Lee Jossum is a distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University, and he s been the chair of the Department of Psychology and Anthropology there. In this episode, we discuss his work on left-wing authoritarianism, and why it s so important.
00:28:27.200But given that we observed the effects that we did, the sort of people concocting racism where there was no evidence of it, on the basis of a very minor intervention, that's like reading a single paragraph.
00:28:45.260It at least raises the possibility that when people are in a culture or organizational context in which this type of rhetoric is pervasive,
00:28:57.540that they are constantly being exposed or primed to think about race in these terms, and because of the steady diet of this kind of rhetoric, the effects are likely to be more enduring than anything we could possibly observe.
00:29:18.500Well, I would also say probably you evaluated some of the weaker systemic effects of that kind of rhetoric, because it isn't merely exposure to the rhetoric, it's the fact that post hoc detection of such things as microaggressions, let's say, are radically rewarded by the participants in those ideological systems.
00:31:15.180So, these studies I conducted in collaboration with the NCRI.
00:31:21.460NCRI is the Network Contagion Research Institute.
00:31:24.800They are a freestanding research institute that started out mostly doing research along the lines of this sort of large language model stuff that you were talking about earlier, analysis of social media and analysis of radicalism, conspiracy theories, hate, sort of groups and individuals mobilizing online.
00:31:50.360And they've done it with all sorts of stuff.
00:31:52.040They've done it with COVID conspiracies.
00:32:02.020They were the first group of any kind, as far as I know, in the summer of 2020, the height of the George Floyd social justice protests, which, as you remember, the rhetoric on the left—this is consistent with what you were talking about earlier, about how the left is—the reasonable left is in complete denial of the far left.
00:32:24.300It is literally true that most of the protests were peaceful.
00:32:29.300Whenever someone would present evidence of some protests not being peaceful at all, like firebombing a police station or capturing downtown Seattle or all sorts of, you know, setting—by creating, sort of setting the stage for lawlessness, you would have looting and robberies that weren't really part of the protests, but people were taking advantage of the sort of police-free zones and stuff.
00:32:58.900When you would talk about that, the response was, this is all just—
00:33:12.480I thought—but, you know, there's something weird about that that's very much worth pointing out, I believe, is that we radically underestimate the effect a very small minority of people who are organized can have in destabilizing a society.
00:33:28.280So, for example, in the flux of the aftermath of World War I, Russia was chaotic enough so that a very small minority of people, that would be the Bolsheviks, destabilized and captured the entire country.
00:33:43.840So, even if the true radicals on the left are 3 percent, say, well, 97 percent of them are peaceful, it's like, fair enough, but you're—
00:33:55.720You're suffering from the delusion that a demented minority is harmless.
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00:35:16.400So, in summer of 2020, when this was all the record, most of the protests on Facebook, complete denial, mainstream media, that there was violence and bombings and all sorts of other stuff,
00:35:30.960that the NCRI, this is the first project I did with them, produces an analysis finding that the far-left groups, not conventional liberals or Democrats,
00:35:48.360but these far-left radical groups were exploiting the earnest commitment to anti-racism or the social justice on the part of people justifiably upset about George Floyd's murder
00:36:06.400and the implications about that for racism beyond that, but these far-left groups were exploiting that to both gin up supporters and to mobilize online,
00:36:19.840this is all occurring on social media, to capture protests, to ratchet up and inspire more aggressive violence at the protests.
00:36:31.040So this, you know, that's exactly what you'd expect.
00:37:26.020And that's how they would have, so they were getting tactical instructions live via social media in addition to sort of ginning up the rhetoric to garner support and adherence.
00:37:38.280Okay, so they, before they brought me on, maybe two or three months before, the NCRI had posted a report on how far-right groups do essentially the same thing.
00:37:50.940You know, sort of mobilize online using memes and catchphrases and, you know, garner adherence, you know, gain adherence and stuff.
00:37:59.600So, um, they bring me on, we do this thing, and this paper on the far-left, which really looks to me, it looked to me like the far-left groups were seeking to ignite an actual revolution.
00:38:40.820Yeah, well, it's a shocking thing to know.
00:38:43.220The NCRI, to no credit to me, I'm an academic, I'm a professor, I don't do this kind of thing, had access to journalists that I, at the New York Times and Washington Post, who ran stories on this report.
00:38:59.760And it was the first time there was any acknowledgement in the mainstream media that there was any level of violence and danger in the protests.
00:39:35.640There was a bunch of, well, it was, so, it was me, two of my grad students, although one of my, both of my grad students also work closely with the NCRI.
00:39:51.300So, a bunch of us are co-authors on this.
00:39:53.580We have this, so I've not been working with them for several years.
00:39:57.100And it took a while for us to get used to each other.
00:39:59.520You know, their strength is this online social media, large language model, topic network stuff, you know, with an eye towards threats and conspiracy theories and hate.
00:40:11.500And my strength is conventional social science surveys.
00:40:19.680It took a while, but we have this rhythm.
00:40:22.100So, why that approach with regards to the dissemination of this information, this particular experimental information, rather than the more standard journal approach?
00:40:31.040Yeah, so, one of the things, first, let me give context, a little more context.
00:40:37.620So, our rhythm is, first, we post stuff as a, essentially as a white paper, as a report on the NCRI site.
00:40:43.900It gets some attention, some public vetting, we get some feedback on it, and then we scale it up for peer review.
00:40:49.580Well, that's not unlike doing a pre-release on a convention.
00:41:12.320It is unlike a conventional pre-print in that it is, and this is the answer to your question, why did we do it this way rather than make it for peer review?
00:41:22.260It is, even though some of it is highly technical, a lot of the worst of the technical stuff is stripped down so that it is comprehensible to the lay intelligent audience.
00:42:11.960You spend 30% of your time writing grant applications that go nowhere and two years to lag to publication that almost no one is likely to read.
00:42:27.980There have been repeat attempts to cancel me that have failed.
00:42:31.200Okay, well, so why don't you tell me and everybody else, first of all, why you're, what would you say, why you so richly deserve cancelling?
00:42:53.080So, because if people try to cancel you, especially given the things that you've researched and have insisted upon and said, if people try to cancel you, there's an overwhelming probability in academia in particular that that will be successful.
00:43:09.700So, let's start by talking about the sorts of things that you've been pointing to in, well, in academia in general, and then more specifically in psychology and social psychology.
00:43:54.360POPs is Perspectives on Psych Science, one of the very prestigious journals within the field of psychology for publishing reviews and commentaries and the like.
00:44:04.800The short version is that I was invited by the editor to do a commentary on a main paper that was critical.
00:44:20.040Well, the main paper by a psychologist named Hamel, Bernard Hamel, was critical of prior work in psychology advocating for diversity in a variety of ways.
00:44:33.300The nature of his critique was that much of the rhetoric in psychological scholarship around diversity was narrowly focused on, and the terms are constantly changing, underrepresented, minority, minoritized, disadvantaged, oppressed groups.
00:44:56.780And that from a scientific standpoint—
00:45:05.800And there was a recent article which argued that on scientific grounds, we need to do exactly that.
00:45:13.400Hamel's critique was that—was really multiple, but two of his key points were that, well, there are some types of things we—it's irrelevant.
00:45:22.140Diversity is irrelevant for certain kind of theoretical scientific tests.
00:45:25.140And then the other point is that if diversity matters, it matters for scientific purposes, it matters extremely broadly, and it's not restricted to underrepresented groups.
00:45:37.540And a very simple example would be if you would compare a study based on undergraduate psychology students versus one based on a nationally representative sample.
00:45:47.320The research based on the nationally representative sample is going to be broader and more generalizable and more credible.
00:45:54.680A nationally representative sample represents the population.
00:45:59.360It's not focused entirely on any subset of the population.
00:46:02.500That would be a very simple example of Hamel's point.
00:46:09.220And there's—okay, there's a distinction there, too, that we should draw.
00:46:12.040Clearly, it's the case that if you want to draw generalizable conclusions about human beings from a study, that the study participants should be a randomly selected and representative sample of the population to whom you're attempting to generalize, obviously, because otherwise it doesn't generalize.
00:46:31.540That's very different than making the case that underrepresented groups should be preferentially hired or employed or promoted or unspecified.
00:46:48.900But I guess so, again, the editor invited me to publish a commentary on this exchange.
00:46:55.080And the title of my commentary was—it eventually got published—is Diversity is Diverse, because there's lots of different kinds of diversity.
00:47:05.820And if we're arguing for diversity on scientific grounds, then what the science needs to be is fully representative of the—whether it's the participants or the topics, or it goes way beyond oppression.
00:47:21.900I mean, oppression is a part of that and shouldn't be excluded, but it's only one piece of that.
00:47:27.900So I basically was in agreement with Hamel's critique and augmented it.
00:47:32.440As part of that, I critiqued progressive academic rhetoric around diversity as disingenuous and hypocritical.
00:47:45.800And the way I framed that, the way I captured it, was using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof.
00:47:53.100So in Fiddler on the Roof, which is what an early 20th century Jewish life in the—
00:48:11.120So there's an interlude in the song Tradition where the—whatever—the villagers get into an argument because one chimes in, there was the time he sold him a horse but delivered a mule.
00:48:26.220And I used that to frame my discussion of progressive disingenuousness around—
00:48:34.980They all disintegrate into fractions, arguing in the middle of this song about unity to know that when that comes out.
00:48:43.580And I argued in this paper that the way and the reason that's a good metaphor for progressive rhetoric around diversity is that diversity sounds—you know, superficially, it sounds good to a lot of people.
00:48:56.200Right, because who doesn't want to be included?
00:48:58.720No matter what group you're a member of, the idea that someone is advocating for diversity, you—you know, it's kind of appealing.
00:49:19.780And, for example, one thing you might think—one might think if one had a little bit of knowledge is that, especially in the social sciences and humanities, but really in academia writ large, there's hardly anyone who is not left of center.
00:49:33.800I mean, the range goes from sort of center left to the far, far left.
00:49:45.080Well, so, Nate Honeycutt, my former student, he's now a research scientist at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, did a dissertation on this.
00:49:54.480He surveyed almost 2,000 faculty nationwide at the top colleges and universities and found that 40 percent self-identified, not just as on the left—not on the left was about 90, 95 percent, but 40 percent self-identified as radicals, activists, Marxists, or socialists.
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00:51:24.520Now, how many faculty members at colleges and universities do you suppose there are in the United States, approximately?
00:51:43.860So that means there's 80,000 academic activists who are being employed full-time in the United States.
00:51:50.260I don't know if you could go that far, because he looked at the top colleges and universities.
00:51:54.680If you wanted to generalize to all colleges and universities, you would have to include community colleges and, you know, primarily liberal arts.
00:52:19.200So one might think, if someone is advocating for diversity, given the extreme political skew and given the extent to which academia deals with politicized topics,
00:52:28.400that there would be an embrace of people, an attempt to bring into academia professors, researchers, scholars, teachers from across the political spectrum.
00:52:39.000That has never gotten any traction in academia, and in fact, it's gone in the complete opposite direction.
00:52:44.720If you go back 50, 60 years, I think it's fair to describe the way academia has functioned is to produce a slow-moving purge of conservatives and even people center and libertarians from its ranks.
00:52:56.820So my point in this commentary was using things like that as examples of the disingenuousness of progressive rhetoric around diversity, that it wasn't really diversity in the broadest sense.
00:53:15.000See, that's actually the fundamental flaw of intersectionality, is intersectionality devolves into combinatorial explosion almost immediately, right?
00:53:24.600Because once you start combining the categories of oppression, you don't have to make—your list of combinations, black, women, gay, etc., every time you add another variable to that multiplicative list, you decrease the pool of people that occupy that list radically, right?
00:53:45.280But there's also an infinite—there's literally an indefinite—this is your point—an indefinite number of potentially relevant group categories, right?
00:53:55.920So how in the world are you going to ensure that every possible combination of every possible group category is—you can't even measure it, much less ensure it?
00:54:07.160So there's this underlying insistence, which you're pointing to, I believe, that there are privileged categories of oppressed people, right?
00:54:18.120It's like, why is it that it's race and sex?
00:54:22.260And you might think, well, those are the most obvious differences between people, and maybe you can make that case.
00:54:27.040But then it's also gender, which is a very weird insistence, because whether the idea of gender is a valid—I don't think the idea of gender is a valid idea at all.
00:54:37.500I think it's super—it's, what would you say?
00:54:40.280It's a warped misconceptualization of everything that's captured by temperament much more accurately and precisely.
00:55:23.920And there's more to the story than this, but to keep this succinct, eventually what happened was almost 1,400 academics, probably mostly psychologists, signed an open letter denouncing—
00:55:45.440So my paper was one of several commentaries.
00:55:50.480All of the commentaries were critical of this oppression framing of diversity.
00:55:59.400It was in, yeah, Perspectives on Psych Science, yes.
00:56:01.440Okay, so I just want to provide people some background on this, and correct me if I get any of this wrong.
00:56:06.120So scientists publish in research journals, and they generally publish articles of two types.
00:56:13.100One type would be a research study, an actual experiment, let's say, or a sequence of experiments.
00:56:20.120And the other, I guess there's two other types.
00:56:23.140There's reviews and there's commentaries.
00:56:25.460And then there's a variety of different journals that scientists publish in, and some of those cover all scientific topics, science and nature.
00:56:35.780The world's premier scientific journals used to do that before they became woke institutions.
00:56:40.480And then there are specialized journals that cover fields like psychology, and then there are sub-specialized journals.
00:56:47.920And the less specialized the journal, all things considered, the more prestigious it is.
00:56:54.120Anyways, that's where scientists publish.
00:56:57.160And they do publish commentaries on each other's material, especially if it's a review of something contentious or something that's emerging in a field.
00:57:04.800And now, this journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science, there's also an interesting backstory here, because that's an American Psychological Society journal.
00:57:15.100Okay, so there's two major organizations for psychologists, especially research-oriented psychologists in North America.
00:57:24.100There's the American Psychological Association, which has its journals.
00:57:28.240And then a newer organization, which is now a couple of decades old, American Psychological Society.
00:57:34.020And the American Psychological Society was actually set up, at least in part, because the American Psychological Association had started to become ideologically dominated, particularly in the leftist and progressive direction, and that that was having an arguably negative effect on research, reliability, accuracy, and probability of publication.
00:58:38.500And it was becoming unscientific, but not because of the politics.
00:58:42.400Well, okay, so let—yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough.
00:58:45.620But, see, I was watching that happen because I knew some of the people who were setting up the APS at the time.
00:58:51.840And my sense, though, also was that part of the reason that the APA was tilting in a more and more clinical direction was because there was an underlying political ethos that was increasingly skeptical of science as the privileged mode of obtaining valid information.
00:59:18.560But, you know, it's also the case that, as you've seen, is that certainly the clinical psychology and the whole therapeutic enterprise has taken a cataclysmic turn towards the woke direction in the last—specially in the last 10 years.
00:59:34.540It's been absolutely devastating, and I don't know, is social psychology—I think you could probably say the same thing about social psychology.
00:59:42.880Maybe you could say a deep—maybe that's even worse.
00:59:46.620Well, it's probably worse politically, but it's probably not worse practically because social psychologists don't really—aren't responsible for helping anybody get on with their lives.
00:59:55.020I mean, they're responsible for teaching and students and things.
01:00:44.300But then when you look into it, you know, it's often—I know the distinction between graduate student and, let's say, full-fledged scientist is murky.
01:01:11.100But if you assume the first five or 10 names are the likely organizers, those were all well-established psychologists, especially social psychologists.
01:01:26.400And part of the accusation, for me in particular, was that by using this line from Fiddler on the Roof, there was the time he sold him a horse but delivered a mule, as a frame for progressive disingenuousness around diversity, I was comparing black people to mules.
01:02:43.920So, with one or the other—Fiedler so liked the reviews that he asked all of us to scale them up to full-length articles.
01:02:54.060Scientists publish their research findings and their reviews of the literature in scientific journals.
01:03:00.380And it's one of the ways that the quality of these articles is vetted is by submitting the manuscripts before they're published to—well, first of all, the editor reviews them to see if they're even vaguely possibly suitable for publication in that particular journal.
01:03:19.500On the basis of, let's say, topic and quality and apparent integrity of research.
01:03:25.040Then they're sent out to experts in that area, multiple experts, for analysis.
01:03:33.100And that's part of the quality control process.
01:03:35.300And that's worked—that worked pretty well up until about 2015, I would say, or maybe even spectacularly well, all things considered.
01:03:46.760And what's—what happened in this case was the reviews of this—the peer reviews of this particular article were of sufficient quality so that the editor decided that they might—
01:03:58.760They might turn into standalone pieces with some development.
01:04:02.380But I warned Fiedler, the editor, in my review, before anyone had the idea that a version of my review would get published, that if he accepted Hamill's critique of the way in which psychologists write and think about diversity, what they've been advocating with respect to diversity, that he would be at heightened risk of people coming after him, demanding the papers be retracted, and coming after his job.
01:04:36.560I'd have to go by—I don't—I think I may have taken it out because it wasn't really appropriate because the commentary wasn't—it was about the exchange.
01:04:48.580I mean, it's not necessarily the case that it would stick.
01:04:51.020Yeah, so, Firestorm, APS, the, like, executive director, committee of APS, whatever that group is, of committee, put an immediate kibosh on this—it was going to be all published as a discussion forum.
01:05:11.700That's how Fiedler framed it, it's a discussion forum about diversity issues.
01:05:49.760Partly because often—well, they don't have the specialized expertise, at least in part, which is partly why they hire the editors to begin with, who then they give pretty much carte blanche.
01:06:10.560So, the open letter had two main demands.
01:06:14.460They weren't even required, they were demands.
01:06:15.940That Fiedler be fired, and the papers be retracted.
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01:09:14.640So, they ousted him almost immediately.
01:09:17.120And then the papers—they brought in two special editors to figure out what to do with the papers accepted as part of the discussion forum.
01:09:28.580And who were these special editors, and what made them special?
01:09:32.160Well, there was Samin Vizier and E.J. Wagenmacher's.
01:09:36.040And both of them—I think Samin is now the head editor at Psychological Science.
01:09:42.340So, they both have had long careers advocating, with some success, for upgrading the quality and credibility and rigor of psychological science.
01:09:55.180They both have made important contributions that way.
01:09:58.720And so, I think that's why they were brought in.
01:10:00.840They had a certain cachet as able to figure out what to do.
01:10:04.840I think that's what the APS directory believed.
01:10:08.580On what grounds do you think this investigation was—how was the progression of this investigation justified?
01:10:18.620I mean, there's no established precedent in the scientific community for re-evaluating an editorial decision based on political objection, right?
01:10:29.280Like, there's no—we'll re-evaluate if 500 people sign a petition.
01:10:33.140Like, this isn't the domain of rule or principle or tradition, right?
01:10:38.080So, it's—what's the fear here, do you think?
01:10:42.600These 1,400 people signed this petition, which is something that takes like two seconds and costs you nothing and has no risk to you whatsoever.
01:10:50.380And so, it's not an ethical statement of any profundity unless you're an activist.
01:10:53.880So, what was it, do you think, that raised people's hackles about the mere fact that these complaints had been raised?
01:11:10.720The main object of Hummel's critique was a black or biracial social psychologist at Stanford, Stephen Roberts, and Roberts denounced the whole process as racist.
01:12:02.440Second ground was my use of this, me comparing blacks to mules with the, you know, there was the time he sold a horse and delivered a mule.
01:12:11.220And then the third was there was a considerable—so, Fiedler offered—
01:12:18.900Fiedler offered Roberts the opportunity to respond to the full set of papers which were supporting—were generally supporting Hummel's critique, which was really about diversity in general.
01:12:33.440But it's jumping off point was a prior paper by Roberts.
01:12:57.140Fiedler was probably kind of a pain in the ass.
01:12:58.980But, I don't know, in my experience, editors—I don't know how many times—I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times I have subjectively experienced editors' comments as pains in the ass.
01:13:39.760I have no—I don't have—I have at best very circumstantial evidence.
01:13:44.280I may not even have circumstantial evidence.
01:13:45.600I strongly suspect—I would really like to test this in the lab or in surveys—that liberals, especially white liberals, are so wracked with guilt and shame over the bona fide history of white supremacy and discrimination and oppression in the United States, in Europe, and especially in the UK.
01:14:06.940I'm so wracked with guilt that there is a vulnerability to just believing anything a person from one of these oppressed, stigmatized groups says denouncing others.
01:14:21.180Yeah, well, it's a very quick and easy way to signify the fact that you're not part of the oppressor camp.
01:14:34.880Well, that's something like—it's something like, from more broadly speaking, is that are there—it's a mechanism of gaming the reputation domain, right?
01:14:47.220Because obviously our reputations are probably, arguably, the most valuable commodity, so to speak, that we possess.
01:14:54.660And every system of value is susceptible to gaming in a variety of ways.
01:15:02.980And one way of gaming the reputational game is to make claims of reputational virtue that are risk-free, broad, immediate, and cost-free.
01:15:14.340Right, and for me, if you're accused of something, and I can say—and accused of transgressing against a group towards whom I feel guilt, I can signify my valor as a moral agent by also denouncing you.
01:15:30.500And it costs me nothing, right, which is a big problem, right?
01:15:34.580It's like, maybe it's the problem of our time.
01:15:39.500Well, especially now, because there's something else that's happened, right, is that groups of denunciators can get together with much greater ease than they ever could.
01:16:03.100It's like denunciation firestorm time, and that's certainly happening.
01:16:07.140Well, so, you know, I mostly agree, certainly in the short term, the personal consequences of engaging in this sort of denunciation behavior are non-existent.
01:16:20.580But the consequences are not non-existent.
01:16:24.740So the credibility and trust and faith in academia has been in decline for a very long time.
01:16:35.640Yeah, well, just because something's advantageous for some people in the short run does not mean that it's good for the whole game in the medium to long run.
01:17:15.240And that was one of the things you talked about, this sort of impulse control and short-term benefits versus long-term benefits, especially regarding social relations.
01:17:44.960So, but it's correlated with narcissism and that this pleasure that people, that people on this sort of cancel culture that has emerged.
01:17:57.300I mean, the right is not immune to cancel culture type activities, but it emerged primarily originally on the left.
01:18:03.480Any place infiltrated by narcissists is going to be susceptible to exactly, and the narcissist will use whatever political stance gains them the most immediate credibility.
01:18:20.060See, one of the things I've observed, this is very interesting, because I've talked to, I've talked to a lot of moderate progressives, let's say, or moderate, or actually even genuine liberals within the Democrat.
01:18:33.640Congressman and senators, many of them.
01:18:36.280And I've been struck by one thing, and I'm curious about what you think about this.
01:18:40.960We know that a tilt towards empathy, so agreeableness, trade agreeableness, a tilt, tilts you in a liberal direction and maybe in a progressive direction.
01:18:49.400And there are concomitants of being more agreeable on the personality side.
01:18:54.000But I think one of them is that the moderates that I've talked to always denied the existence of the pathological radicals on the left.
01:19:04.660And I've really thought, I mean, this is to a man for a moment.
01:19:09.240And I think what it is, I think it has something to do with the unwillingness or inability of the more liberal types to have imagination for evil.
01:19:19.640Like, I would make the case that most criminals, you could validly interpret most criminals whose criminal history is sporadic and short as victims.
01:19:35.660They're, they've come from abusive families, alcoholic families, often multi-generationally, antisocial families, etc.
01:20:02.380It doesn't matter how egregious the crime.
01:20:05.820Now, I would have, that's something I would have tested as a social psychologist if I still had an active research lab, which I don't.
01:20:12.820But the problem with what we know that, we know from simulations that networks of cooperators can establish themselves in a way that's mutually beneficial and productive.
01:20:23.440But that if a shark is dropped into a tank of cooperators, then the shark takes everything.
01:20:30.000So the problem with being agreeable and cooperative is that the monsters can get you.
01:20:34.740And if you're temperamentally tilted towards denying the existence of the monster, so much the worse.
01:20:42.280Now, I made that case because you talked about the relationship between narcissism and left-wing authoritarianism.
01:20:48.120I mean, narcissism shades into sadism as well.
01:20:51.800And so this is a very big problem, especially with online denunciation.
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01:21:50.620Now there's debate about whether these papers are going to proceed to publication.
01:22:13.900Negotiations go on for almost two years.
01:22:15.940Like, what are they negotiating about?
01:22:18.580Who's going to—so part of Robert's denunciation, public denunciation of all of us, was he posted the draft of his commentary response that was headed for the discussion forum,
01:22:38.160and the full set of emails he exchanged with Fiedler about publishing it.
01:22:44.960And those are typically confidential communications between an editor and an author, and so—