recorded while Rob was driving up to northern California this past weekend.
Among the topics discussed:
The CEO of Starbucks has called for an end to partisan rancor. Given that the price of a monthly Ricochet membership is tied to the price of grande latte at the flagship Starbucks in Seattle, does this signal a moratorium on new podcasts?
Nobody writes a doomsday tome because they want it to come true. From an author’s point of view, the apocalypse is not helpful: the bookstores get looted and the collapse of the banking system makes it harder to cash the royalty check. But Cassandra’s warnings were cursed to go unheeded, and so it seems are mine. Last time ’round, I wrote that Europe was facing a largely self-inflicted perfect storm that threatened the very existence of some of the oldest nation-states in the world. My warning proved so influential that America decided to sign up for the same program but supersized. Heigh-ho.
As I said to Mark at the top of our 20 minute interview this morning, I received a copy of his book from his publicist on Wednesday, the Dow Jones dropped 512 points on Thursday, and S&P shorted America’s credit rating on Friday.
All this and much more of the most fun you’ll have contemplating the Spenglerian collapse of a nation near you. (And watch this space for a transcript of the interview, hopefully online tomorrow. UPDATE:Transcript added here.)
Click here to listen:
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(21 minutes long; 19MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this week’s show to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6 MB lo-fi edition. And for any of our recent podcasts at the new PJM Lifestyle blog, start here and keep scrolling.)
Update (11:59 PM PDT): A couple of people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio. Click below on the player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip. Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.
Over at the new PJM Lifestyle blog, I have an interview with Glenn Reynolds to discuss the state of the DIY culture that he explored in An Army of Davids, and why it’s progressing, while old media, in the form of Hollywood and the recording industry is regressing in quality. Plus a look at the British phone hacking scandal, the state of the 2012 election, and much more. Click here to listen.
Note: No puppies were blended in the making of this interview.
Taken from this week’s edition of PJM Political, I interview Gary Bruce, the author of the new book from Oxford University Press, The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. In this 19-minute long interview, Bruce, an associate professor of history at University of Waterloo in Ontario explains the inner workings of the secret police of the former East Germany in the 60th anniversary year of their founding. He’ll discuss researching in their labyrinthian Kafka-esque archives, their complex web of informants, and the uneasy coexistence their surviving former members have with the now unified Germany.
Duane Lester of All American Blogger and Radio For Conservatives recently interviewed me about the history of Ed Driscoll.com, a topic I know just a little bit about. It’s an hour-long podcast; tune in here if you’d like to listen.
(Incidentally, greetings from 30,000 feet, as this and the last few blog posts were delivered via American Airlines’ onboard Wi-Fi system.)
Since CNBC’s Rick Santelli first suggested a Chicago Tea Party to protest President Obama’s plans to “stimulate” the economy and bailout homeowners through unrestrained government spending, organized demonstrations have been occurring across the fruited plain. In fact, as Glenn Reynolds reported moments ago, there’s one happening today in Cincinnati.
Unfortunately, unless you frequent conservative websites, you’d have no idea that such events were being staged.
Of course–because the modern job of the MSM is largely to keep news out, not let it in. Or like the Swift Vets, the John Edwards scandal and Charles Freeman, debate stories on the op-ed pages that the general public is familiar with thanks to blogs and new media, even though MSM’s news departments never bothered to report them.
Update: Trust me, if it was 2003, and/or there was a Republican in the White House and/or this was an ANSWER-organized protest, this photo would be all over the MSM. On the other hand, as Glenn Reynolds writes, “Yeah, it’s kind of cool the way people are sending me coverage in realtime via Blackberry and cellphone. Somebody should write a book about this phenomenon…” Heh, indeed.™
As we’ve discussed numerous times around here, when states go from red, or even purple, to hard core blue–residents and businesses votewiththeirfeet. (Even in the bigbluestates overseas.)
For a sneak preview of today’s PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio, check out the podcast of the blogger round-table recorded immediately after Tuesday night’s debate, featuring:
Austin Bay interviews Steve Green, Glenn Reynolds, Jennifer Rubin, and–live from Denver International Airport–James Lileks. In a half-hour interview recorded by yours truly earlier today, they look back at the then just recently announced Sarah Palin pick by John McCain, Barack Obama’s speech last night, and the gestalt of the Democratic Convention in Denver.
Ten minutes of video, 55-minutes of satellite radio, 30-minutes of podcasting, and all for the price of your broadband connection; just another week here at Ed Driscoll.com.
Seriously–be sure to check out the latter two items: Steve Green energetically ties together the disparate elements of this week’s PJM Political, and Austin Bay interviews General David Petraeus, who phoned in from Baghdad.
(For any podcasting boffins in the audience, here’s some gear talk: because of the poor phone connection, Gen. Petraeus initially sounded more like a call from here until I applied a massive amount of Izotope’s RX audio restoration plug-in, followed by compressing the daylights out of the recording with their Ozone mastering plug-in.)
How a now-legendary sign at a 2009 Tea Party rally influenced the title of his new book.
But along the way, Breitbart also took detours into other ventures, such as helping to build the architecture of the Huffington Post, and co-writing, with Mark Ebner, their 2004 book 
Col. 
I said to Mark at the top of our 20 minute interview this morning, I received a copy of his book from his publicist on Wednesday, the Dow Jones dropped 512 points on Thursday, and S&P shorted America’s credit rating on Friday.
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