'You feel the desperation of people who are understanding their own irrelevance'
tarahenley.substack.com
Jan 5 • 31M
'You feel the desperation of people who are understanding their own irrelevance'
On Lean Out's first anniversary, Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon returns to the show to contemplate the state of our media - and talk through the big stories of 2022
Appears in this episode
Tara Henley
Conversations with heterodox authors and journalists from around the world, asking the questions that are not being asked.
Episode details
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One year ago today, the Lean Out podcast launched with an interview with the American journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon.
Now, 12 months later, Lean Out has listeners in 135 countries and 2900 cities. To mark this milestone — our first anniversary — I invited Batya back on the show to talk through some of the big stories of 2022.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek, and the author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.
I’m thrilled to have Batya Ungar-Sargon as my guest, to kick off a whole new year on the Lean Out podcast.
'You feel the desperation of people who are understanding their own irrelevance'
There are these life-paths connected to ramps leading to a platform level on the human social dominance class hierarchy. Some of these ramps are platforms that are stable and real. The Canadian truckers for example. Some are manufactured societal constructs that lack real foundation and are always at risk of collapsing. Our modern ruling political media chattering occupies a rickety platform. By increasing the educated class and shrinking the working class we have loaded up the rickety platform. The occupants know it is at risk of collapse, but with strength in numbers they are committed to authoritarian measures to prop it up. They are also committed to destroying the foundations of all other class platforms as their stability is too hard to take. We need their false platform of authoritarian dominance to collapse before they destroy everything.
I'm still grappling with the the astonishing realization that many of my colleagues support the invocation of The Emergencies Act, right down to freezing people out of their money, which is to say disenfranchising them. We're musicians, for heaven's sake, we used to be the ones speaking out for social justice. There are tiny, extremely vocal, minorities on the extreme edges of the political spectrum that are controlling the discourse and those of us in the middle are increasingly frustrated. This is a volatile situation - a powder keg - and it's so bizarre as to appear contrived; but for whose benefit?