On this week's episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, host David Axelrod is joined by former Seattle Times columnist David Gergen to discuss his time at the paper, including his controversial column defending Adolf Hitler, his time on the paper's editorial board, and why he left to become a full-time comedian.
00:01:10.020David, so you were fired from the Seattle Times for defending Hitler, at which point we were like, this is going to be a great guest for us.
00:01:17.920And then I read more into the story, and disappointingly, you actually didn't defend Hitler.
00:01:31.940I'm actually, the deeper you look, I think, into my bio, I think you'll find I'm probably the last person you could possibly imagine throwing that accusation at.
00:01:43.280Sure. I spent a good part of my career leading up to this situation covering genocidal violence, genocidal rape.
00:01:58.360When the war in Ukraine broke out, I flew over to the border to write about the refugee crisis that was going on there.
00:02:06.720I've covered the Tigrayan genocide, and I wrote specifically about how I think that it wasn't getting the attention that it deserved because of racism,
00:02:15.260which is quite something that actually the WHO director Tedros was convinced me of, that I initially was not persuaded of.
00:02:25.940Anyway, so it was around this time, right after those two stories came out, or within a year of those two stories coming out,
00:02:34.320that I decided to apply and get the position for the Seattle Times editorial board and columnist.
00:04:34.340At the time, my daughter was six months old, so this was an issue that interested me.
00:04:40.580But my boss repeatedly nudged me to write about the statue of Vladimir Lenin in downtown Seattle.
00:04:48.940And I thought, okay, it's not very difficult for me to make that a personal story, given my family background, which is that on my father's side, both of my grandparents were refugees from Russia.
00:05:02.880My grandmother's from Siberia, my grandfather was from the western part of the country, and his family was just shredded by both the Soviets and the Nazis.
00:05:15.880So he ended up in a concentration camp, but made it out with his life, which is its own story, where he had to actually wait for a torrential downpour so that the ground would be soft enough that he could dig under the fence with his bare hands.
00:05:30.960Although at that point of the plan, he had become so weakened through starvation that he wasn't able to, and his two buddies had to drag him under the fence because he couldn't dig, he could barely walk.
00:05:46.200He actually ended up entering the U.S. military as an advisor of sorts, largely because of the number of languages that he spoke at this point.
00:05:55.420Belarusian, Russian, English, German, very useful at that time.
00:06:04.120So, okay, so I'm asked to write this piece about Vladimir Lenin.
00:06:09.200I can connect these parts of my background into the story.
00:06:12.380I thought it would be an interesting way not only to comment on what the statue means to Russian Americans, but also to introduce myself to the readers and say,
00:06:20.860hey, this is who I am, this is my background, nice to meet you, I'm the new editorial board member, something of that nature.
00:06:26.980It's important to note that in my column, I did say that I do not believe that the statue should be torn down by fiat.
00:06:34.420I think that it's a statue that, first of all, it's on private property, but also if it's to be taken down, it should be taken down with the consent of the community.
00:06:44.420I actually spoke to the former editor-in-chief of the Odessa Review and tablet writer Vladislav Davidsson about this and got some commentary from him on this for the story because he has commented on this in the past, other statues that were of controversy.
00:07:00.220And he and I are eye to eye on the fact that you shouldn't just go around ripping down statues because they are offensive.
00:07:07.020Now, of course, in the context of Seattle and in the context of the United States in the past few years, we know that statues has become a very contentious thing.
00:07:15.000And so I thought it was interesting for me to comment on this because of what I perceived to be the selective outrage on the left, whereby a Confederate statue must come down,
00:07:26.320even some statues of George Washington must come down, but a statue of Vladimir Lenin is not only OK, it's the two most common responses that I received were that it was funny.
00:07:42.020And the other one is that he's the glorious hero and we should, you know, there are a lot of Seattleites, I think, are unaware of how seriously some other Seattleites take this statue.
00:07:56.420So people would write to me after the column came out and they would say, why are you taking this so seriously?
00:09:09.640I meant to say maybe there should be a little more reflection on what the statue means to everyone in the community.
00:09:15.080Because that tends to be the kind of rhetoric or dialogue that you often hear on the left is, let's talk about the people most directly affected by this issue.
00:09:24.440Let's talk about the people who are of this community, right?
00:09:28.200That's what we are instructed to do in these situations.
00:09:32.920But I felt that there was a problem here with what I would call selective outrage on the left.
00:09:38.580And unfortunately, this is no longer a point that I have to really hammer home in the wake of October 7th, where we really have seen selective outrage on the left at a level that almost defies comprehension.
00:09:52.380So the gist of the column was essentially, was not that we should take it down, but that we should have more deeper consideration.
00:10:03.020And then, you know, I think as a good columnist does, not to say this is what it is, but to say, well, here's the information.
00:11:29.940I go on X and I write a few posts about the column and then I start getting into conversations with people.
00:11:36.100And I make the point that, you know, we wouldn't tolerate a Confederate statue.
00:11:42.180Why would we tolerate a statue of Lenin when he has inarguably done vastly more damage than any single Confederate soldier or general ever did?
00:11:53.680And one individual made the point, well, it's not really fair because we have a deeply personal relationship with the Confederacy in this country that we don't really have with Lenin because that's Europe.
00:12:06.980To which I said, okay, then what about Hitler?
00:12:10.400Because Hitler is a European dictatorial leader who caused untold suffering.
00:12:17.580And would we tolerate a statue of Hitler for even one second?
00:12:21.420I think everybody knows the answer to that.
00:12:27.100Now, at this point, I said, it's even more ironic because Hitler, not in terms of any physical harm caused, because we know that the death tolls, the Holocaust was uniquely evil.
00:12:38.200The death toll under the Nazis was worse.
00:12:40.560Nothing to be compared to what Lenin did.
00:12:42.320But psychologically, I said, Lenin was actually more terrifying.
00:12:50.900So let's explore that point, because I think this is a very interesting part of your story.
00:12:55.560I mean, why do you find him psychologically more terrifying?
00:13:00.220I think because I don't know, obviously, as much as you about Soviet history, but Hitler was the impact that he had psychologically on the people living under his rule was horrific.
00:13:16.620I meant his psychology, not the psychological impact he had on others.
00:13:20.660So Hitler is this is a somewhat outdated framework for understanding psychopathy.
00:13:25.440But there is a framework that I find useful, which is a two part framework.
00:13:28.860There's primary psychopathy and secondary psychopathy, otherwise known as type one psychopathy and type two psychopathy, two types of psychopaths.
00:13:36.040So you can think of type two psychopathy as you're more impulsive, hotheaded, quick to anger, usually not that bright.
00:13:44.620This is where I would fit Hitler from all of the all of the research that I've done, the biographies that I've read, the information that I've gleaned.
00:13:52.660And I would say he he reads to me as a sort of I think of him as a kind of Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones.
00:14:01.240Like you you every moment that he's on the screen for the first I don't remember what season he ends up leaving.
00:14:07.680But up until that point, you're just hate watching the show waiting for this kid to get killed off.
00:14:13.340Right. So that's that's your Hitler is this disgusting, little, hateful, bigoted, nasty.
00:14:19.280But and what gives him his power in large part is that he is the ruler of Westeros or in Hitler's case, 1940s Germany.
00:14:26.220Even if Hitler was on par with Lenin, you just can't compare 1920s Russia to 1940s Germany and expect that they're going to have the same degree of harm.
00:14:34.300So that's that's a different issue, though.
00:14:36.700So Lenin, now, Lenin was actually he was not a I don't think that Hitler was a great mind.
00:14:43.880I don't think that he had a I don't think he was particularly intelligent.
00:14:57.260And if you go back and read his writing, you look at his research, you look at the sort of his routine when he was in prison or just throughout his life.
00:15:05.020He was incredibly brilliant. And that's not to say anything positive about the conclusions that he came to.
00:15:09.180But he was a brilliant. He had an incredibly brilliant mind.
00:15:12.500He was methodical. He was calculating. He was manipulative.
00:15:16.740This is not a Joffrey Baratheon. This is a Hannibal Lecter.
00:15:20.000This is a far more terrifying. Now, who killed more people, Joffrey or Hannibal?
00:15:26.800It's not because Hannibal is a less terrifying or less evil mind.
00:15:30.180I think that Lenin is a is a type one psychopath, a primary psychopath.
00:15:35.800He and one of the ways that I think we can understand this is by looking at the fact that even within his.
00:15:45.140Almost incomprehensibly evil worldview, Hitler, he still had this framing of his desire to protect what he defined as the good and to oppose what he defined as the bad.
00:15:57.020So he had this kind of like moral architecture that we might recognize as defend the good, oppose the bad.
00:16:03.220But what he chose to fill in there is the complete reverse of reality.
00:16:07.960Right. So he was completely psychotic in his understanding.
00:16:10.280His architecture did not map onto reality, if that makes sense.
00:16:14.640But he at least believed he was a good guy.
00:16:17.000And if you go back and read Mein Kampf, you see that he was in his thinking.
00:16:21.040Trying to rationalize his evil acts as in some way helping Germany, helping Germans, creating being a force of good in the world.
00:16:32.440It's it's it's unbelievable that he was able to do the mental gymnastics on this.
00:16:36.100But he if you look at Gregory H. Stanton, the great genocidal expert, if you look at his 10 stages of genocide.
00:16:42.920Hitler was very much on the fourth stage of dehumanization, genocidal dehumanization.
00:16:48.820That's what Hitler did to every single one of his enemies and everyone he targeted.
00:16:52.160He dehumanized the Jews. He dehumanized the Romani. He dehumanized communists.
00:16:56.220He saw anyone that he was killing as an existential threat.
00:17:00.800To his to to Germany and to to all good people.
00:17:03.960So as much as we might want to, you know, relegate Hitler as this as this unthinkable evil, I think there's there's two things that we have to come to terms with.
00:17:16.760And one one of the things is that, as I think Jordan Peterson has often said.
00:17:22.460He said that there's a little bit of Hitler in all of us, that there is a there is a psychological aspect of Hitler.
00:17:28.500Don't forget, Mein Kampf, people who haven't read it, often assume that Mein Kampf, which literally means my struggle, is his struggle to power.
00:17:37.340When in fact, it is his struggle against anti-Semitism.
00:17:40.860And it's in the second chapter of the book that he describes his descent from that position, from walking down the streets of Vienna and seeing people with their anti-Semitic pamphlets and pushing them aside because he's disgusted to to his realization that they have a point and that, in fact, anti-Semitism is the only way to save Germany.
00:18:01.360Right. So something happened to him that was in the culture, that was a moment in Vienna that was so anti-Semitic.
00:18:09.200And I think we're seeing some of this today, in fact, and this is why this kind of conversation matters.
00:18:16.960Don't forget, it was in what was it, 1896, that Theodor Herzl, who was living in Vienna, came to the conclusion that Jews would never be accepted in Europe.
00:18:25.260And therefore, he penned the pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, or the Jewish state, giving birth to political Zionism.
00:18:31.300He was living in Vienna just a decade or two before Hitler ended up there.
00:18:50.200If you if you look at his his writings, if you look at his relationships with other people, his sex life, which is just it's just chapters and chapters of unbelievably awkward and abusive and absurd behavior on his part.
00:19:08.680But so, for instance, like going on a date with a girl and telling her that she has his dead mother's eyes or beating a dog almost to death, his dog in front of her, things like this.
00:19:19.040So anyway, the thing that we have to come to terms with when it comes with regard to Hitler is that he he was himself a psychopath.
00:19:28.880Yes, and so different, but also at the same time, to a degree, a product of his environment, a product of what was rampant anti-Semitism at the time.
00:19:39.340That's how he was able to be so successful.
00:19:41.460He didn't convince all of these Germans to think what he thought.
00:19:46.440He just had to get up and say it out loud.
00:19:48.980I think they were just waiting like they were just waiting to and they already were blaming Jews for, let's say, the economic depredations, for instance.
00:19:58.720In the wake of World War One, things of this nature.
00:20:00.980So, OK, so he that's one thing that we have to think about with Hitler is that to the degree that he was this product.
00:21:04.060We just we just came out of a pandemic.
00:21:05.340OK, imagine under COVID, just you're driving to your grandma's house and there's just dead bodies along the highway because there's just so many people dying in your country.
00:21:15.960The the international media was just having a field day with this to the great embarrassment of Russian leaders.
00:21:23.020Anton Chekhov, who was a doctor, got involved and tried to do what he could.
00:21:31.680Lenin's older sister, she started going around doing relief aid.
00:21:36.800His other sister did relief aid as well.
00:21:39.080Everybody was trying to get involved to save lives, do whatever they could.
00:21:41.900Now, Lenin ran around spreading disinformation about the relief efforts.
00:21:45.700And something that I think that it's important for us to remember here is that under COVID, for instance, when you had people who were in whatever direction they were pushing, whether they were on this side of the argument or that side of the argument, isolation, masking, vaccination, whatever it is.
00:22:03.940Both sides were doing it because they believed that their side was the right side and that the harm being done was being done by the people on the other side.
00:22:12.320If you're for vaccination, it's because you think you're going to save lives.
00:22:14.840If you're against it, it's because you're not sure about the vaccine science and you don't want people to get hurt either way.
00:22:21.780So you might think that Lenin was going around spreading disinformation because he believed that the relief efforts were harmful as we saw people doing similar things today.
00:22:30.440But in fact, he understood that the relief efforts were saving lives and his aim was to maximize death of all class, of all of all races, of all religion.
00:22:40.180He just wanted as many people as possible to die.
00:22:42.740There was no effort here to protect the good or save the innocent, maybe the children, nothing like that.
00:23:47.560Hitler is this, I would characterize as this incel youth who goes to Vienna and absorbs the anti-Semitism there, comes back when his mother becomes sick with breast cancer, I believe, and to take care of her.
00:24:04.420And then he ends up, you know, that's the sort of genesis of his racist hatred.
00:24:10.160But Lenin, from a very early age, had, and his sisters often wrote once, in particular, I'm thinking, wrote about this, about the callous, cold, nobody uses the term psychopathic, but this is, I think, what we're dealing with, is a primary psychopath or what's known as a born psychopath.
00:24:33.200So this is someone who, even the people within his own life, even, you know, innocent children, you might say, that he would have regarded as innocent by his own terms, they were just fuel for the fire.
00:25:21.680Somebody made this point about a confederate, and I said, well, what about Hitler?
00:25:24.160I mean, Lenin was an even greater monster.
00:25:27.460Lenin was, you know, he was the Hannibal Lecter to Joffrey Baratheon.
00:25:31.220This is, Lenin, what I said was that Lenin targeted people that even he himself believed knew to be innocent.
00:25:42.200And people said, oh, so you're defending Hitler.
00:25:45.760And I said, wait, so if I said that it's evil to kill my sister, but that it would be worse to kill my sister and my mother, am I defending the murder of my sister?
00:25:56.960Is that what you're suggesting in your argument?
00:25:58.620And people said that I was also denying the Holocaust, which I don't even know.
00:26:05.060I don't know how they got there, but that was another claim.
00:26:09.180I started looking at the accounts who were attacking me.
00:39:59.380And I also disagree to a certain extent.
00:40:01.880Do you not think these kids are getting brainwashed in these institutions?
00:40:04.860If you think about when you go to university, you were raised to believe that these are your professors, these people know more than you, they have the answers, and you were there to learn and to take in information that the professors will dispense.
00:40:20.160Is that not really a form of brainwashing as well?
00:40:23.120If you're 18 years old, you go to Harvard and someone tells you that communism is brilliant?
00:40:27.400I suppose we could use the word in both situations.
00:40:35.660But if we were going to deploy the word to describe both scenarios, then I would say it's not that I'm against using it in that situation, although I don't think I would use it.
00:40:45.040But if we were to use it, I would say, okay, fine, but then one is far more extreme and thorough and intense.
00:40:51.680And the other one, perhaps it's a form of social, quote-unquote, brainwashing to have people that you look up to and maybe even your family and friends all feeding you the same information.
00:41:02.080Okay, there is, but just the fact that you have access to so many alternative forms of information dilutes the effect, or anyway should, especially if you're going to an elite school.
00:41:11.780I still think that you can't get out from under the weight of you should know better.
00:41:17.940I think that that still remains, and I don't think I can put that on – you can still hold Gazans morally responsible without feeling that they should know better in the same sense as a student at Stanford, for instance.
00:41:35.040And so what we've seen – and this is not to say that I in any way justify or support what I see coming out of the Middle East, but what I see coming out of Gaza.
00:41:45.100But to say that when I see it coming out of our own Western institutions, the first thing I have to ask myself is, what has become of our institutions?
00:41:55.160What has become of our – particularly, for me, most especially, the sort of beating heart of corruption of this rot that we're seeing in our society that is kind of eating us from the inside,
00:42:08.760is coming from our media and our universities or our schools, and these are the two most powerful sources of information.
00:42:17.080So if the two most powerful sources of information have been hijacked, where does that leave us?
00:42:23.280It's coming from within these institutions.
00:42:25.120It's not as if they've been taken over in a sense, but it's from the inside out.
00:42:29.460This reminds me of – I'm not going to remember the name of it, but I just recently, the other night, saw this dystopian science fiction movie.
00:42:40.300And anyway, in the movie, it's explained that there's a form of warfare whereby you just shut down the grid,
00:42:48.640and then you just leave people in the chaos of darkness.
00:42:52.420And you don't have to invade, and you don't have to kill anyone.
00:42:55.220You just let them rip themselves apart.
00:42:56.620And I feel – I mean, I don't want to be hyperbolic, but I do feel as if, to a degree, China, Russia, our rivals, Iran, North Korea,
00:45:13.760That was the only further engagement I made.
00:45:16.800So the technically official reason was for me telling a journalist my ancestors were not Nazis.
00:45:25.040And if that's not the reason, then the other reason would, of course, be that I said Lenin is a primary psychopath
00:45:32.280and we have a real problem with selective outrage on the left.
00:45:34.600David, can I ask a few questions about – well, this will sound like I'm sort of being passively, aggressively critical,
00:45:46.540but I am sort of an adopted Brit, so it comes naturally.
00:45:50.420I suppose the question is, why are you surprised by this?
00:45:54.960And I hope that's not an unfair question, but you seem incredibly smart, incredibly knowledgeable about a lot of things, both historically and modern day.
00:46:03.700Why did you take a job with the Seattle Times and then expect to be able to criticize Lenin and get away with it?
00:46:11.020I guess that's not an unfair question.
00:46:14.700And it's one that I've been asked before.
00:46:19.120One of my very close friends, in fact, asked me, like, what do you think was going to happen?
00:46:25.540And to which I responded, well, look, my background is that I've been writing for many years about North Korea.
00:46:36.660I was the U.S. correspondent for NK News, which is one of the best outlets for North Korean news in the world, the other one being 38 North, I think.
00:46:50.600And I wrote about China for many years, so I get a lot of heat from tankies.
00:46:57.460Just define tankies for people who are not familiar.
00:46:59.840Tankies would be people who are in support of violent, the use of violence to further their beliefs.
00:47:07.520This comes from the, I believe it was during the Hungarian Revolution, where they were rolling in the tanks.
00:47:11.900And that was a point, that was an inflection point for many communists who were like, okay, this is a step, this is a bridge too far for me.
00:47:17.420We can't go in there with tanks and start slaughtering innocents.
00:47:19.520And then there were others who were like, no, no, we have to, as the individual said to me, this violence is necessary.
00:47:28.280Essentially a Leninist, I suppose you could say.
00:47:31.100Someone who thinks that, you know, revolutionary violence is morally justifiable.
00:47:36.200And this is the same thing that you hear today from pro-Hamas protesters.
00:47:40.760You know, if we can define it as an occupation, then we can reframe this as a revolution, and then we can justify whatever violence took place on October 7th.
00:47:51.440So, okay, I have tankies coming after me.
00:48:05.720The thing is, on social media, when these groups come after you, you ignore them.
00:48:09.520If I had ever told my boss at NK News or one of the outlets I worked at with regard to China, like, hey, I've got these tankies and they really don't like what I had to say, my bosses would have said, why are you telling me about this?
00:48:23.900I don't care what some pro-Mao, pro-Hitler individual on social media, why are you even wasting my time?
00:48:35.240So that was my general understanding of the appropriate way to respond, and I think it still is the appropriate way to respond to this type of thing.
00:48:42.380And that was the understanding I had coming into this.
00:48:44.340So I knew that if I wrote this, there was going to be some kind of, like, backlash of tankies and Leninists, fine, and that I would ignore it.
00:48:51.500I did not predict that my paper would choose not to ignore it and that they would ever end up citing with Leninists.
00:49:04.240I mean, you look at the accounts of the people who were attacking me and who were really incensed, and you can look at their accounts on X and you can see they're self-identified.
00:49:12.560Not only are they self-identified Leninists or communists with the flag in their bio or whatever.
00:49:17.400I checked back a little bit later with as many of them as I could still find, and almost every single one that I looked at was also pro-Hamas spewing anti-Semitic garbage, which you probably could have predicted if I had told you that they are Leninists, that they would do that.
00:49:34.540But then to think that the paper would side with those types of individuals who are armed with lies about one of their journalists just is something that I think truly did catch me by surprise.
00:49:50.860Well, not to add misery on top of it, and certainly not to sound like I'm sort of victim blaming you for what happened, but it seems to me that if you know that in Seattle a significant number of people or a certain number of people have those views,
00:50:10.420would it not be quite natural that the Seattle Times would be sensitive to them if that is a portion of the local population, I guess?
00:50:20.000I think the reason for them to be sensitive would be if they perhaps, you mean if they saw it as a potential business issue, like they're concerned.
00:50:32.780Well, the problem, I understand what you're saying, but the only problem that I foresee with that analysis is that the people, the leftists, loathe the Seattle Times, and they're never going to read it.
00:50:43.380So I don't see how firing me was a business decision.
00:50:45.640They see the Seattle Times, which may be surprising to hear, especially the editorial board upon which I sat, is viewed as conservative, if not neoconservative.
00:50:58.880Some of the editorials have come out over the years in support of Republican candidates.
00:51:02.520I don't think that the board members, you can say, are just conservative, maybe one of them or two of them, but largely they're rational moderates, if not Biden Democrats, I imagine.
00:51:16.040But the paper has also had some controversy in the past.
00:51:21.100I remember when, I think, gubernatorial candidate Bob McKenna was running, the paper was like his third largest donor.
00:51:28.340A lot of staffers were upset about that, and they wrote a letter of protest, and he was a Republican candidate.
00:51:35.580And it's quite unusual for a newspaper to do such a thing.
00:51:38.160So the paper has, and especially the editorial board, has this reputation of being very conservative.
00:51:42.500Now, also in the city, there are more left-leaning outlets.
00:51:50.200So the idea that these Leninists are, in some sense, that the paper should maybe take action to appease these Leninists, who will never read your paper, who will never pick up a copy except to spit on it, it just doesn't make business sense to me.
00:52:10.220I don't see how that would fit into the analysis.
00:52:12.440But then again, that assumes that the analysis was perfectly rational, and that may not have been the case.
00:52:16.140It may have just been an emotional reaction.
00:52:19.420And so where does this leave you now, then?
00:52:22.120Because has that impacted your ability to go and get another job?
00:52:25.760Because if people look at your CV, they'll say, well, this person, this candidate has been fired.
00:52:30.480I mean, it certainly was the first thing that came to my mind was, are people going to Google my name and, you know, what's going to come up when they see?
00:52:39.820And initially, that is all that came up, including from outlets that I had written for exposing neo-Nazi lies.
00:52:48.580And now they're writing, now they're doing these hot takes about me, which I thought was just really unfortunate to see, for instance, the Daily Beast did that.
00:52:59.500So I've written for them about neo-Nazism, and now they're doing a piece without mentioning that maybe I had written for them about neo-Nazism.
00:53:05.020I think that maybe that would have been relevant in the story.
00:53:06.980So these stories are coming up, and I'm thinking, this doesn't look good.
00:53:12.900Then Vladislav Davidsson, in fact, the great Ukrainian writer and journalist, who I had gotten commentary from for the original column,
00:53:27.360he ends up writing a piece about this whole thing for the Jewish magazine Tablet titled Hitler and the Seattle Times,
00:53:35.460which was a scathing, scathing judgment on their decision and the whole thing, and then more largely speaking, cancel culture and where we are today.
00:53:48.600Then after this, I wrote a piece for the Free Press, in which I told the full story.
00:54:19.560Other than the Leninists who came after me, I haven't met anyone yet who looked at what I wrote on social media and believed what they believed about it.
00:54:28.900Everybody, you know, understands what happened.
00:54:32.660So, I suppose my hope is that when people are looking, if a prospective employer is looking at my name, they're going to see all of this information.
00:54:46.020The other thing is, when something like this happens to you, until you do take your next step, you're thinking, well, what do I do now?
00:54:54.140And what I've decided to do in the meantime is, as we've seen with many journalists, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, this transition to independent journalism.
00:55:04.800And so, I took the subject, which was the basis of my cancellation, which was not just Lenin, but more broadly, political extremism.
00:55:14.860And now I have a Substack newsletter and podcast, which is focused on political extremism.
00:55:21.360It's called The Radicalist, if anyone's interested.
00:55:25.720And this is, if this reaches the point of bringing in a livable wage, then that's what I would continue to do.
00:55:36.220Until then, or depending on how things go, I'll be doing that, or I'm still looking for gainful employment elsewhere.
00:55:51.440Well, David, it's a really crazy, I said crazy, but it's, I mean, the people, the number of people we've had on the show who've been in a similar position to you is such that it's no longer crazy.
00:56:04.420It's just part of American and British life now, sadly.
00:56:09.780The good thing is what you said at the end there, which is you have a Substack now.
00:56:13.340Substack, I think, is a great platform for people like us.
00:56:16.340I ride on there, and, you know, it's really worked out for me.
00:56:19.780I am certain, given how eloquent and erudite you are on these subjects, it will work out for you.
00:56:25.080I recommend everybody head over there and subscribe right now.
00:56:28.740We're going to ask you a bunch of questions from our supporters that they've already sent in, which goes behind a paywall.
00:56:34.120But before we do, we always end with the same question, which is, what's the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be?
00:56:51.520Christopher Hitchens once said that he became a journalist because he didn't want to have to rely on newspapers for information.
00:56:56.340And I think one of the things that I try to express to people is the way in which it used to be a problem with journalism is getting the information out to people.
00:57:07.980Whether that means riding on a horse and literally handing them a paper out in the middle of wherever they happen to live.
00:57:16.020Or just having the means by which to publish, you know, the media is the only company mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.
00:57:25.320And I think that we've now reached the point where the problem is not getting out the information.
00:57:31.560It's that we are basically feeding off a fire hose of information.
00:57:35.200It's too much and people are not equipped to deal with that.