The Problem with Everything

by Meghan Daum

  I didn’t agree with my Free Speech YouTube friends on every point. Far from it. When Loury said he was skeptical of the claim that blacks got longer sentences than whites for the same crime, I scratched my head. When scholar and social critic Camille Paglia said that agreeing to accompany a man upstairs to a bedroom during a fraternity party is “consenting to sex,” I cringed. But more often I was invigorated, even electrified, by their willingness to ask (if not ever totally answer) questions that had lately been deemed too messy to deal with in mainstream public discourse: Are we using “multiculturalism” as a cover for tolerating human rights abuses in other countries? Can we use evolutionary psychology to help explain why women, in the aggregate, are less likely to pursue careers like engineering and computer coding? Are there biological brain sex differences that help explain the gender wage gap?

  You’re not supposed to ask these sorts of things in public anymore. (Evolutionary psychology, which is all too easily oversimplified and repurposed into any number of shaky suppositions about social hierarchies, is a particular bugaboo.) Since my YouTube friends were asking nonetheless, many turned into de facto speech rights champions. And since the term “speech rights” now had a trip-wire effect for many liberals, in that it was often associated with defenses of hollow provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, many of my YouTube friends were finding themselves cast out of the political left. (Yiannopoulos, by the way, was to me an imbecilic, insufferably boring varmint who bore no resemblance to anyone I found interesting on YouTube.) Not that getting cast out of the left meant not having an audience. Some of these folks, like Sommers and also Sam Harris, the neuroscientist, “new atheist,” and host of a mega-popular podcast, were getting plenty of attention by asking these questions. Peterson, for his part, was poised to get very rich. I just got the sense that at least a few of them felt just as alone as I did. Their company with one another, even in the form of panels and webcam chats, managed to keep me company.

  * * *

  As I look back to 2015, I now see that my burgeoning relationship with Free Speech YouTube had to do with the end of another relationship, namely my marriage. I’d left my home in Los Angeles right after the December holidays and was living temporarily in New York. My husband and I were experimenting with what we had thus far managed to avoid calling a trial separation but was nonetheless a fairly obvious stepping-stone to divorce. I remember hunkering down in the small apartment I’d sublet for the semester while teaching at Columbia, anticipating a snowstorm billed as a “snowpocalypse” and watching something like six hours of conversations on Bloggingheads. For some reason the storm had me terrified. I’d been in California for so long that the thought of being blinded by a power outage caused by already blinding snow seemed beyond my coping abilities. But also for some reason—maybe because they were so much like the talks I had with my husband—the meandering dialogues had a soothing effect that evening. I lay on the couch and nipped at them all night as though they were brandy, finally drifting to sleep to the lullaby of conversations tagged “Should the left have a tea party?” and “Ferguson is not Palestine, but is it similar?”

  The storm turned out to be not nearly as apocalyptic as advertised, and the power remained on. But in the ensuing months, whatever embers remained of my marriage managed to smolder out. I distracted myself by watching YouTube and reading everything I could about anti-rape activism on college campuses. It would be two years before I found myself at Iowa, sitting on the grass at Take Back the Night rallies and listening to stories like Joseph’s, but I was already trying to sort out my feelings about the gulf between this generation and my own. I was all in favor of the new dialogue around issues of sexual consent, but why couldn’t that dialogue be a little more, well, nuanced?

  Many people I knew apparently saw it differently. They posted alarmist articles on Facebook and formed comment threads that were like a chorus of outrage and anxiety. When I saw them recite statistics I knew to be misleading—one in five, maybe even one in four, college women will be raped!—I wanted to scream. When I saw someone say she wondered if she should now even send her daughter to college, I wanted to throw things.

  Even more than that, I wanted to put myself in a time machine. My crumbling marriage had made me something close to inconsolable, and my only wish was to go to sleep and fast-forward my life to some indeterminate point in the future when I’d feel better. By spring, my husband and I had decided to divorce. There was no tangible grievance, just a baseline dissatisfaction with our lives together that no amount of hard work or therapy or cable-drama binges could allay. We were in our forties. We had dogs but no children. There was no reason, other than the raw pain of finality, not to cut our losses and move on. I returned to Los Angeles after my semester in New York, and we continued to live together as we prepared to put our house on the market. We were amicable to an almost absurd degree, so much so that I decided I’d move back to New York, at least for a year or so, lest we remain emotionally entwined. Never at a loss for conversation, we continued to talk—often in the animated, passionate, probing way we’d been doing since our first date—until the minute I got in the car and drove east.

  At the time, I assumed the extreme amicability of our divorce made us lucky. Whereas other couples fought bitterly, we just sat next to each other and cried. Whereas other couples changed locks on doors and let legal fees burn through their savings, we graciously divided up our things and did what we could to soften the other’s landing. It was only later that I saw the ways in which this accord made things so much worse by ripping off the proverbial Band-Aid at an anguishing pace. It was only when we stopped talking so much that I realized how our conversations had been like platelets in my very bloodstream.

  Despite our fundamental incompatibility, my husband and I were each other’s best friend and preferred conversation partner. Even at our lowest points, even when scarcely a day passed in which we didn’t fight, there was also not a day that we didn’t have something interesting to discuss. From the very beginning, it had been clear that we saw the world in uncannily similar ways—and sometimes in ways different from our sprawling tribe of supposedly like-minded liberals. We shared an allergy to hyperbole, boredom with perfunctory expressions of political correctness, a guilty affinity for jokes best suited to adolescent boys. We may not have been on the same page when it came to life, but somehow we were on the same wavelength. We were, for lack of a better term, intellectual allies.

  In the late summer of 2015, we sold the house, and I took one of the dogs, the hulking Saint Bernard, and moved to New York City. My plan was to be there temporarily, maybe a year or two, possibly three. Then I would return to L.A., where the dogs would be reunited and my husband and I, long divorced and healed, would function as both dear friends and built-in dog sitters for each other. The time machine would take off, orbit the Earth a few times, and land right on schedule.

  But there was no time machine. I had to live my life in real time. And so 2015 drifted slowly into 2016. By then, Hillary Clinton, who was obviously and definitely going to be the next president of the United States, was talking about white Americans needing to recognize their privilege. Even when Clinton became the Democratic nominee, the residual heat of the Bernie Sanders campaign underscored the souring divide within the left. Clinton supporters chalked up any opposition to their candidate to misogyny. Sanders holdouts blasted Clinton as an establishment neoliberal with troubling ties to Wall Street. That there was truth to both sides hardly mattered, since cable news and social media lacked the capacity to metabolize more than two food groups at the same time. Meanwhile, the identity politics game that the left had been playing at a mostly amateur level for decades had officially been elevated to professional sport by the right. Its most valuable player, Donald Trump, would soon occupy the Oval Office. In the meantime, most of us on the left giddily prepared for Hillary Clinton to become the first woman president of the United States. We couldn’t wait.

  * * *

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sp; By that time, a year had passed since I left my marriage. My husband and I were still spending a fair amount of time on the phone together, texting photos of the dogs or running through our usual talking points about the thing we’d been chewing on since we’d met, a meld of politics, cultural observations, and personal gripes that could really only be described as the problem with everything. It wasn’t the best of times, but neither was it the worst. The state of our marriage seemed hopeless, but the state of the world seemed at that point relatively intact. Until suddenly it wasn’t. The night of the election, I sat on the sofa watching CNN and exchanging texts with my husband. The first text, from me to him, said something like “relax, it’s still early.” The last, hours later and from him to me, was one word: “wow.”

  I hardly need to describe what happened over the next year. Racists became more racist. Sexists hardened into full-blown misogynists. In turn, those fighting their bigotry too often commandeered their own kind of tyranny. Almost immediately, the resistance became not just a front line against Trumpism but its own scorching battleground. There was no amount of outrage that couldn’t be outdone, no wokeness woke enough. (At least not on social media, though, let’s face it, social media had effectively become a placeholder for real life.) Amid this crisis, virtue signaling went from a kind of youthful fashion statement to the default mode of public and private expression. Twitter headlines wrapped themselves in the banner of social justice even if there was hardly a social justice angle at all. New crops of young journalists, many consigned to online opinion writing, knew all too well that career advancement depended on clicks, which in turn depended on fealty to the woke narrative.

  From NPR to CNN to dinner parties in gentrified Brooklyn, you’d think the only conversations that were allowed were the ones in which facts were massaged to accommodate visceral feelings of liberal outrage. Sipping my rosé in the parlors of Cobble Hill brownstones, I’d hold my tongue as the permissible opinions ricocheted like bullets off the eleven-foot ceilings. Of course evolutionary psychology is bullshit. Of course the conservative columnists in the New York Timesare climate-change-denying troglodytes who bring nothing to the table whatsoever. David Brooks should fucking retire already! Amazing cheese, by the way—Zimbro?

  I’d say this happened every time I went out, but the truth is it happened about half the time. The other half, if people had enough to drink, they confessed the truth: they were getting sick of the term “gaslighting.” They thought the pussy hats at the Women’s March were a little silly. They didn’t love Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book as much as they knew they should. Not that any of this stopped them from indicating the exact opposite on social media. There was simply too much at stake to do otherwise, they said. Apparently any admission of complexity was a threat to the cause. Nuance was a luxury we could no longer afford.

  I still talked with my husband, but our conversations were growing shorter. Though the problem with everything remained an inexhaustible topic, the signal along which our wavelength traveled was growing weaker. In the spring of 2017, he called and told me he was in a new relationship and that we couldn’t talk as much as we had been. It was a gut punch but also necessary and long overdue. I thought about calling a friend, but decided instead to console myself that evening by watching a two-hour interview on The Rubin Report.

  The guest was Bret Weinstein, the biology professor who’d recently been embroiled in a bizarre racial controversy at the ultra-liberal Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. A few months earlier, in March of 2017, Weinstein had voiced opposition to an anti-racism event in which white students and staff were asked not to come to campus for a day (both groups, according to the college, would attend workshops exploring “issues of race, equity, allyship, inclusion, and privilege”). In response, student activists tarred Weinstein as a white supremacist and hounded him to the point that his safety was threatened. Weinstein and his wife, the evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, who also taught at Evergreen, would eventually leave the school and go on to become core members of the intellectual dark web. But at the time of the Rubin interview, he was just a guy who’d been thrust into the news following a traumatic professional ordeal and who seemed harried enough to forget that his glasses were hanging awkwardly around his neck during the entire two hours. He was also mesmerizing. He talked about intellectual “feebleness” in academia and in the media, about the demise of nuance, about still considering himself a progressive despite his feeling that the far left was no better at offering practical solutions to the world’s problems than the far right. He talked about student activists who had accused him of white supremacy, who had hunted him down and threatened his safety. Amid the frenzy around his situation, he said, no mainstream news outlet except Fox had contacted him or covered the story. The concept of a left-leaning professor (Weinstein had been a Bernie Sanders supporter and was also involved in the Occupy movement) being accused of racism by even further-left-leaning students simply didn’t fit the prevailing us-versus-them narrative.

  “I honestly think journalists had no idea how to cover the story,” he said.

  I watched the video at my dining table while drinking half a bottle of wine. The next night I watched it again and finished the second half.

  * * *

  Let the record show: I was not completely without a life. I taught, at Iowa and also back in New York. I walked my dog. I had dinner with friends. I stood at podiums and gave readings from my old books while trying to write—and rewrite and rewrite—the book you are now reading. But not having long conversations with my husband anymore had left a sort of white space in my life, as if there were a missing block of text in my line of vision at all times. Without quite realizing it, I crammed the space with the wonkish gladiator games of leftists fighting one another on YouTube. I watched symposium panels with names like “Are Young People Scared of Sex?” and “What’s Wrong with Men’s Rights?” I watched an American Enterprise Institute video of Sommers in conversation with Paglia, who recalled being a college student in the 1960s and fighting the administration over the unfairness of girls being subject to curfews when boys were not. “What we said was ‘give us the freedom to risk rape! These are the freedoms we’ve won!’ ” I watched yet another video in which Paglia sat with an interviewer and expounded volcanically about the failure of the educational system and the collapse of Western civilization. “We’re in a period of desiccated secularism,” Paglia exhorted. “This migration, this transformation of the classroom situation and the university setting into a praxis to cure present problems. That is wrong! The university should be about abstract and detached study of the past and the global present!” She was totally bonkers and completely captivating.

  I lapped it all up. I couldn’t get enough. These videos felt like a safety net, even a warm embrace. Eventually, Bret Weinstein’s brother, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, entered the Free Speech YouTube ecosystem with, among other things, a physics-based theory suggesting that institutional gatekeepers like mainstream media, universities, and even large corporations discourage complex viewpoints by labeling the holders of those viewpoints as bigots, idiots, or both. (Eric Weinstein, alas, was the one who would go on to coin the “intellectual dark web” label.) When the brothers sat down together for a two-hour-and-forty-seven-minute interview on The Rubin Report, I watched the segment three times over the course of a week.

  And why not? Free Speech YouTube was what I did now instead of watching television (and, very often, reading books, listening to music, or cleaning my apartment). When a new Loury and McWhorter Bloggingheads video went up, my excitement was such that you’d think it was 1980s New Jersey and there was a new Springsteen album out. At a Columbia University event featuring McWhorter called “Identity Politics on the Right and Left” (for which I’d seen a Facebook posting hours earlier and hightailed myself to campus like a student late for an exam), I lingered afterward and fawned over McWhorter as though he were the Boss himself.

>   A simplistic reading of this story might suggest I had been red-pilled. That term, which came from the movie The Matrix, originally referred to being awakened into some vaguely defined realm of politically incorrect “truth,” though it’s now associated with indoctrination into the alt right and any number of related and troubling subgroups. But I found the red-pill concept facile at best, and not just because the conspiratorial overtones weren’t my style. It wasn’t just “truth” I was after. It was that pesky nuance thing. I would have taken equal, if not more, delight in criticizing the political right if there was anything remotely interesting or surprising about doing so. But bashing the right, especially in the age of Trumpism, was easy and boring, the conversational equivalent of banging out “Chopsticks” on the piano. Inspecting your own house for hypocrisy was a far meatier assignment. As with James Baldwin’s line “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually,” I felt an obligation to hold the left to account because, for all my frustrations with it, I was still of it.

  So this was no red pill that I’d swallowed. It was more like an assortment of pills of varying colors and sizes. When combined properly, these pills produced the desired effect of making me feel less crazy. If Heying, a biologist, a liberal, and presumably a feminist, believed that the best way to address the gender wage gap is to admit that there are biological differences between male and female brains that can influence women’s professional decisions—“We can’t make things better without first establishing what’s true,” she has said—then I was okay for thinking that, too. If John McWhorter said that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fans are engaged in a sort of ritual self-flagellation that’s ultimately its own form of racism, then I wasn’t a bad person for harboring the same thoughts myself.