[Juliane Camfield] Good evening, everyone.
My name is Juliane Camfield. I'm the
director here at Deutsches Haus at NYU
and it is my great pleasure to
welcome you to our panel discussion,
"The Politics of Language with Siri Hustvedt,
Masha Gessen, and Uli Baer," who will moderate.
This is our third
and last panel in our conference,
"What's Going On: Reflections on Truth,
Democracy, Politics, and Language"
Yes, and... what the hell is going?
And please, you guys, you will
edit this out of the tape [laughter],
and we're taping this so please
leave if you don't want to be taped–
Now is your last chance.
So, what the hell is going on? I don't know
and that's why these guys are here
because I don't know, but I think
many of us and perhaps also
our distinguished panelists–but I hope not–
but I think many of us have felt a strong
and profound sense of discombobulation
since last year and perhaps even
the really prescient ones since before
November 8th or November 9th last year
and together with that sense of discombobulation,
a sense of experiencing, being,
and perhaps being lost
in the "upside-down" world,
and I think
maybe this is why "Stranger Things"
is so popular these days.
"Stranger Things", if you don't get the reference,
is a bizarre TV series that you should be watching.
I think it's interesting, and there's an
"upside-down" world which is
very similar to what we live in currently.
There's also some kind of weird
monster lurking about and
I feel in our parallel universe that we
have been experiencing recently,
we think we have a better sense of who
or what that monster is,
but are we correct? I don't know.
But, what role does
language play in our strange new world?
I don't know that either, but again, I
hope light will be shed by the
distinguished thinkers, authors, and
panelists here tonight.
But one thing that came to my mind
as I was walking my daughter–my young daughter–
to school this morning, and she had a
spelling test coming up which focused on
homonyms which I thought was rather
strange in second grade but here you go.
This is an advanced country,
the education system's excellent
so seven-year-olds learn about homonyms,
and she's having a hard time with the homonyms
and the homonyms that mostly
troubled her were "brake" and "break"–
B, R, A, K, E, and B, R, E, A, K, 
and I'm a bad speller in English so
that for me is completely...
just saying these things is difficult.
So she's confused about it,
we're rushing to school,
I'm thinking of this event, and I'm trying to explain to her how
to spell this and I'm saying,
"Okay, think about the bike brake and
think about the bike breaking or not breaking,"
but she's like, "my bike is braking!"
[laughter]
Anyway, so we had these conversations
and then I'm like, "Okay, think about the teacup breaking,"
and she's like, "which teacup?"
Anyway, so we have this conversation,
by the end–and I will get to my point, bear with me–
by the end of the conversation
I can't spell either word anymore,
she can't spell it, I think she
will have flunked the spelling test
and I'm utterly confused which of the
two signifies which.
I think this is pretty much what
we experience now
when we read the news, listen to people–
What are they saying?
What are they talking about?
They're using words we think we know,
but they seem to mean something else,
or we understand something else,
or
it is just really discombobulating.
So, this is the long and the short
of my mini introduction
so we'll all think about how to spell these
words and we'll find out what they mean.
In the meantime, let me thank
a few institutions and individuals,
the DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service,
especially Nina Lemmens and Michael Thomanek
for the continuing support;
of course, our distinguished speakers,
to make the time in their busy schedules
to be here tonight and share their
thoughts on a serious topic, even though
I'm making fun of it, but I just like to
do that;
and my wonderful staff
especially Sarah, it's been a pleasure to
work with you on this conference.
This has been a lot of work and
difficulties and challenges,
which we will share with you
later over a glass of wine
because there are some people
we'll badmouth–no, never,
and I want to thank our unpaid interns,
our wonderful student workers,
I want to thank you, the audience, for
coming here tonight.
Remember you can also learn German here at Deutsches Haus if you "DER," D, E, R,
or if you want to "viel" good, V, I, E, L,
as our slogans say,
so enroll for a class for the holidays because
the holidays will be miserable anyway
[laughter]
So there.
[laughter]
and also, speaking of the holidays,
we have Siri's and Masha's
last book on sale here,
so for $20, a special discount price for your
loved ones for the holidays
to depress them even further, read those books,
and now it is my great pleasure
to hand things over
to my distinguished colleague and good
friend of Deutsches Haus, Uli Baer,
who will moderate the event and please
just as a reminder to our panelists
and also to you, the audience, please
speak into the mic as we're taping this,
this will only be caught for the next
five years that the earth will still exist,
if you speak into the mic [laughter]
so thank you.
Please welcome our panelists!
[applause]
[Uli Baer] Thank you, Juliane.
So I'd like to second Juliane, thanks to the DAAD
and Deutsches Haus and the staff,
thank you for inviting me to moderate this panel.
I don't think I'll be needed very much but
I want to thank, first of all,
Masha and Siri for coming, thank you so much.
Both of your...when you publish books, they are events.
I love "What I Loved", I've loved it for a long time,
I loved your book of essays recently,
and Masha, I have your book right here,
"The Future is History"
and I grew up in West Berlin, where
Soviet Union was a very menacing and strange entity
and I'm not drawn to read about it, in a way,
and this is post-Soviet Union Russia.
It is an incredible book, and
I really want to congratulate you.
It's so deeply engaging and moving,
and to capture
a society going through
a transformation that was so hopeful and yet
somehow slowly closes in, in a kind of
from one level of lack of information about itself
to another level of misinformation.
So, maybe we'll start there, 
and I want to thank the audience.
The other option tonight was to go to
see Thomas Adès' 'The Exterminating Angel'
at the Metropolitan Opera, which I saw last week.
Thomas Adès is a friend of NYU. 
It is his opera, it's the Buñuel film
where a bourgeois dinner party is
trapped and can't leave for quite a long time
- this won't happen tonight -
but it's a bit this kind of strange feeling of being trapped in a situation that you can't escape from.
And part of what we're trying to do tonight is to
see what happens when language is being abused,
or used in ways that don't quite seem to
 jive with how we would assume it should work.
So maybe, Siri, I'll start with you. 
You wrote in the introduction to your last book
how the context in which we 
acquire knowledge changes continually.
When you read new things, you learn new things it changes.
Can you...if we think about the context today, 
there's always been a suspicion of language.
Language has always been used,
and abused, there has always been lying,
there's been falsehood and there's been
deception in language.
Is there something that you think that makes it a bit 
more urgent or different? We can start right there.
[Siri Hustvedt] Yes. I mean there's there's no question that
I am as shocked and discombobulated
as many of my peers.
In other words, I do have a sense that something has happened
in the the culture that is
not necessarily new in the annals of human history,
but there's been a turn.
And this is a little...
Do you...does everyone here remember the 'Pizzagate' thing?
Well, after this happened
- this person who ran into the pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. with a gun -
I started to do a little
research on what I was mentioning
earlier when we were talking,
that I have a sense that there's an epistemological crisis.
You know, how do we know what we know?
And how does that man get into the
pizza parlor?
Right? What is it about belief systems that makes it possible?
Now he was - I also looked up him - he was not well.
He had run over someone not long before.
He was clearly in an unsteady state.
But he did believe what he read.
And when you go into it, you see that
one of the clues about this "ring"
was an icon
that resembled an icon apparently that
pederasts use to communicate.
Now, whether this is actually a sign or not, I don't know.
But that was how this engine got going.
So what I - and then I went on to
and these things are closely connected
to some of the evangelical propaganda.
And once you move through these different epistemologies, if you will,
you begin to see that the Earth is
moving beneath your feet, right?
So, many people here have an idea,
 we have a kind of consensual notion
of what knowledge is, what we believe, what a fact is.
We have a tendency to accept recent scientific
knowledge, for example,
to admire...
I don't know, a well-written scholarly essay
about this or that.
But what has happened
is that the ground has always been
multiple,
but now it's shifted
so you really have completely separate
epistemological methods, if you will, existing at the same time.
And it's not within an intellectual framework.
It's...out there.
[Masha Gessen] You know, I'm actually going to argue with you a little.
[Hustvedt] Oh, please! I'm so happy when people argue with me!
[Gessen] I agree with your conclusion, but I think that the story of
Pizzagate is actually much more depressing than that.
Because it's not... it's not pure craziness.
It's not the icon, right.
So that pizza parlor belongs to a man, 
and I forget his name now,
but he was for 10 years the partner of David Brock.
David Brock is the author of "Blinded by the Right."
So he was a, uh, Republican activist and fundraiser,
who then saw the light and became a Democratic fundraiser
and wrote this book "Blinded by the Right."
And he's a major fundraiser for the Democratic Party 
and a major organizer.
And so the connection was clear.
And, you know, the reason I say that 
it's more depressing is because
you know, David Brock is real, his partner is real,
the assumption that all gay men are pedophiles is real
and it's just half a step to thinking
that Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of the basement of the of that pizza parlor.
But that kind of conspiracy thinking is becoming endemic.
[Hustvedt] Right, right.
[Gessen] It's not just the pizza parlor and I wish it were just the icon, right.
[Hustvedt] No I, I think...
[Gessen] I wish that there were fewer dots to connect.
But there are enough dots to connect for somebody who has a particular view of reality
that it seems almost inevitable that they got connected.
[Hustvedt] Yes, I think that's it and actually 
when you're following these sites
what happens is that it reveals a kind of logic.
In other words, there's a kind of underlying logic
which is very similar, by the way,
to what happens in schizophrenia.
That you're, you know, you step out
of your house and you see a car
and you read the license plate,
and it is bringing you meanings.
You're interpreting the numbers and the letters.
And, you know, to be devil's advocate,
to some degree, all interpretation...
all interpretation,
all language, if you will, if we're talking about language,
is a form of what they call
in neurology, a "confabulation."
Right, 'confabulation' is when you have a
brain injury, and something happens to you,
and you actually don't have,
at that moment, the cognitive abilities to respond normally,
so you make up a big story. Yeah!
[Baer] Let me just jump in. In terms of what
you are talking about,
let's say there's one story out there,
and then someone believes that
and then we're sitting here and we sort of think
"Really? Hillary Clinton ran this ring? That doesn't seem likely."
Could you talk a little bit...what are the authorities or
the referential functions in these kinds
of different language games.
So they have different operative, you know, they're operating different things,
and maybe I don't read the same websites you do.
Sort of what is... where is the authority?
And I'm quite interested in...
well there is authority and institutions, real authority
in, you know, offices and people
who are elected officials, et cetera,
or have certain kinds of power, 
and then there's public opinion.
And I wonder if something has shifted with
the shifting landscape of the media and public opinion.
That the public opinion is a very powerful thing.
It's actually quite interesting that public opinion may be
as powerful or more powerful than even the state,
in a way, in controlling what people think, 
or influencing them.
But if you could talk about what would be the authority. You both write scientific articles
or about science, so there's a kind of belief
in fact finding, evidence-based, proved verifiability.
So how do you verify such a story?
We can move away from this particular story
but what do you actually refer to?
Do you go to the correct website
 and then you know the truth?
You read much, I guess, and you know?
[laughter]
That's always a good first impulse!
[Hustvedt] But for a journalist this is something...
you work in this,
I think you should really answer that.
[Gessen] So... it is actually very close to what I've been
thinking through like for the last few days.
Specifically, which is that there's...
we're witnessing yet another period of a death of expertise, right?
And you know we're seeing it in government and it's very intentional.
You know, Donald Trump appointed people to run each agency
who were opposed to the function, 
to the mission of that agency.
But also who were explicitly incompetent, right?
I mean he could have...
now I'm blanking on the name of the neurosurgeon who's running...
[Audience member] Ben Carson.
[Gessen] Thank you.
See, so he could have appointed Ben Carson, 
you know, to run Health and Human Services,  right?
And he probably would
have been just as destructive.
But to appoint him to run HUD is... 
I mean it's not only clear his sort of racist
assumption, but it's also yet another
gesture of...
sort of killing expertise, right?
And you know, one of my
favorite stories of course about the
Trump administration is the the story of
the inaugural cake that was the exact
copy of Obama's inaugural cake, 
but was also made of styrofoam right?
[Hustvedt] No one could eat it.
[Gessen] So it's like...the perfect...
the perfect metaphor for the Trump administration,
which is that it's a copy of the real thing
and it is not suitable for performing the function
that it's supposed to perform, right?
And only three inches of it was sheet cake,
and I think that was an accident, right?
And the Obama cake was cake all the way through.
But I think we're also witnessing death of expertise
on the opposite side right? And I've...
the reason that I've actually been
thinking about it, because like what I just said about the Trump administration is obvious, right?
But I've, you know...
I rail against the Russia conspiracy-theorizing, and
I've been in correspondence for the last couple of weeks
with a prominent public intellectual, who keeps telling me that I'm wrong about Russia.
And it kind of boggles my mind
because, like, I will tell him something, 
you know, just point to sort of, certain facts,
and he'll...
and he'll say "but no! that's not what you're saying!"
I'm like, "I can read the text and you can't,"
[Hustvedt laughing]
[Hustvedt] Not a Russian speaker? 
[Gessen] No, not a Russian speaker, no.
I have studied this stuff and you haven't,
and really, like, I can't argue with you about this stuff like,
you can't argue facts,
but this is not, you know, some sort of outlier
This is really, like, a prominent academic.
[Baer] Could you say like, where was expertise located?
[Hustvedt] Yes, see that's a good question
[Baer] So it's kind of interesting, I think you're right and I think it's so...
so because if not expert, but what do you
think the experts would have -- you could have an expert and
someone is saying, "you're not really an
expert anymore."
[Gessen] Right.
[Baer] Because there's opinion out there or...
[Gessen] Well and because we, you know, we've...
we've discredited the academy because it's
it's coddled and cloistered and, uh,
and blind to the world.
I think that we, in the media, have actually
in sort of, in beating ourselves in
the chest post-election,
have done further damage to trust in the media.
And I think it's...actually, it hasn't been fact-based.
There's sort of...
this very common trope that we have two bubbles: 
the left-wing bubble and the right-wing bubble
That is not true!
Right? There's a right-wing bubble and if you look at...and there's plenty of data on this,
if you look at media consumption by a
majority of people in this country,
it's varied, right?
A majority of people in this country are routinely exposed to
opinions that they don't share, right?
That is the opposite of being in a bubble. 
[Hustvedt] Right, right.
[Gessen] And then a minority of people in this country consume Breitbart and Fox
and nothing else...
[Hustvedt] Right.
[Gessen]...and are never exposed to opinions that they don't share.
[Hustvedt] Right.
[Masha Gessen] And there's a difference, right?
And that's a classic example of a false equivalency,
but it's undermining the authority of
people who are, sort of, you know, nobly
exercising self-criticism.
[Hustvedt] Well yeah, I think, there, you know...
it's extremely interesting, you know, how it's
presented right?
It's presented as two isolated camps
that are at war, if you will, and, actually,
the right is continually propagating this idea,
and I think you're absolutely right: it's wrong
because people in the middle
I guess, and on the Left, have a tendency to read around,
to read more around.
But then you have to ask yourself: so what...
first of all, anti-intellectualism is something hardly new to the United States.
We have the oldest...well,
we have a big strain, and you can compare it to
Europeans very easily.
The respect for intellectuals here has been in the
toilet since, you know... 
yes, we did have some intellectuals there at the start
and we've had some very good ones along
the way,
but the general populace attitude
towards intellectuals is very low.
[Gessen] I guess I'm not really talking about that,
I'm talking about
the, sort of, an epidemic of academics
writing about, you know, how...
how coddled their students are, 
how, you know, how...
[Hustvedt] But there's both sides of that.
I mean I've read also lots of, lots of
defenses of the thing.
I think that's a much more mixed... 
I think the conservative media really
pushes those politically correct articles.
I think the Academy is much more mingled,
but then there's the question of, 
what really drives ideas?
Right, I mean what is it that...
I mean, why are some people attracted to certain ideas
and not to others?
Now you can have lots of facts,
we could have many, many facts.
We know that because I spent a lot of time doing
what I call "reading against myself."
Now, it's not usually reading the
Pizzagate stuff, I mean I have a tendency, like...
There was a moment when I understood 
I really had to get into
symbolic logic to understand how
analytical philosophers were thinking
about certain problems, 
and if I didn't learn it, I was going to be sunk.
Now I have no natural inclination
towards symbolic logic.
I happen to be now happy I'm on the other side of it,  
but that...
the point is, I am not natural...I don't 
gravitate towards this.
So what is that?
It's that emotions are always
involved in ideas.
And your friend, or ex-friend or your interlocutor [laughs]
your interlocutor is someone, 
and I think many of us understand this,
that there's a deep-seated sense
of what, you know, the right-wing calls "values"
that outweighs what you're telling him is the truth.
[Baer] Can we talk about that for a moment?
So that's a political discourse, it has always had lies in it, but now we have actually
the highest office in the land, and he's actually saying things that are not true
and then he doesn't really seem to care,
and he says something else afterwards
and then other people care a lot and they expose it, 
but that, what Siri said,
people are attracted to certain things
because he does several things.
He has gone against what he thinks is political correctness.
He says these things that are not supposed to be sayable in this country,
and there wasn't...and I think the universities actually contributed quite a bit to this sense,
I think they're people you've cited who,
who sit in the university and cry about
the university because they're coddling...
it's all a little confusing to me,
because I don't see it and I've been in
the university for 21 years,
but this, he may be something else.
But there's something that's been opened up with a
kind of critique of authority.
Let's say generally speaking, which was also salutary,
and it was good and it was important
to not just say there's a bunch of, basically five men who tell you
what the world is about. Walter Cronkite,
sure he's a great person,
but there was a kind of opening up of authority,
and in some ways what seems that this
political establishment is exploiting that
to an extreme position and saying,
"Well there's no authority, it's my authority," which was based on affect, emotion, and values
and not on fact.
But I wonder how much had been opened up,
and whether this kind of culture of expertise, of authority
in people who've done the work, who've done the research,
who speak the languages, you know, real and metaphoric languages,
they've been discredited in a way and
maybe that was also good, up to a point.
America, I think, also has a very good attitude toward authority sometimes, it's skeptical.
It's not completely beholden to authority right?
So that's a positive, one would think,
so how do you get to a place where you don't throw out all authority
and open it to affect, emotion, and kind of, you know, demagoguery?
[Gessen] You know, I mean, I think that Trump, he actually does a couple of different things
and I'm not sure that what you're describing is the most important thing that he does
because I think the most important thing that he does is he lies.
He lies, without actually trying to change your perception of reality.
He lies purely to assert power so he ,you
know, he will say that
he had the biggest inauguration in history
when it's demonstrably not true and then,
insist on saying it or...and saying that a million and a half illegal immigrants
voted illegally or whatever it was he said.
and it makes...or that he was wiretapped by Obama,
knowing that it can be disproven
and I think that's part of what gives the statement power.
You know every time he does this he says,
I have the biggest microphone in the world
and I assert my right to say whatever the hell I want
and the fact that I can say whatever the
hell I want and continue saying it
is actually proof of my power.
And that's a kind of authority in itself
[Hustvedt] But also I mean I really do think
that there's a kind...there's a rhetorical
power to Trump's technique
and it's an old one. If you listen to him you'll see
that he repeats everything three times.
It's almost always three times
and the slogans are not only in the heads of his followers,
they're in all our heads, right,
"make America great again," "lock her up,"
"build a wall."
Now I kept thinking about this, build a wall, build a wall, build a wall now.
Now those people who voted for Trump did not really believe
he was gonna build a wall.
I mean, I don't think that these people are uniformly stupid people
who think he's gonna build a wall.
What is the rhetorical power of this?
Right, the rhetorical power goes into
very old tribal ideas about purification
and walls and the body and invaders
that his audience is alarmed about.
This is about purity about, you know,
fear of the pollution of the other, you know,
the barbarians are at the gate
and it gives us a big rush to hear "build a wall."
I don't think Trump voters are so upset
that he's not going to build the wall
and that is, I think, these appeals we
have to understand and that
the rage of those rallies, the rage
that, you know, when you watch them you saw
in the faces of the people.
What does...what is that rage about?
I think that rage
is the quickest route out of shame,
a feeling of those hoity-toity, fancy-schmancy people...
I mean, I grew up in Minnesota, so I'm not
talking out of my head,
you know, I grew up with people who felt that kind
of shame that you think you're better than I am.
"Build a wall," "lock her up," the misogyny,
the xenophobia, you know, the racism, it
was inspiring
and if you go around, you hear Trump voters always said this thing,
"He tells it like it is.
He's an honest guy.
"He's..." - and I heard this too, which is completely untrue,
"He's a self-made man."
[laughter]
[Baer] If we stay with these too, so there's a kind of rhetorical force
and then you're saying, Masha, there's
authority itself and just saying it and
knowing you can sort of say it, not even
get away, just say it.
And he'd started out by discrediting
President Obama for a long time,
which may or may not have registered
everywhere
and that was just out there in a way and in some ways, I'm curious,
from your position sort of having analyzed other major political figures,
what is the long-term effect of that?
Someone's just saying things for the
sake of sort of cementing his authority
to be able to say it.
[Gessen] Well I think that what I experienced in Russia
as a writer
was that it does irreparable damage
to the language.
Right, and I've heard the same thing from my friends,
who are now trying to recover language in post-Berlusconi Italy.
Twenty years of using words to mean their opposite or using words to mean nothing
or just using words to throw at people
to create cacophony or to lie,
and Berlusconi actually lies in very much the same way, in, you know, the way of asserting power, right?
And Putin does the same thing, so it's very hard to to use language
and I had that experience when I first
went back to Russia to work as a journalist
in the early 90s, it was very
difficult to use Russian, post-Soviet
because because so much of the language
had been made unusable,
sort of anything that had to do with politics was made unusable,
simply because words were used to mean their opposite, right, but...
but what was worse is that anything that to do with passion,
anything that had to do with ideals, was made unusable so we had to, like,
stay in a very narrow space of
using only nouns and verbs
and just saying what had happened.
Because I was in a somewhat unique position
because I could...I was writing simultaneously in Russian and English
and I could see just how much more
freedom I had in English
and then under Putin, who not only uses words to
mean their opposite
but just uses language to create cacophony,
it's just become very, very difficult to use words at all,
to communicate using language and
I think that that's...
we have to be so intentional now about
using language because
this is happening right now right here, you know language is being ripped out from under us.
[Hustvedt] It's true, but it's funny about the media because language is a form of a contagion.
We all pick up words right, so you notice
these things, like,
baked-in.
I think it might be almost gone now because people aren't saying baked-in,
but for a while everything was baked in, it's baked in,
and I remember thinking, what's baked-in? You know,
and there are many of these words that
that travel
and become the way one speaks about a particular issue
and that's fascinating. It's just, I think,
the nature of things,
where we catch it, you know, we catch these words.
[Baer] Can you say something else when you said the
language of passion
or values was devalued. What had happened?
Had they used these words too much? Or can they...
because how does that actually happen
that words lose their meaning?
We think, you know, we know what they mean.
People learn language.
What was the actual process before it got to when you
couldn't use them anymore?
[Gessen] So I think that language was,
I mean when I talked about language of passion and of values,
I'm particularly talking about mobilization, right,
so a totalitarian society is a mobilized society
and mobilization requires excessive emotion
and so words that have to do with passion,
not only are words themselves suspect,
but the impulse behind using the words is suspect.
Oh, you want to to elicit excessive emotion in me?
Been there. I no longer
trust you.
[Baer] So at this moment in our culture,
it's almost odd to discuss, to say,
to be very intentional about
language because and I do note that I
work in a university
and in higher education, I don't really believe that
language departments are the center of
people's discussion or interest and
English departments aren't and
the humanities at large are not really
and that's actually interesting when you think it's so important.
We're living in a moment in world history which so incredibly important what a man says,
but their culture at large seems to have drift, I mean,
you know, you have children like, you're trying to teach them how to spell
and they can look at you and say "Why spell?
I have the other Siri on the phone," you know?
[Hustvedt laughs]
I think it's actually that language actually matter so greatly
and you brought Klemperer who, you know, diagnosed what happened to language
in the Third Reich and under the Nazis.
What happened to the devaluation of language and how language, how do you
arrest that back?
It happens in a lot of countries, but it's actually an odd
thing to think about, to focus on language
when people think politics are about power
and policies and institutions.
Can you sort of locate in this post-Soviet moment?
Was it able to get this language back or has Putin kind
of undone that effort as well?
[Gessen] There was a lot of interesting stuff going on in
journalism in the 90s.
I think Putin has undone it, but pretty much every
publication that I know of
had its long lists of words and phrases that
could not be used.
And I think that actually, I mean the publications in
this country have them too,
like the New York Review of Books will not let
you use the word narrative
to mean anything but the narrative in a book,
right?
And the New York Times won't let you use the word trope with I think very
good reason,
but so I think it's great to...
it's part of the job of an editor to notice when a word is being abused
and note that it should be set aside.
So I think that actually the very fact of the existence of such lists
is assigned to writers to be intentional
about language, right, so the
list becomes less important
than the message that it sends, but um,
but I remember those lists were really long
in a lot of publications because people were doing the work of, sort of, figuring out
what was going wrong with their writing
and editors were noticing phrases or even turns of
phrase
that sounded Soviet and that had to be retired at least for a while.
[Hustvedt] Well I think it's fascinating because we all are vulnerable
and the idea that, you know, it's a very Bakhtinian idea, right,
that there are...well we live in a, you know...
it's my belief about language that you
know every word is half someone else's
and that it's not some kind of a static
code
that we can pluck up and it's always shot through
with power relations, which is,
you know, hence the care,
but I also find that there are times when
one can in a way write oneself out of
what you'd call collective discourse.
You know, I mean one of the points that was sent to us earlier
was the idea that in the Soviet Union, and you write about it in your book,
that discourse was completely occluded because
disciplines were not allowed to grow, they weren't allowed
to read books that were written, they weren't up to date, so to speak,
and so they were shut down. Now the
interesting thing about...
that is not true here, right, we are not shut down,
but we're totally specialized.
[Baer] Well let me ask you this, so I heard this on Tuesday,
so the assumption among working scientists is to get a federal grant,
you are to not use the word climate change.
You just avoid it, just avoid it.
You're not in Florida, where you're not allowed to use it
if you're a state employee,
but as a scientist, you want to get a federal grant.
The people that are going to be reviewing your grants are going to be
people who don't believe that exists,
so you can find a grant,
but this is unlikely to get funded,
so as a scientist, do you make the decision to say I'm going to be kind of,
you know,  renegade poet
and rest his language back and...
you know I'm very invested in this. I grew up in Germany
and the person who I worked under was Paul Celan,
who felt German was so compromised
that you actually couldn't use it anymore and yet...
[Hustvedt] He reinvented it.
[Baer] He reinvented it but it didn't quite work
and there's a certain kind of ballast in the language, there's some terms that
I feel aren't usable probably for hundreds of years,
but so as a scientist do you make this decision to say, I'm going to defy this
and write my grand proposal to study the impact 
of, whatever, climate change?
Or am I going to just sort of adapt a bit,
accommodate a bit, not use that word,
have the list that is kind of unspoken
and that is the seeping kind of
what Klemperer says, there's an accommodation.
People start backing out of that.
[Hustvedt] That's right.
[Baer] You hear people saying, well let's not use climate change because it'll just piss people off
or you won't get funded. Those are two separate things.
You won't get funded, that's real power.
People are in charge right now who can
determine people's research,
so this is, I think, the seeping sins
and how do you start doing that if you start looking
like you're not gonna...
[Hustvedt] And this is very closely related to totalitarian regimes to the experience...
experiences in the Soviet Union and of course
in Germany,
you know a little bit and you know I see this all the time, you know.
How bad is this? How bad is Trump?
How authoritarian is it?
How frightened should we be?
And when people are in the middle of
what will become a historical
situation,
those are profound moral questions.
I mean the question you just said,
those are profound moral questions.
Is it better to go along and get some
money to do your research
or do you draw a hard line
for ethical reasons?
[Baer] Or is there another alternative?
[Hustvedt] And the other alternative would be?
[Baer] I'm not sure, but what if all the major senior scientists in this country
at major institutions actually bring this out
over and over again.
[Hustvedt] There was a march.
[Baer] It may be a creeping progression.
[Hustvedt] Yeah.
[Baer] That I'm not totally sure,
but actually I think it's interesting that because
you're both science writers and I'm not
but it's sort of that science would have
to be concerned about the use of language
where it's mostly difficult to present ideas...
[Hustvedt] Oh actually, they are.
So every grant, I mean, so many scientists I know
tell me that in order...so let's say you're doing genetics research
and you don't really know what can
come of this research.
You're really curious about it, but in your grant,
you write that it might...not might, you say,
this could have a profound effect on
cancer research
now you don't really know. Scientists do
that as a matter of course, by the way.
So I think we should be a little...so now
we're talking about cooperating
with a government that you know...
you know where do you say...so this is a...
this becomes politicized, but it's always politicized.
[Gessen] It's funny that we found our way back to purity.
[Hustvedt laughs]
[Hustvedt] Yeah, whatever that is and again, I'm not answering it,
you understand? I'm simply
making an observation about the gradations.
[Gessen] But I'm also concerned about things that
we can't talk about because we can't talk about them,
not because, like, you can't get a federal grant,
but because they are in some way unspeakable, right?
Like the fact that we've been living with the threat of nuclear war with North Korea for three months.
[Hustvedt] Yeah.
[Gessen] I can't talk about it because how do you?
And so, we don't.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and
I thought, "We haven't actually talked
about corruption enough."
[Hustvedt] No, No.
[Gessen] It's just, you know, the fact that Trump hasn't separated himself from his businesses
and the fact that Ivanka and Jared are
in all the meetings and, like, all that... that thing.
Because there's nothing to...you know, that conversation is just not
...it's impossible in some way or another.
I'm not even...
[Hustvedt] But why is it impossible? Is it because
there's so much going on that people can't bring it up?
I agree, but why?
[Gessen] I guess it's partly, yeah, there's so much going on,
I think there's not an apparent solution.
It was very clear from the
beginning that he wasn't going to
separate himself from his businesses, and
this was the sort of thing that, unless
he divested radically, it was unsolvable,
and because it's unsolvable,
much like...less consequentially, but much
like the threat of nuclear war with North Korea,
it's also...it also becomes unspeakable.
[Baer] I think much of...there's a kind of
entertainment value to Trump, and I actually, I think,
you know...to make you blush
but I actually think you have a capacity
to step out and say,
"Okay this is what's going on this is what's going on, and
this is what's at stake."
So you're saying so Ivanka and Jared - and, believe me,
Chelsea and Marco in meetings,
we would be, you know, everyone would be having a fit
you know, like,
"Oh they went to Tokyo. Can you imagine?"
[laughter]
"She doesn't even have a real cabinet position"
[Hustvedt] Right, right.
[Baer] I mean we would have an impeachment trial right now
[Hustvedt] Absolutely.
[Baer] So I think there's an entertainment value,
which people actually experience as
panic attacks or distractions in a certain way,
and rather than saying, "Okay, let's step away.
So this is untoward" and "why is that?"
And sort of to say it's unsolvable because...
it's unsolvable because Congress will not act or
because no one's gonna investigate, no one's gonna put pressure on it.
So what you're saying, people back away from things as unsayable,
but they're saying a lot. 
[Hustvedt] Yeah
[Baer] I mean there's a lot of...I mean you cannot actually...
I mean I was saying, walking over here, like it's so cold. You know, let's blame Trump.
It's unbelievable.
[laughter]
There's a kind of exhaustive coverage at Trump has responded to already in this kind of
domination of our collective imagination
I think that's another effect.
Not even if you can recite all
the words which we all can but this--
and I'm sort of trying to question, sort
of, can the media pull itself out?
And you do this very skillfully. I think you sort of say like, 
"This is what's going on,"
you give us a bit of the kind of titillating
exciting thing and then you say,
"This is what's at stake."
But your shift back and forth is really good.
[Hustvedt] But I think it's quite rare, I mean to be honest.
I think it's...I know that...I mean, listen I read good things  
almost every day but there's a lot of...
you know, they're moments when I think the problem with the news is that it's the news, right?
So you need to keep going.
That's the nature of the news, is that
something new happens
and everyone covers it, and to put it into some kind of
larger conceptual frame is much more rare.
[Gessen] Well I mean, I think that you're
right, and I think in a way journalism
is just unsuited for the task at hand.
Journalism doesn't work in historical time right?
That's for academics, and in fact it's kind of a neat division of labor
that, you know, journalists work in the media time, and when an academic says
that they're working on contemporary history, they mean,
you know, the last 60 years and for
journals that's ancient history.
[laughter]
[Hustvedt] Last week is!
[laughter]
[Gessen] So I think, you know, we may just 
not have the tools at our disposal to do this.
and...but I also think, I came across this
just a few days ago,
this wonderful Russian writer writing actually about
something completely different,
about 18th century Russians,
but he used this wonderful term,
he called it provincial time.
and I was like, "Oh my God, yes! We're living
in provincial time, right now!"
It's like we're concerned with right now, 
but there's a kind of fog because,
you know, the sort of, a part of being provincial is not quite feeling your outlines in the world.
[Hustvedt] Absolutely 
[Gessen] And I very much feel that. I feel like sort of
we've descended into that mushy state of not...
of not feeling outlines in time and space.
[Hustvedt] But, and partly because there is a lot I think,
that people are feeling that this is,
you know, the rhetorical environment that we're living in
now does not feel like
anything in my lifetime.
I mean we could not have imagined
a president saying the things that this man has said, right?
I mean this is new talk. It is a new kind of talk
and that has ushered in another feeling
of a kind of radical shift.
Now whether that's actually true or not I'm not even speculating on.
I am simply saying that the...
the sort of abandonment
of what was a form of decorum,
even when Republicans were, as they say,
this is a word from the press, "dog whistling," right?
Racism, xenophobia, all of that was there.
It certainly didn't start with Trump,
but now the naked rhetoric,
the rhetoric that makes his base say,
"He tells it like it is"
This is a fascinating change in the landscape,
the verbal landscape, if you will, of American politics.
And I'm eager to hear what people think of that.
[Baer] You can say that he's saying what has been said in America for a long time,
it's not new in a way that we haven't heard it, it's just he happens to occupy the White House.
So you hear it from a different place. 
You'd heard it from him for years
There was never any ambiguity 
[Hostvedt] No, never.
[Baer] You said you figure out what, you know, a demagogue or somebody wants, you listen
You keep on saying, as you listen carefully, he's told you just about everything is no mistakes
[Hustvedt] No.
[Baer] And the other part is this kind of...
I'm kind of interested,
are there unsayable things, taboo things in American society, you know,
yes and no. And he's sort of, when people get
all worked up, he says things about race that hadn't been said before.
They have been said.
[Hustvedt] Yeah, yes.
[Baer] Otherwise, they wouldn't resonate with millions of people. 
[Hustvedt] Right, of course, of course.
[Baer] So there's a weird part of like,
"unbelievable when Kelly"--
what's his first name, their chief of staff?
He got the Civil War little wrong it seems,
[laughter]
[Baer] Historians actually...Ron Chernow,
who was the biographer of Hamilton
and, you know, Grant, was here last week and he said, "Let me take two minutes to actually
explain what kind of narrative"
- to use that word -
[Hustvedt] yeah, yeah.
[Baer] "What that is, what he's saying, why people say that, that many, many people say that,
and what's wrong with it" and that's a historian that can do that, it took him two minutes.
It didn't take him a book, not the biography of Grant,
so there is a way to undo this in a way but I think people
don't even have the patience,
and I wonder whether...I don't know, whether journalists have to step back sometimes and say,
"Let me take a paragraph to actually explain what the Civil War
is rather than to rush to the news
story."
So you're saying academics have to do all
this back work,
but it seems a little bit risky to just be so taken with the moment
that I missed a bit of Trump also by saying he had a history
and then no we...so I'm just saying it's new,
but not so new for many people.
[Hustvedt] I'm really talking about the language of Trumpism, if you will
that is actually unprecedented. 
Not that it doesn't exist in the culture,
not that people haven't been talking like this. 
I mean I think this was part of the appeal
Right?
But usually the misogyny, the racism, the xenophobia,
they were covered over
by a veneer of poly tests, if you
will, whatever,
so that people could understand what they were saying,
but it would be said in a presidential way.
Remember when there were the all these
journalists saying,
"Just wait, when he gets into office,
he's gonna become presidential"
and I thought, "Are they mad? 
Wait, who are these people?"
They think that this person who is, as you say,
told us everything.
There were no secrets about Trump.
He's not a secret hidden being.
He's a malignant narcissist and we knew,
 and everyone must have known.
[Gessen] it's a problem of the imagination.
It was like...
one of the most instructive conversations
I had with people
was in the spring of 2016.
I was talking to a friend and I said, 
"So, you know, he's locked up the nomination"
My friend said "No, no, no, the republicans are gonna do something"
[Hustvedt] Oh to get him out, yeah.
[Gessen] and I said, "Well what makes you think that?" Thinking that he was going to, like, tell me
what was actually going to happen in the Republican convention
and he said "Well I just can't imagine him
becoming the nominee."
Oh, that's the key to everything it's like
when the imagination fails us
we just say, "Oh that's not gonna happen." 
I mean that's what four-year-olds do
and that's kind of how much I think we
have been infantilized by the situation
with the toddler or the teenager in the
White House,
where, "Oh, I can't imagine this being in the White House,
so that's not gonna happen."
And so then everybody agrees he's going
to become presidential
[Hustvedt] But I think provincialism, the word that you used before,
is advantageous because
If one looks at historical precedents,
if one looks at the history of rhetoric,
of persuasion, of all of this,
it's all there
and not that it's identical,
historical situations are never identical,
but there's certainly precedents
for this kind of rhetorical atmosphere.
[Gessen] Yeah, but we actually because
the problems mostly we learn or most
people learn about history are from history books,
and history books rely on texts a lot of the time,
most of the time.
And so they actually create a much more
coherent narrative...
Hello to the New York Review of Books...
than exists in lived time and that can possibly exist in lived time.
[Hustvedt] Of course, of course.
[Gessen] And they also, I think, imbue, you know,
demagogues with much more coherent
ideology
than they ever really have had
or have now.
And so you know most people
are convinced that Hitler had
a belief system in a coherent ideology,
and all I have to do is read Klemperer
to remember that that's not the case, or
read Erich Fromm or read Hannah Arendt.
But if you read history books,
they will tell you that he had a coherent ideology and a belief system.
And well you know and that humanity didn't sort of stumble into the abyss.
But the idea of stumbling into the abyss 
is even more scary.
[Hustvedt] Yes. I do have a quote. Here it is:
"The receptivity of the great masses is very limited.
Their intelligence is small,
but their power of forgetting is enormous.
In consequence of these facts,
all effective propaganda must be limited
to a very few points
and must harp on these slogans
until the last member of the public
understands what you want him to understand
by your slogan."
Adolf Hitler
So, that's from "Mein Kampf" and we know that was written
before.
[Hustvedt laughs]
So, in this one point,
Hitler does seem to have had an idea.
And he does seem to have an idea that was then
carried out with a certain rigor
during the Third Reich,
and it was effective.
[Baer] And with new technology. 
With radios to tens of millions of people
just like Donald Trump figured out 
that Twitter works for him.
[Hustvedt] Endless repetition works.
[Baer] An interesting thing is that it's not neutral, 
it works for him like you said earlier,
just by putting it out, he says, "I can put this out."
It doesn't even matter what it says.
I don't- you know, God help us all to read the tweets, 
but they're just there and
some people talk more about the fact that he tweets a lot  and not about what he actually does or not
and so this kind of authority that's...there's something that has shifted yet again.
There was new technology and now there's new technology yet again.
And the public shifts.
And I want to go back.
So if journalists, they work in real time,
it's a bit provincial of a time as you said, right?
Right here?
Academics, they take a long time to write their book,
so it'll be a couple years  until they write their terms on Trump,
so what is to be done, in terms of...
Are we supposed to match the lack of civility
with more lack of civility?
Because I think we also kind of, journalists and
academics, are kind of guarded 
and say, "we don't want to go there,
we don't want to attack him in this way.
We don't just want to tweet for the sake of tweeting."
And if you ever go...you've probably been...
I'm sure you've been in this role,
if you say something online that people don't like on the other side,
they are very quick and very organized
and they say a lot online and liberals say nothing.
I mean, very little.
If you actually provoke a response,
thousands of people are very organized to attack you
but liberals say, "well yeah, I don't know, 
You'd have to look at both sides."
So what do you do?
How do you counter these things?
[Hustvedt] I think there are moments for real hostile rhetoric
and I have given a couple of speeches.
One is a long list of people at Cooper Union,
which was the Self-Made Man, which was a sort of
violent and caustic parody of this American mythology.
I wrote a piece for Slate that didn't go viral
but after several hours there were 300,000 people,
probably more than, have read my books,
and that was the same thing.
This caustic, ironic, but highly rhetorical piece 
talking about misogyny
during the campaign.
And the tone, of course, got people's attention.
So I think there is a role for fury,
you know,  for a kind of righteous, rhetorical fury.
I mean, not lying, you know.
Not saying things you don't believe
or making something too simple,
but no, this is not my general voice
when I'm writing a science paper or an essay or a novel, no.
But I do think that there's a place for that. 
And you're right, that, you know,
one of those speeches I gave about Emma Lazarus,
you know, and it was really addressing Trump,
you know, "President Trump, blab blah blah,"
and on the steps people were pulling out little nice poems to read
and I thought, "This is not the moment,
what are you doing here? This is a time for political opposition
to stand up and say!"
And, you know, I know I'm not gonna be...I mean I've read your book,
the most recent book and, you know,
I don't feel that someone's going to arrest me
or put me in prison.
So, you know, it's not that brave.
[Baer] I do want to say something about that, 
what I said much earlier.
The state is one thing.
Public opinion, the court of public opinion 
is a very powerful force.
Simone Weil said, the masses or the public cannot think,
they don't form a thought,
it's not possible for many people,
only one person can think.  But she said,
they're incredibly powerful.
And in our Republic and our democracy in America,
actually free speech, I think,
is as threatened by the state as it is by public opinion.
So if you say something, they're not gonna arrest you.
But if people are very systematic about attacking your line, it is very threatening.
It's silencing and it drowns out a lot of things
so I think that's actually another factor where Trump benefits
because there is this kind of echo chamber.
[Hustvedt] Yes, it's true, but then there are...
there's certainly the other part that there are people 
who really like it.
You know, there's like this "go-girl" part.
So I think, and you know,
and then people say, "Oh well, you
know, you're just - what is it called -
singing to the choir"? Is that...
[Baer] "Preaching to the choir"
[Hustvedt] But that's something too!
I think that's okay
and we shouldn't think that
there's no need  to sharpen our rhetorical tools
to speak, to preach, to the choir.
[Gessen] No, I agree I don't have a prescription,
I actually think that it's impossible to say what's right,
it's just possible to try to identify what's wrong,
which happens to
fortunately coincide with my profession.
But, you know, there are things I really worry about.
It's "messy language,"
it's falling into language traps, like the way
that we've started to...
a lot of us have started using the word political
as a demeaning word,
as a dismissive word.
You know, "That's just politics."
Politics is all we have! 
And it's being destroyed!
No, don't say it's "just politics."
[Hustvedt] Or the other word, "partisanship."
Excuse me, is there something wrong
with partisanship?
Why is this suddenly a bad word in the culture?
I mean, I find this fascinating and it's all over the press. This "politics,"
or "partisanship."
Well, of course, if you've thought through what you think,
you often become partisan.
You take a position.
[Baer] Are there things you have worried about much?
[Gessen] I am really worried about humor.
I'm like worried about humor in a really circular way,
but I'm worried that
that we're laughing in things that we shouldn't laugh at.
That really aren't funny.
[Hustvedt] Hey, say, say what you think.
[Gessen] Yeah, so for example, what's funny...
So I think the way that political satire usually works
is that something is
taken to its logical, absurd extreme,
and then it becomes funny.
And what's happening now is that we turn on "Saturday Night Live"
and nothing is taken to any extreme,
they're just saying exactly
what was said earlier
in the news program
or, you know, in the White House briefing
and it wasn't funny.
And then because it's 11:30 at night
on a Saturday, it suddenly is funny.
But it's not funny.
And another effect of the late night
shows, and you know
a lot of these comedians do it absolutely brilliantly,
but it's just, to do the thing actually
that the journalists are failing at,
which has put
news in a slightly longer context.
Right, so John Oliver does it brilliantly.
He will do these long reports reminding people
what came before.
Samantha Bee does the same thing. It's
like "and this happened and this happened
and this happened, and that's how we
ended up here" and suddenly it's funny
and it's like not funny at all.
And sometimes I started noticing it in my talks when I,
especially when I quote Trump a lot, people laugh.
And I feel like it's a kind of hysterical laughter.
[Hustvedt] It is, I think.
[Gessen] It's a laughter of relief
because someone is saying something that they feel, right?
And so it points to what's not happening
in regular journalism.
It's not actually corresponding to how people are perceiving reality.
It's not affirming, sort of, the lived experience.
And then the late-night comedy shows are affirming that experience.
[Hustvedt] Right. 
[Gessen] They speak to shared reality
and it's funny, but that really worries me,
that I think something is getting flipped there.
And if I can just  finish that thought
with a quick anecdote
because I think it's somehow very weirdly illustrative of
what I'm trying to say.
So I was participating in filming the Samantha Bee segment
where they were interviewing people
 on the street,
"Man on the Street Interviews"
with pre-screened people,
which is OK for a comedy show but not ok,
obviously, for a news show.
And that's part of the problem that we're having
with sort of blurred boundaries.
But these people, these "men on the street"
had been referred by a New York City therapist,
because they were people who were willing to be filmed,
talking about how they were suffering from stress
because of all the alerts on their
phones and stuff.
And so I was playing myself
but a counselor who talked to these people about how to deal with alerts on their phones.
And how to stay outraged... and as me.
And the producer said to me, 
"You're really good at playing yourself
a lot of people aren't, but you're like, really
good at playing yourself."
And I thought 'well, that's great," you know.
And then I went home. Three days later I get a letter
forwarded by the publicity department of my publishers
and it says, "I participated in the filming of this Samantha Bee segment
and Masha Gessen was my counselor, and I
was wondering if I could schedule another session"
[laughter]
And this was serious!
And, you know, this person didn't
have a misapprehension of who I am. 
I mean he found me through my publisher.
But something had gotten very, very blurry
in this picture and that goes to
the heart of why I'm really worried
about humor, because it's not
ultimately sort of clarifying reality.
[ Hustevdt] Right, but so this is, actually before I came,
I started thinking about, you know, rhetoric and,
you know, in my sort of "reading past,"
I told you I went back to Kenneth Burke.
And you know he has the frames,
the comic and and the tragic frame.
And the tragic frame fits very beautifully into
the Trump "Trumpist" idea,
 which is that it's all about
purification and push and pollution.
Right, so the pollutant is coming in
and then you have to to push it out.
And the comic is a much more tolerant position
with subversion, you know, making jokes
about
the structure of what is.
And I think that's...
I think, if I understand you correctly,
that what you're saying is
that because there's an impossibility of parody
that that nudging that the great comic state
can do, which, as Burke says, initiates change
is not happening.
And so what you get is a kind of inertia,
as opposed to,
you know, jiggling up the situation into movement.
[Baer] The tragic is a difficult and complicated genre because it turns you into a kind of victim of fate.
There's a kind of depersonified fate and no matter what you do you're gonna go against it.
And so "tragic," I think it's really tricky as
a political kind of genre
because it removes a certain part of
agency that citizens should have.
Because tragedies happen to people.
It what doesn't matter what you're gonna do
you're gonna end up in a tragic outcome.
It's tricky.  So comedy would be a much more apt one
if it would be
a kind of outrageous, insane burlesque.
That is more what we are in, in a way because that keeps you engaged in a way
to participate and shape the outcomes, I think.
[Hustvedt] Right, well it's hard to burlesque the burlesque.
[Baer] I do want to ask Masha, as a therapist now...
[laughter]
I do have a very specific question
 and actually I've really been wrestling with this.
So after Charlottesville, so when Heather Heyer was murdered
and two state troopers lost their lives
because we had Richard Spencer
having this charade of a political
rally at University of Virginia
and then afterwards Trump said these things and
he said there's good people on many sides and then people got incredibly
upset.
And to be honest with you I've been sort of watching the whole free speech debates on campus
and I'd heard the entire summer from all liberals,
"Well there's good people on both sides
and you've got to really listen to them and you have to listen to the Nazis and the Klan,
we really have to understand them,"
and I actually think he was,
in a clumsy way, saying what
every liberal says, "Well there's another side to this, you know."
And to be honest with you, ironically, I mean
Richard Spencer is getting
recommendations from really distinguished colleagues of mine all the time.
I mean people are on record saying,
"Absolutely he must come to my campus."
You know, no climate change deniers,
no creationists, no Holocaust deniers,
no crank scientists, but Richard Spencer absolutely.
[Hustvedt] Really?
[Baer] That's an interview online, right,
it's really odd because they make an exemption. Why?
Because it's political speech which must never be regulated.
They make a big mistake between academic freedom and...
but I'm interested in Trump having assumed this position,
which I really think he was in a clumsy way saying,
"Well, you gotta look at both sides."
And there is a kind of unacceptable part.
You don't actually look at the other side, like,
the Nazis want to take over America, that's not something we really want to consider,
but he happened to be speaking in this free speech moment and he'd found it...to me I...
and this is why I'm talking to you
as a therapist, like, I really was struggling
and I wasn't that outraged.I thought, well, I've heard this all summer.
[Gessen] That's really interesting. I mean
he has a real instinct for sort of
assimilating liberal speech, right?
And he usually throws it out even more clumsily,
but I was really struck when he...
Remember when he said that the theater
should be the safe space?
That's like, where did he even get that phrase, right?
[laughter]
[Baer] Fox News.
[Gessen] I guess it might have been Fox News,
but, then he uses those phrases to mean, you know,
really it's the opposite with the theater,
it was great because he was...
you know, he was talking about, it was when Mike Pence went
to see Hamilton and then the troop addressed him and
then the cast addressed him and then
Trump said well, you know, they shouldn't have done, that the theater should be a safe space.
it was like the opposite on every count, right?
It was a public place, an elected official
being addressed respectfully by the cast,
and that made it not a safe space.
So, I think you're right to pick up
on that.
I mean, he uses those phrases from the liberal discourse.
[Baer] That makes me feel a lot better.
[Gessen] Good, I'm glad. 
[Baer] No, not in a kind of jokey way.
I actually think it was troubling because I do think,
what has surprised me that,
I'm not making this up, Richard Spencer gets not a pass
but a strong endorsement to be able to give a speech
while we're distancing ourselves from this speech.
So for me this was interesting
and I thought when he picks
up on that a lot of people resonate and
say well you got a look at...
let's re-examine some of these things whether
maybe there was a good idea.
So I think this is what he opens up to for people
also in this kind of weird attack on
political correctness,
which, to go back to where we started, happens to be
very pervasive in the university itself
where the people are very upset about
political correctness in the university,
so he picks up on these kinds of tropes, t
 use another word
The New York Times won't let us use, right?
[laughter]
And deploys them against themselves.
That's actually what happens to language also.
They're not meaningless,
They're just used against what you think
they should be used for, right?
You know, they become weaponized or something
and that has happened from the 80s.
Family, the flag, America,
[Hustvedt] Everything, it–
[Baer] It doesn't mean people like me.
You know, it means something else and why did the left
stand by and let that happen?
Like, why did the left allow these symbols and terms to be appropriated?
[Hustvedt] Well, I mean, I think racism
is something that is,
you know, worth bringing into these ideas.
There's a Dutch man, his last name is,
I think, Mudde, M, U, D, D, E, and
his first name is Mas...? I don't know how to pronounce it...
Yes? Okay, and he talks about
the fact that every time there's a
right-wing populist victory,
there is a rush by the press,
it happened with Brexit, it happened with Trump,
to talk about how the elites have forgotten
the real people out there on the plains,
you know, in our case,
and these poor people, they've been deprived
and they're suffering and what are we doing?
And as this guy, he actually...I read some of his papers
and then he had a piece in The Guardian
and he said the important thing to understand
is that angry white men are not the people.
Now, this is, okay, this is a broad point,
but I think it's...
I think there's really–this speaks to something.
I was at the Women's March,
nobody called us the people, right?
Women are not the people.
Black lives matter–they're not the people.
And this is partly the fact that
most, many still, journalists are white guys
and they get all gushy and sympathetic,
and we have to remember
that, you know,
there's a
white prejudice here
and those...and white people elected Trump,
not the rest of, you know, us. 
'm very white, I know, but...
but not, you know, that's not who did it,
and I don't think we can talk about this
without
really examining that a certain bias that exists
for suffering white guys
that is spread out all over the place
and a lot of it is implicit.
It's part of perceptual values that are "baked in."
[laughter]
[Hustvedt] I used it, okay!
[Baer] If there's anything else you want to share,
then I'm gonna round us out and, well, close it up.
[Gessen] Well I mean I agree with that.
I think that it's actually a little bit more
insidious even than that.
It's not just that white guys in journalism get all mushy about
white guys, but there's a basic idea that
people who look like us should be
comprehensible to us, right?
If somebody who doesn't look like the journalist
does something incomprehensible,
well, then they've done something
incomprehensible, what do you want?
They're Muslim terrorists, it's something incomprehensible.
But, if someone who looks like you does something
incomprehensible,
then it's your fault for not comprehending it,
which, you know, I'm not dismissing the project of comprehending the term
further,
I'm actually working on that project. I don't think that, you know...
[Hustvedt] No, I agree, I agree.
[Gessen] I don't think that's the way to do it.
But I think that, you know, what you're pointing to is
a really basic part of sort of identification
in the way the journalists work unfortunately.
[Hustvedt] Yeah, there's a lot of... [laughs]
We won't go in there, but there's a lot of science on this, as you know.
[Baer] I want to thank the two of you and I want
to say again really how
critical your work is, both of you, your books and
actually what you're doing actively also,
in addition to this panel,
thank you so much for being here,
but actually to use language in intentional ways,
as you say, and to give us a way to imagine
the world in ways that are open-ended
and more creative and not sort of
"I can't imagine and therefore it doesn't exist"
which is kind of a...
bit of a, you know, defensive attitude
and I do want to recommend the two books out there, "The Future is History"
and then which ones of your books? I don't even know which one is out there.
[Hustvedt] "A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women"
If you want a 200-page essay on
the mind-body problem,
I strongly recommend it.
[Baer] So, and thank you so much
for being here on a Friday evening,
really appreciate it, thank you.
[Gessen] Thank you.
[applause]
