Lean Out with Tara Henley

As the pandemic winds down, another public health emergency rages — and it is not getting as much attention. I’m speaking, of course, about the opioid crisis. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief medical officer of health, recently tweeted that the latest data shows that in 2021, 7,560 people died of opioid-related overdose. On average, 21 people died and 17 were hospitalized every day.

My guest on the program today penned an opinion piece in the Vancouver Sun in 2020 warning that our pandemic response could escalate the crisis. And sadly, he has been proven right.

He is a former criminal justice advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper who underwent a transformation in his views, becoming a passionate advocate for the decriminalization of drugs, for a safe supply, and above all, for more empathy and compassion for Canadians struggling with addiction.

Benjamin Perrin is a professor at the University of British Columbia’s law school. He’s also the author of Overdose: Heartbreak and Hope in Canada’s Opioid Crisis. The book is a compelling and evidence-based journey through the overdose epidemic, and I’m so happy that Ben Perrin could join me today to talk about it.

Edited highlights from our interview are below. For the full conversation, download the podcast.

On how fentanyl is getting into Canada

TH: You do a great job in this book of outlining why the opioid crisis has been so hard to address. I want to talk about how fentanyl — this toxic drug supply — is getting into the country. What did you learn about how the drug is making its way into Canada, and why it’s so hard to stem that flow?

BP: Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid. What that means is it’s created in the lab. It was created in the late 1950s in Belgium. It was designed for palliative cancer patients, to alleviate pain and suffering. It’s widely used in medical care. I myself, when I went through a procedure a couple years ago, after writing Overdose, asked the anesthesiologist, “What are you giving me?” It was fentanyl. So it’s safe in that setting, because we know the potency, the contents. And I’m being monitored.

Both those [aspects], if they are absent … that’s what leads to people overdosing and dying. So, street drugs are contaminated with varying degrees of fentanyl.

How does it get into Canada? Well, the research that I did for this book at the time was that it was largely coming from China through the mail.

When you talk about potency … The global war on drugs has advanced through the decades — and we’re not talking hundreds of kilograms, we’re talking tonnes of heroin that’s been seized — organized crime did not pack up their bag and go home. This is in the trillions of dollars, likely, the global illicit drug market. If you could ever estimate it. So someone, somewhere, figured you could make this stuff. Why bother trying to smuggle it into countries in packages that are large enough to get detected?

Fentanyl is shipped into Canada in greeting cards. That’s how small it is. That’s how it’s entering Canada. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. There’s almost 2 million pieces of small mail that come into Vancouver’s international airport from China every single month. You’re quite frankly wasting your time and resources if you’re trying to crack down on it at the border.

On stigma

TH: I want to get to both safe supply and decriminalization. But first, stigma is an issue that comes up time and time again in this book. And part of the problem with this opioid crisis is it is disproportionately impacting marginalized groups: poor people, Indigenous people, those who’ve been incarcerated. The incarceration piece I was not aware of. Talk to me about why jail puts people at greater risk of overdosing.

BP: People who are recently released from custody are 50 times more likely to overdose and die than someone in the general population … In British Columbia, the coroner in our province has done a fairly substantial amount of work on this issue, and has had several of what are called “death panel reviews” — where they don’t just do autopsies on individuals, but they actually then aggregate and say, “We’re going to look at everyone who died from overdose and identify trends.” One of the top-level findings that they made — which really, again, hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage — is that over 40 percent of people in B.C. who died of illicit drug overdose, during this 1.5 year period they studied, had recently spent time [incarcerated].

Let’s talk about why. The main reason is that in prison, drugs are still widely accessible — but certainly not the same way that they are in the community. And so when someone who has opioid use disorder is incarcerated, they’re using less than they were before and their tolerance rapidly declines. As a result, when they are subsequently released, even if they were only in for 30 days on a short-term sentence, they’re at substantially higher risk of overdosing and dying because of their reduced tolerance.

On trauma

TH: We’re not using the word trauma lightly here. There’s a story that you tell in the book of a person who had been at the murder of their mother and had been left with the body for days before being discovered. This is serious, serious trauma. And we know from the work of Gabor Maté that many of the people on the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, for example, have experienced huge levels of childhood trauma. Do you think that politicians understand that piece enough?

BP: No, I don’t think they do, at all. In this country, they don’t. And if they do, they don’t care. You know, when we look at things like childhood trauma and intergenerational trauma … When they look at residential school survivors, for instance, they find that you’re looking at around 6 out of 10 of what are called Adverse Childhood Experiences on average ... And if you have over 4, you’re already substantially more likely to use substances. Why? These are painkillers. People are self-medicating.

On safe supply

TH: Let’s spend a moment on safe supply and the NAOMI study. Can you explain what that is and what the results have been?

BP: So there were quite a few people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside who had made substantial efforts at getting into treatment and recovery. So the average person in the NAOMI study, I believe, had over 10 attempts at reducing or stopping using. And they had tried all kinds of things. There’s all kinds of different approaches to treatment and recovery that hadn’t worked for them. And most of them were longterm intravenous substance users. I think 15-plus years. So these are people who were going to be using drugs anyway — just to give the context for that.

What the researchers did in these studies — there were two of them, the first was called NAOMI and the other is SALOME — is they provided them with opioids that were of known contents and potency. The individuals would come into a medical clinic and they would use the substances there.

Then researchers tracked things. They looked into things like: Were you still using street drugs? If you were, how much were you spending on them? How were things going in your life? Were you reconnecting with family? Getting jobs? Also, were you overdosing? They tracked the health and criminal justice and social metrics. And they found that across those metrics, people who were provided with that safe supply did better on all those fronts at a statistically significant level.

I talked to judges and criminal defence lawyers, and they told me that they found out later on that they had clients, or accused persons who were appearing before them, who ended up in these studies on the Downtown Eastside. And they didn’t know they were in the study. They just stopped showing up one day.

One criminal defence lawyer I talked to said there was a guy he called a frequent flyer. He said it was literally hundreds of charges that he’d had over the years. One day he stopped hearing from this person. He said he assumed he’d passed away. But then he saw him one day — and he’d ended up in one of these safe supply projects. It really shows us that folks who have opioid use disorder and who are using toxic street drugs, that it’s not the drugs themselves that are the lion’s share of the problem. It’s the criminalization of them.

On the lack of political will to decriminalize possession

TH: The political will is the major issue here. And this goes up to the PMO. Your sources told you about a meeting with Justin Trudeau in which he flat-out said decriminalization is not going to happen, that marijuana was hard enough. You were able to independently verify that statement with another participant in that meeting. What do you think it would take to get the federal Liberals on board?

BP: Well, they had an opportunity in May of 2022 to do that. The NDP brought a private members’ bill forward that would decriminalize simple possession, which is what public health experts have said is needed. What the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has said is needed. And growing numbers of organizations. And they chose to not do it. They voted against that legislation. So, this is clearly a political thing.

You have, on one hand, the Conservatives, who are continuing to oppose decriminalization — who actively campaign on criminalizing and demonizing people who use drugs. We see that in the current federal Conservative leadership race. We see that with provincial Conservative politicians, like Jason Kenney in Alberta and Doug Ford in Ontario. And, as a result, the Liberals, even if they were more inclined to decriminalize, they’re afraid … So it is fear and it is politics that is driving policy. Instead of the best available evidence for what would keep people alive during this public health emergency.

This is an edited and condensed transcript. For the full interview, download the podcast.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

The realignment of left and right is something that we talk about a lot on this podcast, as we try to make sense of the current moment. This political shakeup is producing new politics, new alliances, and new conversations.   

To keep up with the pace of such shifts, Lean Out is now expanding to two episodes a week, to better document these developments in real time. I’ll still be interviewing an author every week, but now I will also be interviewing a journalist — about a newly-published piece that’s making waves in the culture.

This week we ask: What happens when a man of the right hits a leftist labour conference?

We’ll be discussing a provocative new piece, “What the Right Doesn’t Get About the Labor Left.”

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact Magazine, a new radical American journal. He’s a prominent conservative commentator and the author of several non-fiction books, including The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos. Sohrab Ahmari is my guest, to kick off this new series.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

Last week, amid growing pressure, the Canadian government suspended vaccine mandates for domestic and outbound international air and rail travel — as well as for the federal civil service and the federally regulated transportation sectors. But this debate is far from over, as the government stated that it will not hesitate to reimplement vaccine mandates in the future.

The question is: Is such a policy backed by science?

A recent peer-reviewed paper in the BMJ Global Health medical journal argues that vaccine mandates are, in fact, scientifically questionably — and likely to do more societal harm than good. My guest today is the lead author on that paper, and he hopes to trigger a broader public conversation about pandemic policy.

Kevin Bardosh is a Canadian social and political scientist and an expert in global public health. He’s an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington, an honorary lecturer at the Edinburgh Medical School, and has worked on Zika control in Haiti and on Ebola in Africa.

Today on the podcast, Kevin Bardosh joins me to talk about the unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy. Below is an edited and condensed transcript. For the full interview, download the podcast.

TH: Kevin, welcome to Lean Out.

KB: Thank you for having me, Tara.

TH: It’s nice to speak with you again. I want to speak about the situation in Canada later in this episode, but first, I want to dig in to the paper. Your co-authors are a pretty esteemed group of people involved in public health. I’ll just mention a few: Trudo Lemmens from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, with cross-appointments to the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, the Faculty of Medicine, and the Joint Center for Bioethics. Your group also includes Salmaan Keshavjee, professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Stefan Baral of Johns Hopkins. This is a Twitter success story, in that your group found each other on that platform. Talk to me about the goals that brought this group together to author this paper.

KB: Yeah, thanks, and that’s a great introduction. Essentially, we were seeing this policy momentum in one direction. It’s kind of like a Titanic ship. Once you make a policy decision, let’s say to mandate a vaccine, you start going in that direction. And as you have contradictory evidence — in this case, quite a substantial amount of contradictory evidence, that emerged in mid-2021. It was quite clear that the vaccines were not durable or sterilizing. That you could be vaccinated and still get infected with COVID. But the ship kept on sailing in one direction. And so, I think all of us were trying to shout out, saying, “Look, this is not completely science based. And there’s also going to be a tremendous amount of harm from these policies.”

We were seeing this from the discussion on Twitter. It has its limitations, but it does provide a good pulse of public sentiment, in certain demographic groups, depending on who you’re following. We were seeing this drive towards suspicion, anger, people being fired from their jobs, and also a solidification of power theories about why government is using these heavy-handed hammers.

We came out of lockdown — an unprecedented policy lever for public health — and then we went into vaccine mandates, if you kind of broadly try to parcel out the pandemic response. Both of those are really harsh interventions and they have a lot of externalities and harms. So, I think, broadly, we felt like that wasn’t being discussed adequately in the public arena, also amongst our colleagues in global health departments and in the university system more generally. I think all of us felt it was our responsibility to put together a piece expressing those viewpoints. Obviously I’m speaking for myself, but I think that holds true for everyone.

TH: To set this conversation up, for listeners, this paper puts forward a set of hypotheses that cover four domains: behavioural psychology, politics and law, socioeconomics, and the integrity of science and public health. The purpose of the paper, as I understood it, is to start a public conversation around these topics and to outline potential areas of study for others in this field. It looks at a dozen unintended consequences of vaccine mandates and takes the position that the mandates are scientifically questionable and likely to do more harm than good. Walk me through the main reasons why you’ve taken this position.

KB: The main position is that we do have vaccine mandates in our societies. Most of those are for schools, for kids. Those vaccines have been safety-tested for many, many years. People are comfortable with them. And those mandates are typically implemented during moments of political calm, where the national temperature is low. Also, you know, there is some controversy about school mandates, especially ones like in Australia over the last couple of years, where they’ve reduced the ability for exemptions. So, there are controversies about vaccine mandates from a policy standpoint. But we have never had adult mandates for a vaccine. Especially, if you think about it: You’re employed, you’ve been hired already, and then your employer says, “Now we have this new condition that you need to get this vaccine or else you’re going to be fired.”

There’s a bunch of legal [issues] from an employee standpoint. But also just at a population level, very novel behavioural and social issues, and political issues, that these vaccine mandates solidified around.

I think that it’s important to appreciate that this is unprecedented. And it dovetails into a political project. Which is that we have this vaccine, and we are going to take the coercive mandate strategy. We also haven’t done a good job, especially in Canada, of presenting to the public the age distribution of COVID in terms of mortality statistics. We’ve ramped up fear for two years. The media has played, I would say, a somewhat deceptive role. There’s a lot of negative consequences to the way the media has talked about the pandemic.

It was a political decision to go down the mandate route, and I just don’t think it was wise. I don’t think it was necessary … A lot of the policies that we have end up taking have their own social life, their own consequences. They often snowball and make things worse. I think vaccine mandates fit into that.

I also think, from a scientific and medical standpoint, people were willing to be vaccinated for COVID. There was quite a large group of people who were willing to voluntarily be vaccinated. The mandates — and we do cite these studies in our paper — tended to have the most impact for younger people. So, those under 30 or under 40, who, looking at the epidemiological data, just thought, “Okay, well, I don’t have a very high risk of COVID, so I’m not going to get vaccinated.” Or, “I’ve already had COVID, so I don’t want to get vaccinated.” But those types of considerations weren’t built into the vaccine policies. They didn’t consider natural immunity or prior infection. They didn’t consider age-based risk, people’s health status …

Anyhow, there’s all these different reasons why people wouldn’t want to get vaccinated. But we said, “No, we’re going have a one-size-fits-all policy because the vaccine stops transmission.” That’s how it was sold. If you don’t accept that as a premise, all of these policies don’t make much scientific sense. And the problem is that was clearly shown to have not been the case. Actually, it was known beforehand. I’m very curious to see, going forward, how much Pfizer and some of the other pharmaceutical companies knew about this — and when they knew about it. I think that’s a very important question that needs to be asked.

TH: Let’s dig in to some of the unintended consequences that you explore in the paper. Last time you and I spoke, we touched on the issue of cognitive dissonance, which I very much relate to. Today, I want to start by talking about reactance. What is reactance, and how does it operate in this context?

KB: Reactance is the idea that if you’re going to try to take away freedoms from me, I’m going to respond by trying to get freedom back. Maybe I won’t be able to get freedom back in the same way that you’re taking it away from me, but I will try to reassert my personhood, my dignity, and my agency as a human being.

A perfect example of that would be the trucker convoy movement in Canada. We wrote this paper right before the convoy. We put it on the preprint server, I think, the week that the convoy started. I see that as we were effectively feeling the social pulse. Not just in Canada, right? These protest movements were going on in Europe; everywhere where there were these mandates, there were street protests … I would say that that is a reflection of that reactance effect. “We’re going to take to the streets. This is unjust, these policies are not fair. We don’t agree with them.” I think in this context, it’s clear that in Canada there is a group of people who were negatively affected by these mandates, who lost their jobs, who were socially ostracized. And even lots of individuals who were vaccinated and just felt like this is a step too far — this is going in a direction that I don’t feel politically comfortable with.

Justin Trudeau, I think, plays a big role. He is a left populist. He has done an incredible amount to make this into a political issue. On the campaign trail, he was constantly referring to “anti-vaxxers” as right-wing agitators. That’s not a direct quote, but he was inflaming the topic immensely for political gain. I think it did, sadly, work for him. The NDP also came along with him to support these mandates.

Now, the irony is that as the trucker convoy was taking place, there were more and more studies every day coming online, showing that Omicron was infecting unvaccinated and vaccinated at the same rate. From a transmission standpoint, the freedom convoy was following the science at that time. That’s now going to be very difficult, or impossible, for certain people in the medical community and the Liberal establishment — people with the Liberals and the NDP — to admit.

The media has played a big role in inflaming this social polarization, this notion that the Freedom Convoy was about these mythological stereotypes. It was a diverse movement of lots of different types of people. Sure, it had a lot of working-class individuals, which now somehow is equated with the far-right. I don’t buy that narrative. I think that narrative itself is actually going create the type of social polarization that we have south of the border, where I live. Which is also a dangerous outcome of the mandates, and we discussed that in the political polarization section.

TH: Returning to stigma, you mentioned the feelings of unvaccinated Canadians. I get letters all the time from unvaccinated Canadians who feel incredibly hurt, who feel demonized and ostracized. I want to quote from this section of your paper: “Political leaders singled out the unvaccinated, blaming them for the continuation of the pandemic, stress on hospital capacity, the emergence of new variants, driving transmission to vaccinated individuals, and the necessity of ongoing lockdowns, masks, school closures, and other restrictive measures.” Stigma used to be something that public health really worked to avoid. What happened here?

KB: That’s a great question, and one that I’m grappling with still to this day. I’ll give you a sense of the reaction to the paper, which helps to contextualize this. It’s been shared over 10,000 times on Twitter. But I’ve noticed that established people in global health have, for the most part, stayed away from sharing it, or reaching out to me about this. I think that that holds true during the pandemic. Heterodox or dissenting views have, for the most part, been relegated to the sideline.

The anti-stigma movement, that comes out of HIV Aids research for the last 30, 40 years. And, yeah, I don’t know … I have different ideas about this, but I don’t feel like I’ve been able to really strongly come to a conclusion. I think people respond differently when they’re thinking about the marginalization of “others.” So, street drug addicts, or prostitutes that have HIV. “Oh, we need to have an anti-stigma approach. We need to think about human rights.” Then you sort of set up this dichotomy of the left, who are advocating for that, and the right, who are against it. It falls along these classic political lines that people feel comfortable with. I think what the pandemic has done is it has shredded those typical ideological lines. Individuals don’t know how to respond to that.

If you’re a progressive — and most people in the public health world tend to be leaning on the progressive side politically — if you’re on that side, you suddenly now have to defend people who support Trump, who are not vaccinated, and who are saying, “I’m not going to get vaccinated. This is a global plot to bring in the globalist coup and take over nation states.” You’re defending those individuals. From a scientific standpoint, it makes sense. But I think people have a hard time putting their ideology to one side. I also think that there’s a lot of career consequences to speaking up about the harms of vaccine mandates. When I say this, I also mean lockdowns; I mean the whole regalia of restriction-based public health.

Essentially, you hit the nail on the head. Most of the community in public health, especially global public health, went from anti-stigma, anti-marginalization, equity, human rights as a framework — to suddenly, “We need to support restrictions. We need to support governments having these hammers over individuals, and we need to maximize compliance.” That’s sort of the transition that took place. I think it’s been confusing for a lot of people.

TH: Indeed. You also write about distrust. A recent Canadian survey showed that 52 percent of interviewees believed that official government accounts of events can’t be trusted. You also touch on social and economic inequality. And this is so interesting. You did a recent event for the University of Toronto, and you were joined by a physician from the shelter system here. He spoke about how the vaccine mandates resulted in homeless people being turned away from businesses and excluded from warm spaces in the dead of winter. How else can vaccine mandates potentially acerbate economic and social inequalities?

KB: It’s important to distinguish between the vaccine mandates, as in the pressure to get vaccinated, and then the way that these tools are used in society. So, if you’re a vaccinated elderly person, you might not be able to get a passport on your phone. You don’t have a phone; you just don’t understand how that can work. I think there’s been videos from Italy, for example, that I’ve seen where elderly people are denied access to a bus because they just don’t know how the system works. Then there’s also, and we cite this in the paper, cases in Israel where Palestinians who are vaccinated are being denied access to crossing borders. It can be used as a tool to coerce people and impose your will.

I also think there’s a strong correlation between lack of trust and historical marginalization. When you look at vaccine studies about trust, people who are socioeconomically marginalized, or have been treated unfairly by the medical profession — I’m actually very interested in this group of people, who don’t trust pharmaceutical companies because their lives have been destroyed by pharmaceutical products. There’s quite a lot of them in the United States. This is pretty well documented, with federal fines of billions of dollars. Think of the drug opioid crisis as one contemporary example. So, these individuals are just less trustful of the state. They’re less trustful of corporate monopolies or pharmaceutical companies. And so, they’re going to be less likely to be vaccinated. Essentially, creating a mandate, you are penalizing this cross-section of people who have less trust in established narratives or established policy. In a way you are selecting, and clearly ostracizing, that group of people.

TH: Getting back to the reception of the paper. One of the criticisms I’ve seen is that the paper did not provide enough alternative policy. Professor Bill Bogart, for example, made this point at your event at the University of Toronto. I am against the vaccine mandates, and have been vocal about that. This is a counterargument that I hear a lot: “How else could we have done it?” How do you respond to that argument?

KB: I would say, again, the studies that are online right now show that there was a huge number of people — especially high-risk individuals — who are willing to get vaccinated voluntarily. In fact, we haven’t focused enough on those high-risk, vulnerable people for booster shots in Canada, and also the United States. I actually think the mandate has detracted from prioritizing the most high-risk groups.

I would also ask the question to those individuals: What level of vaccination is acceptable to you? 100 percent? 90 percent? 70 percent? 60 percent? If the goal is to prevent adverse clinical outcomes, focusing on the high-risk vulnerable groups should have been the policy from the beginning. Rather than, I think, detracting from that, and saying, “Okay, we’re going to treat this virus as if — it’s not explicit but implicit — the risk is distributed equally across society, and hence everyone needs to get vaccinated.” I just don’t think that that was wise public health.

And vaccines are an interesting technology right now in our society. Ideologically, it sort of has a totem status. Because if you question vaccines, you’re seen as an anti-vaxxer or conspiracy theorist, which to me is equivalent to being called a communist during the Red Scare. You’re discredited from the beginning. It’s hard to recover from that type of accusation.

But vaccine science is very complicated. It changes over time. We’ve seen that in the pandemic — myocarditis risk being one thing that was downplayed at the beginning. People who said, “Look, there’s a safety signal here” were dragged over the mud, in Israel and elsewhere. And they were shown to be correct. Even today, I think there’s some serious questions. For example, if you’re under 30, what’s the relative benefit and cost to getting two or three doses of the current mRNA vaccine, especially if you’ve had a prior infection? Those types of cost benefit analyses have been challenging to do. There’s a lot of outstanding questions.

TH: Let’s spend a moment on the situation in Canada. The vaccine mandates for domestic and outbound international travel have been suspended, along with mandates for the federal public service and the federally regulated transportation sectors. This just happened this past week. But some mandates remain. The City of Toronto, for example, has not lifted its mandate for its workforce. So, this is far from over. And the government has indicated that it will not hesitate to reimplement vaccine mandates in the fall if necessary. What do you make of this?

KB: I think we’re continuing to follow this extreme version of the precautionary principle. It’s not sufficiently evidence-based to justify it. It flies in the face of the notion of proportionality in public health ethics. Which is that you are going to impose liberty restrictions to a minimum. To maximize the positive impact and minimize the negative impacts of those policies. I think that we’ve substituted the proportionality principle for this extreme precautionary approach, which implicitly assumes that we should not have any COVID cases — and any COVID mortality is unacceptable. So, we’re still living in a world where we haven’t resolved the tension between Zero COVID and the herd immunity debate. And I think Ontario is similar to Australia or New Zealand, in many regards, with that current conversation.

[The Canadian vaccine mandate] is suspended, it’s not finished. It’s still on the books. They can reinstate it whenever they want. So that’s not giving people a lot of confidence that we’re moving on. The truckers, they’re still under the mandate … If you’re an unvaccinated person in Canada and you travel, let’s say to see somebody in the U.S., your family member. You come back to Canada, you have to quarantine for 14 days. So, there’s still these sort of penalties. This has nothing to do with a science-based policy. This is everything to do with a punitive political vendetta that Trudeau has. The conversation in the Canadian parliament is mind-blowing. This sort of obfuscation and doublethink that’s going on is very worrying. I’m quite concerned about the direction that things are taking in Canada.

I do actually think that there needs to be an investigation, a commission set up to investigate — not just COVID mandates, but lockdowns and other restrictions that governments have taken. But we are living in this very polarized world where there’s two extreme camps. It’s hard to know how those are going be reconciled …

There are these stories that we’ve told ourselves over two years. And the question is: Are people going to be able to revisit those stories? In the paper, in the last section, integrity of science and public health, we rather provocatively say, “If public health and governments want to build trust, one core aspect of that is to admit when you went too far, when you made mistakes, when you didn’t do things in the most proportionate manner.” Is the medical community going to do that? Is the government going to do that? I don’t know.

In Trudeau’s ideological world, the adults in Canada who are unvaccinated are far-right extremists who probably have racist views. They are the Canada that should be left behind. I think that is just not the sort of rhetoric of a national leader who wants to lead a Canada of tolerance and multiculturalism — [the Canada] that I grew up with, having been born in Montreal and grown up there. So, yeah, I think it’s worrying.

TH: Just lastly, I want to pose a question to you. On Twitter recently, you argued that a consensus is emerging that lockdowns and restrictions did more harm than good. And you pose a question to researchers: Why did this happen — and why did so many smart people go along with it? So, I ask you that. Why did so many smart people sign on to vaccine mandates?

KB: Great question. That Twitter comment was also a question to myself … [Now,] going back to this idea that vaccines are totems. “Vaccines are inherently good. There’s no side effects for anybody, a hundred percent safe. Everyone should get them. Why aren’t you getting them?” It’s just this very simplistic worldview. We don’t have that for any other pharmaceutical drug, or any other lifestyle choice. We always have this nuanced approach, and we consider people’s life circumstances. But we don’t have that for vaccines. It’s become part of this very simple good/bad dichotomy.

I think that liberal institutions jumped on board to this — to use Jonathan Haidt’s term — safetyism. Where safety is the highest value, safety is a virtue in and of itself that trumps any other consideration for policy, or for social life, or for meaning in human existence.

There was a lot of career pressure for people to fall into line, and to not speak up against these measures. The classic idea of what we call groupthink. Group psychology. I also think that a lot of individuals who held positions of authority were in the higher economic strata. They got to redo their yards during lockdown. They got to have their kids attend language classes online. They sort of had a vacation for a period of time. But, you know, not everyone did. So we have this clash right now, between the liberal establishment and the working class, who still deliver all of our food, and move our trucks around the country. Who take care of our kids at daycare, and who stock our shelves in supermarkets. And those individuals had a very different time with these restrictions.

When I say that the restriction-based philosophy has had more harm than good, I’m also thinking about this at a global level. It’s clear that what happened is we had the Wuhan lockdown, then we had the Italy lockdown — and then you had a global domino effect across every country in the world. No matter whether it was Somalia or Haiti or Iceland, everyone followed this for at least three, four months. The evidence from low- and middle-income countries is clear: COVID was not a major cause of mortality. It didn’t kill a lot of people in most Sub-Saharan African countries, or Haiti, where I work. But it had huge amounts of economic effects. You know, children being out of school for up to a year plus, where school is the only source of education, or safety, or food. A lot of women dropping out of school, having teenage pregnancies, and those individuals are never going back to school. So, it’s disrupted a whole generation, and has had impacts in very different ways, depending on the country and the demographic group.

So, you can’t really extract the notion of lockdowns, or restrictions, in Canada from this global policy effect. Oxfam had a report that came out just as the Davos billionaire class were meeting in Switzerland a couple weeks ago. They estimated that 160 million people are going be thrown back into poverty, extreme poverty, because of the pandemic. Now, I think it’s interesting that Oxfam mentions the pandemic — and not lockdowns, or restrictions, or the economic crisis that’s been driven by lockdowns. I still think that there’s a reluctance to call out lockdowns as a failed policy experiment. And of course, there are some places you can point to, for example Australia or New Zealand, where it had a beneficial effect. And there is a lot of nuance to the conversation if you want to think about lockdowns for the first month, let’s say, when we didn’t understand the virus. But the age distribution and the comorbidities that are related with the virus — that was known pretty quick. It was known in April of 2020 what kind virus we were dealing with.

And we had all sorts of strange interventions, like telling people they can’t go outside and exercise, and closing off basketball courts. Actually, you want to exercise. You want to go out into the sun and be healthy. But instead, people were locked in at home. And what did they do? Well, they became further addicted to video games, to screens, to self-isolation. With all its incumbent effects: domestic violence, suicide, psychological harm. I find it incredible. Even the term lockdown, it comes from the criminal, penal system. And yet we were using it to protect our health.

TH: There’s lots of questions to be asked in the coming years. And I’m so glad that you are out there asking them. I really appreciate you coming on the show today.

KB: Thanks for having me, Tara. I appreciate it.

This transcript has been edited and condensed. For the full interview, download the podcast.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

There was big news out of the United States last week for those who follow the ongoing debate over the state of free speech. FIRE, the preeminent free speech organization for higher education, is expanding beyond campus. And the organization has been renamed the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

My guest on the podcast today says its expanded mandate is a result of 2020, the worst year for free speech in his entire career. And he wants us all to think deeply about why free speech is worth defending.

Greg Lukianoff is a free speech lawyer and the president and CEO of FIRE. He’s also a documentary producer and a New York Times bestselling author. Most recently, he co-authored, with Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Greg Lukianoff joins me for a wide-ranging conversation about free speech, viewpoint diversity, cancel culture — and how to survive the culture wars.

Below is an edited and condensed transcript. For the full interview, download the podcast.

TH: Greg, welcome to Lean Out.

GL: Thanks for having me.

TH: It’s great to have you on today. We’re going to talk about the expansion of FIRE beyond campus, and the state of free speech culture in America. But first, I want to start with your own story and how you became an advocate for free speech. You studied journalism and international relations in undergrad. What set you on the trajectory to running FIRE?

GL: Great question. My joke is that my second earliest memory after my first birthday was with my Russian father — with a very strong emphasis on brutal honesty, which is pretty Russian — and an ethnically Irish mom, who grew up in Britain and had that exaggerated sense of politeness. I got a present for my Auntie Rona that I didn’t like. It was the first present I remember ever getting that I didn’t honestly like. I looked back and forth to my mom and to my dad, to my mom, to my dad. Thinking, “I have to be polite. I have to be honest. I have to be polite. I have to be honest.” So of course I did what any good four-year-old would do — I broke out in tears. I remember my older sister Katie saying, “Oh, baby doesn’t like a gift, he just cries.” I always joke that I wish I had the vocabulary then to be like, “This is my first experience with a cultural paradox.” [Laughs]

That’s also a way of saying first-generation Americans, immigrants, a lot of times they get what’s different about America. And one of the things that is different about America than any other country in the world is free speech. Not to say that nowhere else has free speech, but our commitment to it is unusually strong. At least it has been historically. My father is Russian, but he grew up in Yugoslavia and we had to flee the Bolsheviks. And so, you also have that family history of knowing how bad totalitarianism can be, and what happens when you stop protecting freedom of speech.

So I was kind of born into it, but then I worked as a student journalist when I went to American University for undergrad. And nothing is going to radicalize you more than that. Because people will come into your office — I was an editor — every day practically with some new reason why you have to fire this reporter, or withdraw this column, or apologize for this article. Seeing that in motion, you’re like, “Wow, okay. So people know they are offended first. And then they come into the office and sometimes they are making up the rationale on the spot, but they are just looking for any rationale they can use.” Due to human nature, it makes a lot of sense that the First Amendment has to be very broad. Because any exception that you allow, someone is going to use it to try to censor speech they simply dislike. Oftentimes having convinced themselves that the thing they don’t link just happens to be something that isn’t protected …

So, I hyper-specialized in First Amendment law. I took every class that Stanford Law School offered on it. When I ran out of free speech classes, I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty — something I designed myself. I interned at the ACLU of Northern California. I was lucky to find a job, because there just weren’t that many First Amendment jobs. Harvey Silverglate, the co-founder of FIRE, came out and found me and brought me away from my happy, cool life in San Francisco to be the first legal director of a then-new organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

TH: FIRE has now expanded beyond campus, which has quietly been the plan for some time. But the events of 2020 accelerated that timeline. Talk to me about what FIRE was seeing during that year.

GL: People had been approaching us with the idea that we should go beyond campus for almost as long as I’ve been around. But that really sped up since about 2014, 2015, with some of the illiberal trends that Jonathan Haidt and I saw that led to our original article in 2015 and eventually the book, The Coddling of the American Mind.

We were already concerned that something had changed in people’s attitude about freedom of speech, but I liked FIRE being narrow but deep. I didn’t want to even consider expanding beyond campus until I felt like we had sufficient coverage there. One of the milestones that we passed that got me thinking maybe we’re there, is that if there was a major free speech on campus case, it might take us a couple of days, or even a couple weeks in some cases, to really investigate it — but we could generally answer almost anything that popped up … We got there about 2019, or at least we knew where we were going to get there. So, we started talking internally about it. People have been approaching us to do this forever, including Ira Glasser, former executive director of the ACLU, and Ron Collins, who’s a First Amendment scholar and historian.

We were thinking maybe 2024, when we turned 25 — maybe we announce that we’re expanding then. But 2020 was just the worst year I have seen for free speech, in the U.S. at least, probably in my lifetime. We thought it was going to be a quiet year because most campuses were shut. In a busy year, we get a thousand case submissions. 2020, with 80 to 85 percent of campuses shut, we got 1500. And they were much worse. They were much more ideological. People kind of gloss over this. Twitter is a place where you constantly feel gaslit around these issues.

But it was pretty remarkable that you had 150 left-leaning people sign a Harper’s letter saying that our Overton windows is too small and people are getting cancelled — even though it didn’t use the word cancelled — and that got dismissed. And then within the course of like eight weeks, people like Bari Weiss, James Bennet, Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, they all stepped down, citing intolerance at their institutions. Those who could speak about it; James Bennet couldn’t. In the case of Matt Yglesias and Glenn Greenwald, it was institutions they helped found. So, it really was a year where we seemed to be kind of losing our minds. And at the same time, on the Twitters, everyone was like, “Oh, this isn’t really happening.” Really?

I’m working on a book called the Cancelling of the American Mind, because I’m stuck with “of the American Mind.” I’m co-authoring it with 21-year-old wunderkind Rikki Schlott, who writes for the Post and Reason. She’s an incredible writer. We’re really just trying to put in one place: Not only was cancel culture real, it was historic. When you look at the other moments in censorship history in the United States — even the Red Scare, there were a lot of professors who were fired during that period, sometimes it could be hard to figure out what for. But in that case, at least, a lot of schools actually stood by their Marxist professors and said we’re willing to fight this.

At this point, I think our Scholars Under Fire database — we’re just about to update it … there’s probably going to be about 700 examples of trying to get professors fired since 2015. Most of those are just since 2020. Hundreds of them were actually fired. Hundreds more were punished in some way. And about three dozen examples of tenured professors getting fired for what they said, wrote, or taught. Yes, tenured professors get fired, but usually for like breaking the law, not showing up for school anymore, sexual harassment — serious stuff. What was going on here? All tenure was designed to protect, really, was research, pedagogy, speech. And when you have three dozen professors being fired for this since 2015, it’s been such a strange time. I originally wanted to call the book, The Gaslighting of the American Mind, but apparently someone is writing a book with a very similar title at the moment. [Laughs]

TH: I’ll be interested to read that book. I have been writing about cancel culture, and the pushback I get is the same arguments over and over. So I’m going to put those to you, and ask you to respond. Number one: Cancel culture is not real; give me one example of someone actually losing their livelihood. Number two: Cancel culture is just consequences of bad speech; if you don’t want to be cancelled, don’t say bad things. Number three: I personally have never felt any danger expressing my own opinion. And number four: Cancel culture is a right-wing talking point and we should not give that side any oxygen.

GL: Oy. I don’t even know where to begin. I could spend a whole hour talking about each one of them. Watching everybody on Twitter freak out when The New York Times just reported what comes out in every poll — that Americans are afraid of getting cancelled. And that’s white, Black, liberal, conservative. They are afraid of losing their jobs for stating their honest opinions, or cracking an untoward joke, or even one that they thought was P.C. So it shows up everywhere, but then people dismiss it, saying like, “Oh no, they’re just talking about self-censoring in the good way.” It’s like, “Okay, you are noticing that every way we have to measure this that can be done by human beings is saying that this is a real problem?”

Now the right-wing talking point, I think, at least is somewhat intellectually honest. I’m politically left-of-centre. Most of the FIRE staff is politically left-of-centre. I kind of hate having to say that, because there’s something very primitive to the way elites in the U.S. talk about this. Which is this presumption that if you can point out that something is conservative, you don’t have to take it seriously anymore.

Right before The New York Times article, where everybody lost their minds, we have an intern Emma Camp, she wrote an article making a point that should have been uncontroversial, that it’s hard to have difficult conversations in class or on campus these days. Again, this comes out in all the polling. The amazing thing was watching how much of the debate on Twitter was so focused on whether or not she was conservative. She’s not, by the way … But also: What is wrong with us? Basically you’re saying that if you can figure out that Emma is conservative, you don’t have to listen to her anymore for saying something that basically most of us could say is true. And what were the other ones?

TH: That cancel culture is not real, but we’ve discussed the ample evidence that it is. And then that there are a group of people who don’t ever feel like they’re in danger for expressing their opinion. My experience of those people is that they happen to agree with the dominant narratives point by point.

GL: The most doctrinaire people, yeah.

TH: And lastly, that cancel culture is just the consequences of bad speech. That if you’re going to say bad things, you should expect really vigorous pushback.

GL: Yeah, that’s the whole “accountability culture” argument. Which drives me nuts. Essentially you’re assuming the truth of your statement by making it. You’re assuming there’s something they need to be held accountable for … People will always bring up hate speech if they’re inclined to be critical of free speech. Hate speech comes up immediately … I wrote a book, Unlearning Liberty. Show me the examples in there that actually look like hate speech. You can find arguably some, but what people are actually getting fired for — what people are actually getting punished for, in a lot of cases, is speech that most Americans would think of as really quite tame.

TH: I want to talk a little bit about the state of free speech culture. In Canada right now, we’re seeing a decline. How would you characterize the state of free speech culture in the U.S.?

GL: I am somewhat hopeful that it’s starting to rebound. The ideological madness that you saw in 2020 and 2021, I feel like the fever might be breaking a little bit. That being said, there’s still a long way to go …

When I try to explain what free speech culture is, I usually go to idioms that we don’t use anymore in the U.S. Sticks and stones is probably the saying that’s gone out of fashion the most, in a very weird way. People will actually say things like, “Well, we used to say sticks and stones will break my bones but names can never harm me — but now we know that’s not true.” It’s kind of like, “Okay, so you honestly think John Stuart Mill, or John Milton, for that matter, or Karl Popper, weren’t aware that words can sometimes hurt your feelings? Badly?” Of course everyone knew that. The saying is trying to teach kids to put being insulted in perspective, which is a great habit to learn if you’re in a democratic culture of dignity, as it’s called. That essentially you should learn habits that let you experience interactions less painfully. And accept the fact that there are going to be people out there who hate your guts, or are just mean some days.

I actually went to a saying, instead of an idiom. The idioms are “it’s a free country.” “To each their own” was something that people said a lot when we were younger. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” “walk a mile in man’s shoes.” These are all good, small-D democratic values represented in those little idioms. And those have largely fallen out, at least in elite circles. Replaced with an immediate association of free speech with what I call the three Bs: The bully, the bigot, and the robber baron.

Now, where do I think this comes from? I think it comes from the fact that campuses, and K through 12, can’t admit that they’re politically homogenous and very influential. It makes sense that when you’re in an underdog position, you argue free speech — because everything else is protected either by the vote, or by wealth and power. It’s only unpopular views that need free speech. Or unpopular people, for that matter.

The political valence of higher education has gone from being, say, two-to-one liberal to conservative in the 60s, to literally some departments having no conservatives whatsoever. And I think six-to-one on average at this point. And administrators are far worse.

They can’t admit they are no longer the underdog. They can’t admit that they are very wealthy and powerful. And they don’t bother to explain that part when they suddenly have discovered that free speech is actually more problematic than we thought. It’s like, “No, that’s normal. That’s what happens when people go from being out of power to in power. That’s a temptation.” And it was largely resisted, by the way, by older liberal professors and administrators who still considered free speech central to their identity. Unfortunately, a lot of those professors have retired, died, been cancelled, or just simply been outnumbered and shut up. So I think that it’s really interesting that a lot of the argument against free speech is couched in terms of power by institutions like higher ed that can’t admit that they’re extremely powerful.

TH: That’s so interesting. I just have two last quick questions for you. You write for Persuasion on Substack. A recent piece you co-authored with Jonathan Haidt gave some advice about how to keep one’s company out of the culture war. It offered eight steps for business leaders. When you think about that piece for the moment we’re in right now, what step do you think is most relevant?

GL: I’d actually have to pick two. One is: It’s okay to say that your widget factory is politically neutral. That it doesn’t take positions and wants to serve all Americans. That’s what Brian Armstrong did at Coinbase, and he had to be willing to let 60 employees go and give them severance packages. But I think that overall, that was the right call.

The other one is if a social media mob is coming after one of your employees, slow it down. Slow the process down. Because these social media mobs can make you feel like the world is ending and you have to do something right now, and you have to get rid of this person … If you have a process in place, basically saying we’re willing to look into it if that’s even warranted, but we’re not making any move for weeks — the reason why that’s so important is the social media mobs rely on this very immediate sense. They tend to just find a new target if you run down the clock a little bit. So I do think that better procedural safeguards can make a huge difference in whether or not you have to sacrifice a great employee to an angry mob.

TH: Lastly, I’m wondering about hope. I know that you are in the trenches of the culture war. This is a very depressing time in many ways, for many people. We’ve just come out of this really isolating, horrible pandemic — or, on our way out. Where do you draw your hope from to keep doing this work?

GL: Two places. One is that our polling shows that Black, white, liberal, or conservative — Americans still value freedom of speech. Still love it. There’s difference in what they think free speech is, depending on where they are on the political spectrum. But overall, the support for free speech is very strong.

Our expansion is a 75 million-dollar expansion … [including funds] for a free speech, public service announcement program, where we’re doing ads all over the place, giving inspiring stories about freedom of speech. Something that, if you’re trying to change the culture from one that never believed in free speech in the first place, could be a real uphill battle. But when you realize that, in a lot of cases, what you’re seeing is pluralistic ignorance, or collective illusion, as Todd Rose puts it, or an emperor’s new clothes situation — where essentially people really just want permission to say that what they believed seven years ago is still a moral good.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I think the next several years are going to be swell. Politically, the situation in the U.S. — I feel like the left and the right are not exactly in great places at the moment. And I’m pretty scared of what the next five years or so will hold. But I’m optimistic for the long term success of freedom of speech for this reason: Free speech works really well. It lets you know where the problems are in your society. It lets you be an authentic person, to actually live your truth. It’s great for artistic innovation. It’s great for comedy. It’s great for science. So, I think that the advantages of freedom of speech are sufficiently great that the countries that decide they don’t want it anymore are going to find that they’re creating far more problems than they’re solving.

This is an edited and condensed transcript. For the full interview, download the podcast.

Lean Out with Tara Henley is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

The pandemic, as we know, has been a different experience for different people. Some of us, the laptop class, isolated and worked from home. But others of us, the essential workers, were out there every day doing the work that it took to keep society from collapsing.

The stories of the working class have often gone untold, but my guest on the podcast today has dedicated himself to interviewing working people — on his podcast, in his reporting, and in his new book. And he believes their experiences deserve to be heard, and remembered, and thought about.

Maximillian Alvarez is a writer and editor based in Baltimore. He’s the host of the Working People podcast, a show about the lives of the working class. He’s also the editor-in-chief of the Real News network, and covers labor for Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. Maximillian Alvarez’s new book is called The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke.

Below is an excerpt of the transcript. For the full interview, download the podcast.

TH: Maximillian, welcome to Lean Out.

MA: Thank you so much for having me.

TH: I’m really excited to speak with you. We will get into the book in depth. But first, I want to spend some time on you and your story. I want to start by reading a quote from another book that I know has inspired a lot of your work, and that is the oral history Working from the great Studs Terkel, which you quote in your powerful monologue kicking off your own podcast. Studs Terkel writes, “It is a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash.” Talk to me about how Studs Terkel has informed your work.

MA: Big shout-out to the legend Studs. Like you said, I quote from his book Working in the introduction to the very first episode of Working People, which was an interview with my dad, Jesus Alvarez. I think that a lot of my own story, and the origins of how I came to do this work, can be found in that episode.

I was born in Orange County, Southern California, first generation Mexican- American. Growing up with my siblings, it was always a big part of our upbringing to hear the stories from both sides of our family. The stories of struggle, the stories of working their way up from poverty — both sides of the family have long histories of poverty.

My dad was born in a shack in Tijuana. As we talk about in that first episode, his mother got sick and passed away from cancer when he was just six years old. Their father had abandoned them; he was a migrant farm worker in the United States and he just stopped coming back and stopped sending money over. So, they were really on their own at that point. It was my great-grandma who promised my dad’s mom on her deathbed that she would bring her children to the United States. My great-grandmother had connections with immigrant churches in Southern California. It was through those churches that she managed to find families in different parts of Southern California to adopt my dad and his siblings. So, they were split up.

I’m very thankful for the podcasts that I do, because it gave me an opportunity to get those treasured family stories — that I’ve been hearing all my life — on a recording. Right now, we have a number of sick family members, some of whom I may never get to speak to again. And I’m racked with guilt and regret that I didn’t get the chance to record with them. So it’s made me all the more appreciative of those recordings.

There was even one that we did that was a follow-up to the one that I did with my dad, where I got the rest of his siblings and a bunch of our family members on. It was incredible. There was a moment where my tios were talking about losing their mom and being split up, and at some point everyone at the table just started crying. My dad said on the drive home that day, “That’s the first time all of us have sat down and talked about our mother dying.” I’m glad that we were able to take advantage of that moment and that it could provide some healing.

Then, on my mom’s side, my grandpa Fletcher was born at the end of the Great Depression. He was one of 13 siblings in North Carolina; he had his first job when he was six. So, we always heard those stories growing up as kids. We always internalized it. Like, “That’s what our family went through for us to get here.”

I was fortunate to be born into a middle-class home that my folks had bought and raised a family in for a brief time. And then, when the Great Recession hit, it all went away. But for the first 18 years of my life, we grew up in our home in Orange County. The world still seemed open to us, and the future seemed open to us. We focused on school. We were always told that it was our job to carry on [the family] struggle by getting a good education, by not getting into crime and gang activity.

I grew up very conservative and my dad, in fact, when he became a citizen — the first person he ever voted for was Ronald Reagan. On that first Working People episode, we talked about how he voted for Donald Trump in 2016. He explained that we lost everything during the Obama administration. We were constantly being told about an economic recovery that seemed to be passing us by. And so he felt desperate. He knew all the problems with Trump, but he was hoping that maybe a miracle could happen and we would get some help. And of course that didn’t happen.

The importance of family storytelling has always been there for me. But I noticed that after the recession, we weren’t telling those stories as much. We weren’t talking to each other nearly as much about what we were going through. We were instead just doing what good capitalist subjects do, which was punishing ourselves for being colossal failures.

It was destroying our family in a lot of ways. My parents’ marriage was on the rocks. Our relationship with our parents was on the rocks. I had graduated college in 2009, so I got spat out right into the recession. I basically had two useless Russian literature degrees. Obviously I find a lot of value in them, but at that moment in time, there wasn’t really much that I could do with them. I had moved back home thinking that I was going to help out while I was figuring out my next move. Instead, I ended up working temp jobs, showing up at the temp agency at four in the morning to get whatever job I could — just so that we could have money for groceries and gas.

That was a big radicalizing period for me. It was when a lot of that conservative upbringing and ideology started to fall off like cracked paint. I was looking at our family and myself. I was like, “I did everything I was told to do. I still ended up working 12-hour days as a temp in a warehouse.”

First, I was like, “What did I do wrong?” But then I started talking to coworkers. I started seeing what my family was going through. They didn’t do anything wrong; they’ve been working their butts off. It felt like something bigger was wrong here.

That was a really important experience for me — working alongside a bunch of formerly incarcerated folks and undocumented guys. You get into conversations about what’s going on in each other’s lives. You learn more about each other. You lean on each other. You build these great bonds. You really learn to see each other as human beings, and you build that solidarity that can be very lifesaving in moments like those.

In the years after that, that’s when we finally lost the house. Of course my parents were very depressed about that. They stopped going to our church. They didn’t talk a whole lot to friends and family. I could see with my dad especially, it was like the lights were on but no one was home. Somewhere inside of him, he was punishing himself so deeply for all that he had had and lost.

My mom was doing the same too, but she was at least she was a little more communicative with us. But it was really ripping us apart. In a lot of ways, the podcast was almost a ruse to get my dad to talk about the trauma that we had gone through … He suddenly opened up in a way that he hadn’t in years.

I think a big part of that was because he had been driving Uber and Lyft, just to pay the bills. He wanted to keep his ratings up, so he would get into conversations with the people he was driving. It was then that he realized that he was driving people who were his age, who were also immigrants, who had lost their homes, who were on their way to their second or third job. He started to realize that it wasn’t just him. That there were other good people who had lost everything, because an unjust system had screwed them over.

I think that was very important for me to witness, because it made me realize, once again, that power Studs Terkel articulates in his book Working. The world-changing power of working people sharing their stories with one another, and believing that their stories — our stories — are worth sharing. I really try to honour that tradition with the podcast, with the work I do at the Real News, and with this new book.

Lean Out with Tara Henley is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

“Men and women exist. Occasionally we even like each other. We exist because of these two simple truths.”

These are the opening lines of a powerful new book that dives into the crisis in contemporary heterosexuality. It’s been called a feminist defence of masculinity, and it is a clear-headed and compassionate look at where we’ve gone wrong.

Nina Power is a British writer, philosopher, and fellow Substacker. She’s also a senior editor at the new American journal of radical politics, Compact Magazine. Nina Power’s latest book is What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents. She joins me today for a conversation about how we think and talk about men — and how we might begin to heal the rift between the sexes.

TH: Nina, welcome to Lean Out.

NP: Thank you.

TH: So nice to have you with us today. This book is so interesting. I want to start with the opening lines of the book: “Men and women exist. Occasionally we even like each other. We exist because of these two simple truths.” To tackle this topic of relationships between heterosexual men and women, you have to commit leftist heresy — you have to acknowledge biology. Why is it important to do so?

NP: I think fundamentally it doesn’t make sense to write a book about men and women unless there is some grounding in reality. And I take my cue not only from empirical reality, but also from the history of humanity, and the way in which we’ve discussed these things for, at this point, thousands of years. So if that makes me reactionary, so be it.

But, in all seriousness, it would have been impossible to write a book about what I call heterosociology — so, that obviously includes heterosexuality, but also different kinds of relationships between men and women in a broader sense — it would have been impossible to pay lip service to a certain kind of discourse that would have tried to disavow the reality of sexual difference. Apart from anything else, it would have made the book read horribly.

But again, more seriously, I fundamentally think that men and women do exist, and I do think that sexual difference is real and important. It doesn’t mean we can’t talk about how we live together, in terms of how people express themselves and so on. But I’m committed to sexual difference. I think the difference is, in fact, very important and very beautiful, and quite meaningful in a variety of different situations. And it would be a terrible error, in multiple ways, to imagine that we can dispense with it.

TH: I want to pull a few threads. Here’s another quote: “It is no longer our relation to the means of production that matters — whether we are exploited for our labour — but rather how we identify, and whether our identity is a good one (and therefore uncriticizable) or a bad one (and therefore open to being blamed). Men as a class today most definitely fall in the latter category.” How so?

NP: Obviously the first part of that is slightly sarcastic. I think that material reality involves exploitation; this is how capitalism proceeds. I’ve been looking at some of the early socialist feminist writers, and it’s obvious that even where there are differences and difficulties between men and women, the fundamental form of solidarity is between men and women — as working men and women. We could say that contemporary consumer capitalism promotes this image of identity as if it trumps everything else. It’s a categorical, taxonomic existence.

There’s this idea that I talk about in the book of a zero-sum game. This idea that if some group advances somehow, socially or politically or economically, another group must be losing out. I think this logic of scarcity is very pernicious and very dangerous. I think it’s a question of people rising together and falling together; so it’s old-school leftist in that sense.

In the logic of this lack, it’s very obvious that some quote-unquote oppressed groups are being privileged over others. Men have been, for quite a few years now, sort of demonized as a class. As if they’re responsible for all the world’s ills. I think both socially and politically, this is quite detrimental for any kind of realistic analysis.

TH: You write that to be a man right now is to suffer, and you go through some of the material conditions experienced by men. Can you recount a few here, to set this up?

NP: One of the things I wanted to be clear to write about was the male suicide rate. It’s very high in the Western world. I myself have had three male friends who’ve committed suicide. I think it says something terrible about our culture in general. We don’t want to live in a world, if we think about it for more than half a second, in which any group of people are feeling so meaningless and so bad about their place in the universe that they contemplate, let alone commit, suicide. I take it as a very salutary lesson — to ask questions about why some men feel this lack of a social role. And what does it mean to have this cosmic meaninglessness?

I also think it’s important to note that it’s men who die in war, overwhelmingly. It’s men who die in dangerous jobs, and so on. And when we’re talking about equality, often a very superficial lip service is paid to the idea of people competing for the top jobs, without taking into consideration the whole plethora of work and employment.

Also, men tend to dominate homelessness, drug use, drug abuse. I mention the opioid crisis in America, where, again, it’s overwhelmingly men that suffer. It’s not to say that women don’t suffer too. Of course they do. But I think it’s just to focus for a second on those issues ... Just by virtue of being a man doesn’t mean that you are in possession of any form of power necessarily.

TH: The ways of talking about power have become so simplistic.

NP: Exactly.

TH: I want to get into, in a moment, the manosphere, which you investigate. But first, on this idea of suffering and what we do about it, there’s another point that stands out to me from the book — this idea that our culture believes punishing men for women’s suffering will somehow remedy male violence. Can you unpack that for us?

NP: I think we live in an age that celebrates victimhood, often in ways that I think are detrimental to people who have suffered from trauma, who have experienced pain and suffering. Many of whom don’t want to be victims. You know, the position of the victim isn’t inherently a good one. In fact, victims often are subject to feelings of revenge and vengeance that are not necessarily helpful to the social whole.

It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t seek justice for harms done, and recognize when harm is done. But it can’t be the grounding character of our culture. I suppose it’s, again, to get away from this idea of the zero-sum game. It’s to say that everybody suffers. That life, in a sense, is suffering. [Our] culture seems to say that when men suffer, they don’t really suffer.

TH: And that punishing men will solve the question of male violence, which is a real question that we need to grapple with.

NP: Right. Everybody wants to solve this problem. Men are disproportionately responsible for interpersonal violence, usually against each other, or themselves, and against women to a lesser degree. It’s a very small number of men who commit these violent acts …

I propose rather than to blame all men, to get men to think of themselves as a class and to take responsibility for individual men when they are acting out. So, a recognition of a shared existence as men. Rather than to think of themselves first and foremost as individuals, to think of themselves as part of a class. And that men might start to look bad if certain of them are acting out. It takes away responsibility from the state and moves towards a social existence. We actually do live in a relational, communal way, despite atomization. Despite these faceless technocratic bureaucracies. And that we can pay attention when people around us are not in a good place, or need help and or support.

I think that preemptively blaming men for all violence runs the risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you say that men can’t be good, then they might start to think, “Well, why should I bother trying at all?”

I have an almost Christian humanist message, which is that everybody can be slightly better. We have to admit that we are flawed and we’re all capable of harm. We all hurt each other, accidentally a lot of the time. We all make mistakes. I think we need to have a little bit more forgiveness and flexibility — which are in short supply in our culture — for everyone’s sake. Whether people have been hurt, or whether they are doing the hurting, or both. It’s an attempt to be balanced and reasonable, which is itself faintly controversial for reasons that escape me.

This is an edited and condensed excerpt. For the full interview, download the podcast.

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Some months ago, I discovered a podcast that gripped me from its very first episode. It seemed to reach deep into my psyche, touching on all the things that I care about most. That podcast is Banished, from Substack’s Booksmart Studios, and it is a deeply thoughtful and nuanced look at the rising tide of censorship and intolerance. Its host is a remarkable academic who is fiercely committed to open inquiry.

Amna Khalid is an historian and a professor at Carleton College. She is a prolific writer of essays, often with her colleague Jeff Snyder, on the big issues of our time — including academic freedom, free speech, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and the controversy over Critical Race Theory in the classroom.

Today, Amna Khalid joins me to talk about how her early years in Pakistan fuelled her hunger for free expression, why she speaks out about intellectual conformity on campus, and where she gets her hope from.

TH: Amna, welcome to Lean Out.

AK: Thank you. It’s great to be here, Tara.

TH: So nice to have you here. I have been wanting to speak with you; I’ve been following your work, your essays, your podcast. One of the main goals of my own writing is to complicate the dominant narratives. I look to your work as an excellent example of this. I’m thinking of the very first episode of your podcast, on the subject of “problematic” public art, in this case the Victor Arnautoff murals in San Francisco. You had this rich, incredibly nuanced conversation about it. You say in the teaser to your podcast, back from last summer, that what you want most in life is to have these conversations. I relate to that so much. Do you think these conversations have been harder to find in recent years, given the state of our culture? Or somewhat easier, given the rise of independent media?

AK: It’s an interesting question. I have found it hard in the U.S. in particular, because things over here are polarized in a way that I haven’t experienced before. I’m an immigrant to the U.S., now an American citizen, but I’ve been here for about 11 years. I’ve really never lived in a country where the way you mow your lawn is indicative of your political loyalties. I’ve been amazed at how quick people are to judge. How keen they are to quickly figure you out, and slot you into a box, does make it much harder to have these conversations with some nuance, with complexity.

Having said that, I have to say that there are ways in which independent media has opened up interesting opportunities. Many of the conversations that I’ve been having over the last year would not have been possible without access to people. Which was actually the silver lining, if you will, of Covid; it does make access a lot more possible.

So, in some ways, no, I think it’s much harder to have these conversations because of the political climate of the country. But in other ways, yes, these places where you can have independent conversations has allowed people like you and other independent-minded people to come together in interesting ways and create places for these discussions.

TH: I think it is an exciting time for that piece, absolutely. I wanted to ask today, to start, about your background, about Pakistan — about what that experience was like, how that shaped how you look at the current moment.

AK: Let me begin by saying: I don’t want to pedal a narrative that I come from this hyper-marginalized community. That’s not the case at all. I come from a place of privilege in Pakistan; I’m not unaware of it. Privilege, for me, is not the bad word that it’s come to mean these days. So, I’m not looking to cash in on the victimhood narrative. That is of absolutely no interest to me. It would be false for me to be doing that, because I’ve not been a victim in any way.

Having said that, growing up under authoritarian regimes has posed its set of challenges. More than anything else, I think it’s allowed me to develop a sensibility where I appreciate the value of open thinking, of free thinking, which was certainly something that was constrained. Even someone like me, who comes from extreme privilege in the Pakistani context, felt constrained. I think that says something about what these kinds of authoritarian societies do; they narrow the scope for thinking, even amongst the privileged. Privilege is not a ticket out of that trap, of what you are meant to think.

I grew up in Pakistan under a whole series of military dictatorships … It’s a strange marriage of political authoritarianism, military authoritarianism, and religious authoritarianism. It was a kind of schizophrenic manifestation of authoritarianism. If you go to Pakistan, you’ll go to places that feel incredibly Westernized and you’d wonder what the problem is. And then you’ll go to other places where it’s extremely repressive. But the general atmosphere, when it comes to freedom of thought, is pretty strictly constrained.

Even before I knew it, I was hungering to have a place where I could think freely. And that informed my move away from home, first to Britain and now to the U.S. I think one of the reasons that I got involved in the kinds of conversations that you and I are having today is precisely because I started feeling a disillusionment about the nature of public discourse in the U.S. and particularly on academic campuses, which to me are sacred spaces that should be devoted to open inquiry. Seeing that space being narrowed has been one of the reasons that I’ve started doing this kind of work.

TH: Before we move on to campuses, I wanted to ask you about one of my favourite episodes of your podcast — your interview with the Pakistani artist Salima Hashmi. Such a rich conversation. One of the things that she talked about, looking at the West, was this horror of mob rule, and the calls for ambiguity and also for humour. Talk to me about what it was like for you going back to Pakistan after having been away, and having a conversation like that.

AK: It’s interesting, I went back after five years and I was really looking forward to it. I was thinking: Who can I get to speak to what’s happening in Pakistan today, but who also has the kind of institutional memory that can reflect on where Pakistan was back in the 70s and 80s? There’s no one better than Salima Hashmi for that, because of the range of her work. Human rights work, art activism — you name it, she’s done it.

For me, that interview was especially interesting because one of my problems — if I can be open — is that I’m impatient. My friends will tell you that I lose patience quickly. Because once I see a point, or an argument, I struggle to understand why I’m not being able to come across to someone else. Why does someone else not see what I’m trying to say?

It was very instructive for me to listen to Salima Hashmi. She’s been in the business of education all her life. And she said, “Pontificating gets you nowhere.” The way to actually change people’s hearts and minds is more indirect. She talked about humour. I must confess I enjoy good humour; I partake in it in my personal life. But in terms of when I’m making intellectual arguments, I’m not quite there yet. I’m still struggling to find the space to be humorous about those things. But it did make me stop and think about the different ways in which we communicate …

At a time when people are so polarized, and people have stopped listening, how do we find another avenue to get to them? That’s really when I started thinking about the voice that I write in. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to listen to that one particular episode where I spoke about my own experiences and disillusionment with the West. It was a letter that I wrote to a loved one who now lives in Britain, reflecting on our journeys of moving away from home, in search of that kind of freedom. And finding ourselves — not in the same trap, far be it from me to compare American society to military regimes in Pakistan. But there is a certain dogma that’s in the air that feels familiar.

That voice clearly reached far more people than I had been able to reach with my argumentative pieces. So, it did open it up for me. We are living in times when “lived experience” is the currency, much to my irritation. I do value lived experience but I find it frustrating — especially in classes when I’m teaching — that lived experience becomes the end of a conversation. Whereas I really think it should be the beginning of a conversation.

TH: I agree with you completely. Part of the reason that I got into journalism is I want to hear people’s lived experience. I want to hear those stories. I want to hear the richness and the differences and the humanity of all of it. But, like you, I don’t want it to be the end of the conversation.

AK: Yeah. I think there is a tendency to do this kind of navel-gazing … I’m all for lived experience and looking at how it speaks to our moment, as long as you can place it in a bigger conversation … I don’t want to dismiss lived experience, but I think the dominant way of engaging with it right now is a way that is silencing conversation and silencing dissent, which is the opposite of how I think it should be used.  

TH: Turning to campuses, your collaboration with Jeff Snyder began around 2016. Describe for me what you were seeing and feeling and experiencing in that moment.

AK: Let me begin by saying I was very naive and likely still am, particularly with respect to American higher education. Which sounds kind of silly coming from a professor. But given my trajectory — given that I didn’t go to grad school in the U.S., I went to grad school in England — there was a lot that I was learning about the American higher ed landscape.

It was in 2016 when our campus was considering instituting a Bias Response Team. I, quite by chance, went to a Town Hall to have a conversation about it. I was horrified by what the proposal was. I was horrified that this was being done in the name of progressive values. That if someone feels like they have been hurt because of someone’s biased speech or action, then that person can be held accountable. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was that it didn’t matter what the intention of the individual was. All that mattered was impact. It reminded me a lot of conversations that I’d had in Pakistan, where people really reject nuance, reject complexity, because of religious dogma. I was troubled by that.

That’s when Jeff Snyder and I decided to write an article. Here is where my naivete is right on display for everyone. Both Jeff and I were junior faculty at that point; we did not have tenure. When we wrote that piece, it got a lot of attention nationally. My inbox started getting flooded by people saying, “You are so brave to do this, especially as junior faculty.” I didn’t even consider the implications of speaking up when you are untenured. But it also struck me as incredibly sad. Here I have this journey that I’ve made to the U.S. to have freedom of thought. And even here, people have to constrain themselves and worry about career consequences. That just isn’t what I’m in the game for.

So that was the beginning. And when we started looking into that, that was my eye-opening moment — to recognize how much of this stuff was going on across campuses in the U.S. It was chilling to me. I could see the impact that was having on the ability of people to express ideas on campus. If there’s one place you should be able to express your ideas in good faith, it is on campus. No matter how troubling the idea may be. Because this is the space where we hash things out.

TH: I wonder what it has been like for you. There’s a couple of things going on here. One is that this list of things that are off-limits — these topics that we’re not meant to discuss because they are too explosive — has been growing and growing and growing. Then: Leighton Woodhouse has a great piece on Substack talking about how in academia, there’s pressure not to speak to a mainstream audience. There’s this idea that your work is more serious if it’s only for the small group of people that are reading it. How have you navigated those dual pressures?

AK: Yeah, that is a very real pressure. I first want to recognize that a lot of academics have pressures on them to produce very specialized knowledge. One of the ways I’ve been fortunate is that I’m at a liberal arts institution and the pressures on us are slightly different from those at research universities, in that we’re not required to produce at this rapid pace. We are still required to produce, don’t get me wrong, but the rate is different. And so that allows us a little more room to play around.

Having said that, the pressures on us are very heavy in terms of teaching. We teach a lot. We spend a lot of time with our students. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons my fundamental commitment is to my students. It’s not the institution; it’s not the faculty. It is the students.

For that reason, I realized that much of what I’m trying to do is make accessible complex things to students who are undergraduates, who are just coming on board. And this is not that different from speaking to a public audience. So, in some ways, I realized that that was a strength that I had, that I could harness and hone.

In terms of navigating those pressures on campus, I’ll say it helps to have tenure. Much of the work that I’ve produced in this domain has been post-tenure … Carleton is, in this regard, very supportive. We have a lot of autonomy as academics to pursue what interests us. I’m trained as a South Asian historian and an historian of medicine. One would think none of that has anything to do with the conversations that I’m partaking in now. I would argue it has everything to do with them, because academic freedom, and freedom of thought, are absolutely essential to explore any topic.

But back to how I’ve navigated those [pressures]. Having tenure has been a huge boon. And it’s also led me to see that I have great frustration with my colleagues. I’m not talking about just colleagues at Carleton, but more broadly in higher education. My colleagues who have tenure, and who have not spoken out where they should have, where academic freedom is being eroded. I do firmly hold professors with tenure responsible for a lot of the negative changes that we see happening at academic institutions. I think tenure is a great privilege. I greatly value it. I think there is a reason why this is the only profession that comes with a lifetime guarantee of a job. And it comes with a particular responsibility for speaking up. I’m sorry to say that I think a lot of academics have forgotten that responsibility piece, and are quietly doing great work in their own areas, but not speaking up in ways that they should be — to protect the space for people to think freely, and speak freely.

TH: I think the same about journalists. I think it’s job number one right now to defend freedom of expression, free speech, open inquiry … When you look at the culture as a whole right now, both on campus and off, what do you see as the biggest threats to free speech, open inquiry, free debate?

AK: I feel the line between the sector of education and the public has become fuzzier recently. Which is not a bad thing. But for that reason, I think that many of the threats that we see to free expression in public discourse are the same threats that we see to academic freedom and open inquiry.

I’d say the biggest threat right now is coming from legislation that is trying to regulate what people can teach in schools and in universities, what are broadly known as anti-CRT bills. I think PEN America has the best term for them: “educational gag orders.” They were mainly targeting K through 12 education. This year, we are beginning to see a shift in that they are going for higher ed and public universities. It’s fascinating to me how this is even possible, given that they’ve fundamentally butt up against the first amendment … It’s going to be a long, drawn-out legal battle. I think that’s part of the intention of those who are crafting these bills. I think a lot of fear is engendered with this particular tactic, and that is the aim … So, that, I would argue, is the biggest threat.

Having said that, I think it’s not happening in a vacuum. I think there are threats both on the extreme right, and the extreme left, and they feed off each other. The tragedy is that in feeding off each other, they become increasingly more extreme.

On the extreme left, I would say there is this new dogma of what, for the lack of a better term, is diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on college campuses and beyond. And also, what my colleague Jeff Snyder and I refer to as Anti-Racism Inc. — which is this approach towards anti-racism based on Ibram Kendi’s work and Robin DiAngelo’s work. Which is extremely reductive, and, I think, counterproductive, and more divisive than anything else. I would say those are the two biggest threats, and it’s not a coincidence that they’re from the extremes, because they actually feed off each other. In so many ways, those on the extremes are more similar to each other than they think they are.

TH: It’s such an interesting point. You had a great podcast on this; Randall Kennedy was saying, “Listen, it’s important to teach CRT. If you don’t agree with it, let’s pick it apart in the classroom. Let’s talk about why.”

AK: Absolutely. The problem is that we seem to think that people are being taught things as the truth, in school or at college. To my mind, if that is the framework, then you will be anxious about anything that gets taught.

However, we can approach it differently and say, “Well, this is one framework, one framework for understanding social change or inequality. Some of them are stronger than others; some are weaker. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t teach them. We just don’t teach them as being true. We teach them precisely so that our students can see what is wrong with them.” To me, it’s not my job to tell a student which one is the right one — at the higher ed level, I’m talking — it’s for them to make up their own minds.

My job is to give them the tools to be able to analyze these different frameworks. I think what is labelled CRT — and there’s been so much written about this — it’s CRT-light. It is ideas inspired by what they think is Critical Race Theory. It is one way of looking at the world, a lens. A lens that I personally find problematic. But that doesn’t make me not want to have it in my class. In fact, it makes me, precisely for that reason, have it in my class. So that I can show my students: “Here it is. What do you think the shortcomings are?” And put it in conversation with other frameworks, so that students can begin to think for themselves. That’s what we should be doing …

The metaphor that comes to mind is disease; it’s like it’s going to infect them. Like there’s only one way that everyone’s going to respond. Which is not true. People respond to stimuli in many different ways. The same book that might have made someone into a dogmatic thinker may have been a reason for me to become a critical thinker, because I disagreed with it. We need to recognize that our children are autonomous. That we have a role, of course, to shape their thinking, but we don’t control every reaction that they have towards a particular stimulus.

TH: The time we’re in is full of these panics, as you say, on the left and the right. And the paternalism on both sides is worrying. I love it when I come across thinkers that look at it on both sides of the spectrum. Because I think it’s so important that we call it out wherever it appears.

AK: Yeah. And those are the people who have the least friends. [Laughs] I find myself belonging to no tribe. And everyone being skeptical when they come close to me, like, “Do we touch her? Do we not touch her?”

TH: [Laughs] I know the feeling.

AK: But, you know, I do think that it requires a certain amount of backbone to say some of the things that need to be said. There is a social cost. I think that’s part of the reason tenured faculty don’t speak out as much. They’re not worried about the economic costs; they have got secure jobs. They’re worried about the social costs. And those are real. But they’re just part of the story.

I feel like pandering to increasingly new demands for X, Y, and Z, doesn’t help eliminate them. It doesn’t satisfy people. We are in the business of education and that’s what we should focus on. We are not in the business of pandering. This kind of customer-is-always-right model that has come to dominate higher education is worrying to me. That’s not a new trend, but we are certainly seeing a new culmination of it in a new fashion right now.

TH: Indeed. I wonder where this all goes from here. It’s something I ask about a lot, and think about a lot. I’m so curious how other people think about this. I want to close by touching on Alice Walker, whom you interviewed for your podcast. Two things really stood out to me. One, she talked about cancellation as an economic imperative that seeks to strip agency from people within the culture. Such an interesting point. Two, she also believes that this moment that we are in is a passing one. One we may need to go through; one we must endure. And that our job, as thinkers, is to study it and learn from it. That is such a hopeful take. To what extent do you agree with that assessment?

AK: I think it is an incredibly hopeful take, and one that I definitely needed to hear at that point in time. It’s one that I often go back to in my mind. I do get despondent at times. The disillusionment piece in my life tends to weigh heavier than the hopeful note. But I really liked what she said about putting it in a longer frame. We tend to think that the moment we’re in is exceptional and the most important — this is where being a historian is also helpful. I do believe that her point about how we need to be paying attention, and to study it, is vital. That is part of what we’re doing. I think that’s part of why I like having these conversations, is to try and observe, to understand, to engage.

I think ultimately where I derive my hope from is when I’m interacting with my children. I can see that they are able to partake in these discussions in a way that is open-minded. And that gives me hope … There is something about human curiosity that cannot be hemmed in. It will find a way to persist, to ask, to question. I like thinking back to my conversation with Alice Walker. I like thinking back to my conversations with my children, the conversation with Salima Hashmi. Some of these discussions were very important for me, personally. Precisely because I was beginning to lose hope.

I remember talking to Nadine Strossen; she came to our campus and we had a fantastic conversation. And I asked her that question. I said, “Do you ever get disillusioned or despondent?” It was inspiring for me to hear her say, “Never.” She said, “No, I believe in the work that we do. I believe that this is vital and important, and people will come through it.” So those are some of the places that I go to in my mind to look for inspiration, to look for hope.

I think things will shift. I think that there are more of us who are speaking out. And by more of us, I don’t mean people who think the same way. It’s exactly the people who don’t think the same way, but who are willing to engage in conversation, that give me hope.

This transcript has been edited and condensed. For the full interview, download the podcast.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

Over the last few years, many of us have had the feeling that things were just not adding up, that the narratives in the mainstream media simply were not making sense. Well, my guest on the podcast today had that experience earlier than most, years back, with online feminism. And it sowed the seed that became her most recent book.

Meghan Daum is an essayist and the author of six books. She’s a former opinion columnist with The Los Angeles Times and the host of a weekly interview podcast, The Unspeakable. Her latest book, The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, was recently released in paperback in Canada with a new introduction. Meghan joins me today to talk about the excesses of #MeToo, about cancel culture, about Elon Musk — and about the rise of heterodox thought.

TH: Meghan, welcome to Lean Out.

MD: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

TH: So nice to have you on. I first read The Problem with Everything in the summer of 2020. I was working on a current affairs radio show, and it seemed like every topic that I was interested in was off limits. So, it was a relief to read your book. And it was a gateway drug to other heterodox thought. I know you have a new introduction to the book. With some distance — with the last two years of heated culture wars, plus a pandemic — what’s it like for you looking back on the book?

MD: First of all, thank you for reading it and I’m really glad it resonated with you. The book was excruciating to write. I’ve published six books and I have never had a challenge like this before. I started writing it in 2016 and it had many iterations along the way. But to answer your question, how do I feel about it two years out? I guess I feel like I thought things would have changed, and I’m unpleasantly surprised that they seem to have gotten worse.

I feel like the book captures the moment that it landed and everything leading up to it. It’s impossible to hit a moving target. There’s a reason that when people are covering the current culture, they tend to do it best in columns, in weekly installments. It’s very hard to capture these kinds of cultural phenomena in a book. So it remains very much of its time, but it has certainly continued to be relevant. In fact, more so. People are responding to it better now than when it first came out.

TH: That’s interesting. As you say, it is of its time, but it really captures a lot of the forces that led up to this Great Awokening that we have been living through. I want to talk about #MeToo; you write about that extensively. Take me back to when the Aziz Ansari story came out and what you were thinking and feeling.

MD: I think I was thinking and feeling what most women were. It was really the record scratch moment. I think that might have been Bari Weiss’s phrase. People were more or less going along with the #MeToo movement; obviously there was much good that came out of it. But like so many of these movements, the overcorrection comes with a lot of unintended consequences. So, you have situations like Aziz Ansari. That was not a #MeToo situation as #MeToo had come to be defined. That was a misunderstanding … I think that a lot of people who had been going along with #MeToo in good faith took that situation as an occasion to take a step back and say, “What are we doing here? What are we critiquing? What kind of behaviour do we really mean to be calling out? Let’s slow down.” But I’m not sure we did slow down. Alas.

TH: Yeah. When you were writing about the ironic contempt for men leading up to that moment, the #KillAllMen, the “I drink male tears” boasts on social media, that soon became inseparable from actual disdain for men. I worry sometimes listening to younger women talk about men now; I hear that disdain there. Do you think there was enough internal criticism from feminists, as this was all bubbling up?

MD: Well, criticism is anti-feminist. Self-criticism is the opposite of self-care, and self-care is now synonymous with feminism, right? I mean, my book is a self-interrogation, if nothing else. I’m self-scrutinizing the whole way through. That’s just what I do in life, and that’s what I’ve always done in my work.

I think that it becomes very difficult to examine anything in any depth — yourself, the world, other people — when you are dealing with everything being on screens, and every kind of media experience being incredibly short. This goes for all of us. If you’re in these younger generations, that’s just the air you’ve been breathing since you were born. But even those of us who are older, we still fall victim to this. We are all headed down this very dangerous path with respect to our abilities to look at ourselves with any degree of honesty, and also look at the world and get past our own confirmation biases. And understand the difference between how things are and how we want them to be. Because those two things are often very much at odds.

TH: In the book, you list some media headlines, and there’s one that really stood out, a BBC headline in 2018: “Climate change impacts women more than men.” This trend is very much present with us now. We’re used to it — this rolling emergency, and everything being about this one thing. But I don’t remember that happening before #MeToo. I wonder if this contributed to the backlash that we’re seeing now. I remember Dave Chappelle warning about this in one of his specials. What do you think about the backlash that we’re seeing?

MD: Well, there’s always been that kind of hyperbole in media. I mean, that was always a joke in news organizations. There would be a headline: “World ends, women and children affected the most.” So, there’s always been that kind of tendency. But, yeah. The reason that I was moved to write about this stuff was because I grew up in the 70s and the 80s, and I was a young woman in the 90s. And the feeling — it wasn't just a feeling, it was a fact — was that women were doing better than men, on balance. Women were graduating from college and getting higher degrees in greater numbers than men. They were buying their own homes as single women, much more so than single men.

Across any number of metrics, women were surpassing men. At the same time, there was this narrative on social media, and in the digital media sphere, in a lot of online journalism, that really took as its premise that women were suffering. That women were a marginalized group. That it had never been a more sexist time. That even to walk down the street and fight the patriarchy at every corner, meant that you were a badass that needed to be congratulated. It didn’t make any sense to me. I wrote the book as a way of trying to figure out what I was missing.

TH: You write about toughness. I loved reading that, and it made me think. I started my career in hip-hop and I experienced sexism. But the way I thought about it was: This toughened me up. I felt good about myself, that I could be tough in those ways. But that’s not how the next generation of women sees it. Is there a middle ground between us probably putting up with more than we needed to, at times, and them embracing their vulnerability?

MD: I think that our generation, we probably overvalued toughness. We fetishized it. And millennials, Gen Z, they perhaps overvalue or fetishize fairness. And we really need to meet in the middle. I remember there was a critique of the book that said: “Why is she taking all this time to praise toughness and talk about how important it is to be tough, instead of working to build a world where toughness is not necessary?” I mean, that’s absurd. We call this the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is true doesn’t mean that we like it. You’ve talked about this a lot in your work, with biological clocks, and the biological imperative, and the differences between the sexes. In fact, there are things that women can’t do that men can, and vice versa. It’s never going be fair. It might be equal at the end of the day, but fairness is a very different thing.

TH: I worry about some of the trade-offs, as well. I worry about the hostility between the sexes, the sex recession, the real trouble young people are having dating and connecting. It just seems like we’ve lost some pretty big things along the way. And yet talking about that is still difficult.

MD: It’s funny, though, is it difficult? Because we’re not allowed to talk about the biological sex, and all that. But I feel like there’s a world in which it’s difficult, or where we’ve decided that it’s difficult — and that’s the Twittersphere, and these very small echo chambers of discourse. Academics and activists, and, you know, writers for Buzzfeed or whatever. But that’s a very tiny percentage of the world and the culture.

In the real world, people can talk about this stuff all the time. And they actually do. I’m at a place now where I think, as a journalist, or as a public thinker, it’s really your job to get past what your colleagues or your peers expect from you — or some kind of arbitrary standard that they’ve set for acceptable conversation — and just talk like a normal person.

Because I guarantee you, if you go out to a restaurant on a Friday night and there’s group of young women sitting around at a table, drinking wine and talking about their lives, they are going to be talking about the differences between men and women. They are going to be talking about their frustrations in so far as they relate to real biological realities. Unless you happen to be in the Social Justice Warrior Tavern, on balance, normal people are still talking about normal stuff. And I think that we, as media people, need to be mindful of that.

TH: You wrote in the book about the discovery of “free speech YouTube.” I remember you talking about this when you had John McWhorter on your podcast, which was just such a strong interview — going through losing your marriage and finding this new group of intellectuals. For our listeners, walk me through what that transition was like for you.

MD: Yeah, I wrote about this in this piece called “Nuance, A Love Story,” which appeared on Medium. It was this very long, very viral in the end, piece. So, yeah, I was married. I got married relatively late in life. We were in our late thirties. The marriage had problems, but we were very much intellectually aligned. We were always on the same page when we talked about ideas in the world. So, when I lost the marriage, I lost my intellectual ally. This was around 2015. A lot of my friends and colleagues were drifting over into this other space — the one we were talking about earlier. The ironic misandry, and rolling their eyes at men, and taking cheap shots at men and the patriarchy. People that I thought were relatively sophisticated were suddenly acting very adolescent and juvenile in their thinking. I think it was a way of signalling to each other that they were on the right side, and also gaining audience by doing that.

That was a very alienating experience. I started to feel kind of lonely. And I stumbled on John McWhorter and Glenn Loury having conversations on something called bloggingheads.tv, which had been around for a long time. They would call themselves the Black guys on Blogging Heads. They talked about race in this extraordinarily nuanced, honest, unapologetic way. It was exhilarating. And then, of course, the YouTube algorithm led me down the path and I started discovering other thinkers. I realized that there was this world of people having really great conversations on YouTube. These conversations were just not available in mainstream media anymore. Certainly not on NPR; not on any interview show. It was remarkable. And so that was the beginning. I didn’t really step away from the mainstream media, I was sort of pushed out. But coincidentally, the structures were falling apart anyway. So, good riddance.

TH: When I was reading about that, I was thinking how many people probably would relate to that, going through that experience in the pandemic. That extreme isolation on the one hand, and then the conformity of thought just pushing down on you. I remember reading an essay from William Deresiewicz, saying your podcast did that for him.

MD: Oh, that’s so nice to hear.

TH: He said in his essay that he was listening to your podcast, and it was filling that void for the conversations that he was not getting other places, like NPR. What do you think that experience is that we all went through? When we’re in such isolation, and we’re in this cultural crisis, and there’s this lifeline of these big conversations that you can’t have elsewhere.

MD: I think it’s just feeling like you’re not crazy. Because, you know, you watch the news, you watch CNN or listen to NPR, read The New York Times, and you’re being fed this narrative. It isn’t completely wrong. But there’s always just something off. The framing is such that you start to smell something kind of bogus. And then it makes you feel very alone when you see your friends and your family members and your colleagues buying into it, without thinking, often. I think those of us who were kind of sensitive to that b******t — let’s just call it what it is — ended up finding each other.

I always want to be clear about this: It’s not like we all have the same views. This word heterodox has arisen; it’s not a great word but we can’t seem to find a better one. People say, “Well, what does that mean?” To me, it just means that you form your opinions on an issue-by-issue basis, rather than lining them up according to one side. Some people think heterodox means alt-right-adjacent, or something like that — which could not be farther from the truth. You get people with all kinds of views under this heterodox umbrella. I like to just think of it as people who are allergic to b******t. It’s that simple.

TH: It’s a good way of putting it. I’m glad you brought up that alt-right thing, because the knee-jerk reaction to anyone on the left criticizing the left is to call us right-wing. I want to read a passage from your book: “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. Inspecting your own house for hypocrisy was a far meatier assignment.” You had this conversation with Jon Kay recently: What is a conservative? Why do you think all the dissenters from the left now are being painted with this brush — what is this about?

MD: Well, during the Trump administration, the idea was that we couldn’t afford to inspect our own house. We can’t afford nuance, because a nuanced discussion can easily be weaponized by the other side. The thing is, you can really only be canceled by your own side. If you’re on the left and you get criticized by the right, that’s actually good, that helps you. That gives you currency. But to be cast out by your own side becomes a real problem.

This actually started well before the rise of Trump. I was noticing this in 2014. People started saying, “I’m going to call you out.” The call-out culture, I was seeing that in 2013. But certainly, by the time we got to Trump, there was a feeling among Democrats that we were in an unprecedented crisis and that anybody who was not going to join the resistance, in exactly this way, was helping the other side — might as well be helping Trump. That we could not afford any kind of complexity in any of our discussions. And I think that remains, that sense of catastrophe. Now we see it around Covid.

TH: You asked Jon Kay, as well, about what he tells younger writers. I know in your new introduction to the book you return to that question. Your old answer was: Be brave. Your new answer in the intro was: I don’t know. What’s your answer today?

MD: I really don’t know. The thing is, I don’t know is the only honest answer to anything. A lot of these podcasts, and these nuanced conversations we’re all trying to have — the ones that really get big audiences and get the most attention are the ones where the guests or the host is willing to say, “Well, I do know, here’s the answer. This is what’s happening, full stop.” And that’s never true. The only truly honest answer to anything is we just don’t know … In terms of what to tell writers, it’s really hard. I’m teaching an online personal essay memoir workshop right now. Just before we started, I went on Facebook and said to everybody, “Can you guys name some publications where my students might be able to submit their work? Because I honestly can’t think of any place anymore.” I’ll be curious to see what people say.

TH: To close, I wanted to read a passage from your book that really stood out to me: “We need to stop devouring our own and canceling ourselves. We need fewer sensitivity readers and more empathy as a matter of course. We need to recognize that to deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.” I loved that. Are we any closer to this point that you are advocating for?

MD: No, I don’t think we are. I think that there is a growing movement of people pushing against it. But the reason that the movement is growing is because the problem has grown … Until we get to a place where the adults can actually act like adults, we’re going to be stuck here. I often say that if the smart, thoughtful people don’t speak out, the stupid thoughtless people are going to continue to do the job. But often the smart people are smart enough to know when to keep their mouths shut … We really just need to see institutional leaders, people who can afford to take some hits, actually standing up and taking them. Because I think when people start to do that, others will follow.

This transcript has been edited and condensed. For the full interview, download the podcast.

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How free is Canada as a country? That’s a question that my guest on the podcast today tackled in a book back in 2020 — concluding that our freedom was actually pretty precarious.

Philip Slayton is a Canadian lawyer and a former dean of law at Western University. He’s also a former president of PEN Canada, and a bestselling author. His latest book had a huge impact on me. It’s called Nothing Left to Lose: An Impolite Report on the State of Freedom in Canada.

Philip joins me for a lively state of the nation conversation, looking at how the pandemic, economic inequality, and the use of the Emergencies Act to quash the trucker protests has impacted freedom in this country.

TH: Philip, welcome to Lean Out.

PS: Well, thank you. I’m happy to be here. It’s nice to see you.

TH: Nice to see you as well. I’ve just re-read your book, and there’s so many interesting threads to pull. To start, I want to go through how you’ve defined the necessary list of conditions for freedom. It’s a long list. So I’ll just touch on a few: An alert and skeptical citizenry, willing to challenge authority; an appropriate apportionment of power between executive and legislative branches of government; a vigorous independent, diverse, and discipline press; a strong and independent education system; an effective justice system available to all; a rejection of political correctness. This book was written before the pandemic. You concluded freedom was precarious at that time. What is your assessment now, several years later?

PS: Let me just begin by saying, as the points you read out suggest, my view of freedom is that it’s a very complex idea with many moving parts. It’s not susceptible to easy treatment, or the shouting of slogans. It’s complicated and needs to be seen as such. Okay, so, what’s happened since the pandemic? Well, I have mixed feelings. Initially, I was quite disturbed by what I thought was the heavy-handed approach of government to dealing with this. I wrote an op-ed piece in The Globe and Mail, maybe in June of 2020, saying, “I don’t like walking through the park and not being able to sit on a park bench. And I don’t like walking around and seeing a sign that says you may be asked for your identity credentials at any time.” This rubbed me the wrong way.

But, on the other hand, there’s no question that it was a very serious public health crisis, very unusual. It needed unusual, and perhaps what in another context would be regarded as draconian, restrictions. That’s not a very satisfactory answer, I know. I don’t have a clear conclusion. I didn’t see anything in the pandemic that made me feel our freedoms were safe, that freedom was expanding. I did see things which suggested to me the opposite. But I think the opposite was, to some degree, justified by the circumstances.

TH: We can talk more about that. I think probably there’s some points of disagreement there between you and I. But before we go any further, one thing I want to get out of the way. You are a former president of PEN Canada. We have American listeners on this podcast. Canada has “freedom of expression.” Can you give us a brief explainer of what that means legally?

PS: Freedom of expression? Well, again, it’s a complicated concept. I’m sorry to keep saying that, but it’s true. I’m something of a freedom of speech absolutist, a freedom of expression absolutist. I think there should be very few restrictions on freedom of expression — freedom of speech being only one, but an important aspect, of freedom of expression. On the whole, in this country, from a legal point of view, from a government authority point of view, there are not many restrictions, I’m glad to say. Although I detect a worrying trend away from that laissez faire attitude on the part of government, and regulatory bodies, and the law in general. We seem to be moving in the wrong direction. But, generally speaking, freedom of expression means freedom to do, to write, to paint, to act, to say, pretty much with very few restrictions, whatever you want.

Now having said that, Tara, let me come back to the idea of freedom being a complicated idea. Let’s take writing. For example, we can proclaim that people are free to write whatever they want. But if you look at the reality behind that, you see something of a different picture. You see, for example, that you’re free to write whatever book you want, but you can make no money virtually doing that … The reality is although you’re free to write, you can’t afford to do it.

TH: That makes a lot of sense. Since we’re on the topic of writing, you write in the book about CanLit — about our literary culture, and how bitterly divided it is over things like the Steven Galloway case and the cultural appropriation debates. Talk to me about what you’ve seen evolve in our writing culture.

PS: The first thing to say about the writing culture is that it’s small. There are not many people who write, and there are not many people who read. I mean, there are some dramatic exceptions to this, of course. The Margaret Atwoods, the Michael Ondaatjes. But they are very few and far between, and their influence is very unusual. Generally speaking, the writing culture in this country is moribund. Again, an example of what I just said. People are free to write whatever they want pretty much, as they should be. But there are very few people doing it in any kind of effective way that reaches a mass audience. So the writing culture, there’s a problem with it.

Now, within the writing culture — as I write in the book, as you mentioned — there’s been tremendous divisions, tremendous controversy, and a lot of bitterness and serious unpleasantness, which is unfortunate.

TH: On a related note, there’s the education system, particularly post-secondary, which you write about in the book too. We recently saw a professor at UBC law, Stéphane Sérafin, write about his experiences trying to teach property law and particularly aboriginal law in the context of this, I don’t what else to call it, “woke” ideology. It has resulted in a formal human rights complaint. This is someone, it’s worth pointing out, who spent years working in First Nations communities before going to law school and has a great appreciation and respect for Indigenous traditions. You write in your Collegeland chapter about this ideological movement on campuses, and its potential to shut down free speech and open debate. Walk me through the broad strokes of your argument there.

PS: I find the prevalence of ideology on university campuses — it’s not just Canada, of course, it is many countries, and it’s throughout the university, virtually all faculties, including law faculties, as you mentioned — I find that to be extraordinarily dangerous, extraordinarily retrogressive. And, personally, an anathema to what I believe in. I’m old school on this, and not just on this, but just about everything. I think that the university is a place for free expression. Where anybody should be able, within very few limits, to argue whatever kind of argument they want to make. And it’s a place where arguments need to be tested objectively, according to their soundness — the soundness of the argument, the soundness of the facts they refer to, and so on.

All of that is distorted by the intrusion of ideology. And it’s an intrusion of ideology which is often thoughtless, knee-jerk, riding whatever happens to be the current political currents. It’s depriving people at universities, students at universities, of the true basis of an education. As I say in the book, the most essential thing that an education does is teach you — and this is not original to me — how to distinguish a good argument from a bad argument. There are so many bad arguments floating around, people who trying to get you to buy into things, to subscribe to things, to do things when there’s really no sound basis for doing it. You need to be able to identify those bad arguments. You need to be able to test them. You need to be able to spot them so that you can reject them. And that, to me, whatever else the universities do, is the essence of their mission. And of course the intrusion of ideology, whatever it happens to be, distorts, or indeed even destroys, the ability to perform that mission.

TH: What do you think is to be done about that in universities?

PS: Oh my God. Well, it’s prevalent in this country, in the United Kingdom, the United States, France and elsewhere. What’s to be done? I really don’t know. I despair when I contemplate this. I had a discussion about this fairly recently with a very distinguished Canadian writer. I was expressing my feeling that the world is spiralling out of control. She gave me a kind look, she smiled, and she said, “Don’t worry, Philip, the pendulum will eventually swing in the other direction.” Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I hope she’s right. But as to what’s to be done? I think all you can do, certainly at the individual level, is fight it in any way you can. Criticize it in any way you can. Speak out, or write about it, in any way you can.

Of course, you will then suffer quite possibly bad consequences for doing that. Because you will be contrary to the prevalent accepted ideology. What amazes me though, Tara, is how quickly and easily senior university administrators and professors bought into this. These are people who are well-educated, who were thoughtful, and in many cases have had quite a long career in the academy, have seen other times and other ways of doing things. And yet they seem to have embraced all of this wholeheartedly. I don’t understand why. Are they afraid? I just don’t understand.

TH: I think that the way that it’s been framed is quite powerful. It’s framed that to be against this ideology is to be against equality. And nobody wants to be against that!

PS: No. But again, I would come back with you to first principles. I mean, nobody is in favor of inequality. Nobody that I know, anyway. And indeed, I write about this my book. I write about the very adverse effects of income and wealth inequality. People don’t talk about that so much, but I think it’s absolutely central. No one’s in favour of inequality. Everybody is in favour of equality. But you have to say to yourself: What is equality? What does that mean? What are the components of it? What are the most important parts of that? And how do we specifically address those things? You have to do that rather than spouting slogans.

TH: The income inequality piece, I was so glad you wrote about that. We will return to that. But I want to talk for a moment about Covid. You talk about the press quite extensively in the book. During Covid, I saw very little questioning, for example, of public health authorities, from members of the press. My view is public health officials are human beings, like anyone else. Some will be mistaken about some things. Some will be in conflict of interest. Some will be overwhelmed and exhausted. Some might be corrupt. We actually saw a public apology from a Danish newspaper for not being more skeptical. I want to read something from the late David Carr of The New York Times, which you quoted in the book, talking about the attitude of the British press: “The one question all of the young reporters on Fleet Street are taught to keep foremost in their minds when interviewing public figures can best be paraphrased by, ‘Why is this jerk lying to me?’” How do you think our national press handled the pandemic?

PS: The first question is: What is the national press? Because the national press is a different animal than it was 20 years ago, before social media basically took over. How did they handle it? I would say not well. I’m not sure this is because the national press — to the extent there is a national press — is inept, corrupt, or whatever. I think it’s more that they’re in disarray, and they don’t have the resources that they need to thoroughly and doggedly pursue and expose the truth. Very few newspapers do have that. Almost none. The New York times, for example, would be an exception, and there’s perhaps others. But very few do. So I don’t think they handled it well.

I also think — and this is a theme of my book, as you know — in Canada, every citizen, everybody is much too reticent to question what officials say. We’re much too deferential. We accept what figures of authorities say, we accept what senior government officials say, including public health regulators. We accept what judges say. We don’t challenge. We don’t question. We don’t argue. And that, I think, is one of the ways in which our freedom is corroded.

Every citizen needs to be asking themselves: Why are they saying this to me? Why are they promoting this particular idea? Are they right to do so? Then you get into the good argument, bad argument thing. Are they giving me good arguments that I should accept, or not?

But we are not inclined to do that in the way people in some other countries are. Now, again, it’s a complicated issue, because then people would say, “If you challenge authority too much, if you reject authority too much, eventually you get some kind of collapse of your institutions.” That is to some extent true. But it’s like everything else; it’s where you find the middle ground.

TH: Let’s talk about vaccine mandates for a moment. I consider those an infringement on freedom. I think the rational argument behind them has fallen apart. In fact, we saw it in The Globe and Mail, Zain Chagla from McMaster University, an infectious diseases specialist, saying exactly that. We know that the vaccines don’t stop transmission. We know that they don’t stop infection. And his point, especially with travel, is that those under 12 have always been involved in travel. So there’s never been a purely vaccinated space anyways. What’s your thinking on the vaccine mandates?

PS: When you say vaccine mandates, you mean the requirement that you be “ fully vaccinated” before you can do certain things, travel internationally, go into restaurants, that sort of thing. Well, you know, this is kind of unsatisfactory too, I’m sure, but I don’t really know. I do accept what people say, medical scientists say, which is that vaccine has prevented a far greater pandemic and tragedy than has in fact happened. I accept that. Scientists, people that know far better than I, tell me this, that the vaccine is a wonderful and effective thing, although not completely effective. I also agree with what you say, what other people say, which is that Covid is a very complicated disease. It’s hard to beat and keeps popping up in different guises, despite the vaccine.

Okay, but try and address your point directly. I think you and I have to differ on this. I think on the whole, vaccine mandates as a public health measure are probably defensible, even though I accept — and I’m sure you believe this — I accept that they represent considerable intrusion on our personal freedom. Because we’re being told to do something and if we don’t do it, then we are deprived of all kinds of opportunities and facilities that we want.

TH: I think that if it was a different vaccine and a different virus, I may feel differently about it. But the logical thinking through of it is difficult at this point because of the transmission issue, mainly, but also because of the small threat of myocarditis in certain populations — perhaps some people should be able to make a meaningful choice of which risk they would prefer to take. And that not being able to travel, not being able to participate in social spaces, that seems to me a very coercive measure.

PS: Well, yeah, I mean it’s disingenuous to say to somebody, “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.” Because if you don’t do it, you’ll be, as I said, deprived of all kinds of opportunities and facilities that you don’t want to be deprived of, that you accept as normal. So it’s a heavy-handed approach. But I would say to you, Tara, what’s the alternative? Is the alternative to just let people do whatever they want and accept what might be very adverse public health consequences?

Although this does bring me back to what, in a sense, is my central point in all of this, which is you need to explain to people, you need to lay out the facts to them. You shouldn’t say, “You must have a vaccine, just go and get it. Don’t ask too many questions.” You have to explain why they should have a vaccine. What the advantages are of a vaccine and what the disadvantages are of not having a vaccine. And then let them decide for themselves.

Now, that may be a very high bar to attain because it implies a massive, coordinated, rational, public education process — telling people why they should do this in some detail, rather than forcing them to do it. But the direction that most countries, including our country, went was essentially forcing people to do it. And then you get back to my point about the deferential Canadian. If some head of a Science Table — I don’t know what a Science Table is exactly, but whatever it is — if the head of a Science Table says, “You should do this” or “ You must do this,” well, he’s head of a Science Table, right? So he must be right. That’s the way many Canadians think now. However, you are now going say to me, “Not every Canadian thinks that way. Look at the Freedom Convoy.”

TH: Yes.

PS: And where does that fit into the equation?

TH: Exactly. I definitely wanted to speak about that as well. You write in the book about the level of power that the executive branch of government has in Canada. We saw Justin Trudeau exercise that power when he evoked the Emergencies Act to quash those protests, and also then making it a confidence vote in parliament as well. The Canadians Civil Liberties Association launched legal action. RoseAnne Archibald, national chief of The Assembly of First Nations, has warned the House of Commons Finance committee that it sets a bad precedent. She worries that those same powers could be used to freeze the bank accounts of anyone supporting any blockade. So far, Ottawa is citing cabinet confidentiality. We don’t know the full justification. This inquiry that’s happening may shed more light. But given that it’s run by someone who used to work for the Liberals, we may be a bit skeptical. What do you make of all that?

PS: I think the invocation of the Emergencies Act was a very serious mistake. I mean, I know nothing other than what I read in the newspapers, so I have no special knowledge of this. But from what I know, and what I see, I judge it to have been a very serious mistake. Totally out of all proportion to the threat that was posed. You can, in a democratic country like ours, cite cabinet confidentiality to obscure the reasons why you did it. I think that’s the last refuge of the scoundrel, confidentiality.

I think it was a very serious mistake. Far too broad in its application. What essentially you were confronted with, it seems to me, in Ottawa — now, Windsor, the borders, were somewhat different — but in Ottawa it was a failure of the local police to deal appropriately and expeditiously and reasonably with what happened. And the emphasis should have been on that and how to fix that. And I guess eventually it was fixed in that way. But the invocation of the Emergencies Act was completely unjustified. You know, it was a pale limitation by the Prime Minister of what his father did in the FLQ crisis. And very pale limitation, too, I say.

So, I’m opposed to it. I agree with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association; I agree with all the criticisms that have been made of this. I think this inquiry, which of course is required under the act, is just silly. It’s not going to tell us anything. I think we perhaps need to revisit that legislation, and either seriously amend it or scrap it all altogether. It has no place in a country like ours.

TH: You also write in the book about secrecy, which I thought was so interesting. I wanted to talk for a moment about internet regulation. Michael Geist recently filed a Freedom of Information Request with the government and gained access to Canadian Heritage’s online harm consultation process in relation to internet regulation. Twitter, for instance, argued that the proactive monitoring of content envisioned by the government sacrifices freedom of expression to the creation of a government-run system of surveillance. The requirement to share information at the request of the Crown is also troubling, it said. And it likened the government’s website blocking plans to policies from countries like China, North Korea and Iran. Andrew Coyne, writing in The Globe and Mail, has said this direct state regulation of content promises to be worse than the disease. Philip, how concerned should we be?

PS: We should be extremely concerned. I agree with what Michael Geist wrote, and I agree with what Andrew Coyne wrote. I read those things because you sent them to me. [Laughs] I agree entirely with both of them. The idea that government should have any part at all in regulating social media content is appalling to me. Absolutely appalling. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to start talking in the same breath about North Korea or China, or now Russia. It’s not far-fetched at all. Once the government starts, in any way at all, regulating what people can see, scrutinizing material — you are in serious trouble. As I said earlier in our conversation, I’m a freedom of speech absolutist. I think that restrictions on freedom of speech need to be very minimal.

One obvious example is incitement to violence. That clearly has to be, and is, in our country, illegal. But save for that, and one or two other similar kinds of examples, there should be pretty much unrestrained freedom of speech.

If somebody posts something that’s absurd, or risible, or prejudiced, then we should be astute enough and well-educated enough — back to my good argument, bad argument theory — to be able to spot it. The average citizen should be able to spot it and say, “That’s ridiculous. I don’t believe it.” Or, “That’s harmful. I reject it.” That’s the appropriate way of dealing with these things. Not to have the government step in, and according to whatever the political ideology of the day is, decide, no, that’s not appropriate for people in this country to see, or to read. Horrible idea. I don’t think it’s going to happen. Because I think, in this country — notwithstanding the fact that we’re all too deferential and passive when it comes to authority — I don’t think Canadians will buy this.

TH: I hope not.

PS: One thing is they might try and close you down. They might decide the ideas you are propagating on Lean Out are not suitable for consumption by the Canadian public.

TH: Indeed.

PS: Against vaccine mandates? No, we have to shut this woman up! [Laughs]

TH: You dedicate a whole section of the book — returning to income inequality now — to how income inequality jeopardizes freedom. Billionaire wealth in this country increased 68 percent during the pandemic. How does economic inequality limit freedom?

PS: I think in many ways, some fairly obvious, some fairly subtle. The aspirations of the middle class, until fairly recently, were regarded as acceptable and appropriate. You know: The cottage with the picket fence so that your children and your dog can play happily in the back; the prospect of a reasonable kind of job with some degree of security; provisions for your old age when you eventually retire. All these things that were normal, acceptable, reasonable aspirations have basically been dashed.

… It’s a malfunctioning of the capitalist system, which is concentrating too much wealth in one place to the detriment of the other. There’s only so much to go around. I also find it, personally, almost obscene the wealth that some people are allowed to accumulate, not because they’ve discovered a cure for cancer or anything hugely dramatic like that. But just because either they’ve been extremely lucky, or they’ve managed to pull the economic levers in some particularly effective and subtle way, often to the detriment of the general wellbeing. So I think these issues have to be addressed …

Everybody talks about other kinds of inequality, and injects theories about it in university courses and in op-eds and so on. But income inequality doesn’t seem to attract that level of attention. But it’s so fundamental to me.

TH: I agree with you completely. I do find it astonishing how little coverage and little discussion and debate it gets, considering the huge impact that it has. I have two last questions for you. You had an academic reader read earlier drafts the book, and they concluded that you are a dominant culture white male, speaking to other dominant culture white males. You reject this premise — this idea that some of us have more legitimacy to participate in the public conversation than others. That was the first time I’d seen that articulated publicly. Why is it important to say?

PS: I reject the idea that we are all entirely trapped by whatever particular circumstances that we find ourselves in. I can’t change the fact that I’m a white man. I can’t change the fact that I had the benefit of a good university education; I’m very grateful that I did. I can’t change the fact that I grew up in a peaceable, prosperous Western society. I can’t change these things. But the idea that somehow this traps me, when it comes to what I can say, what I can think, what I can write? And that somehow everything I say, or think, or write, has to be seen through that prism and discounted accordingly? I reject that. I think that there’s no reason to accept that.

The idea, for example, that I can’t say anything meaningful about the plight of Canadian Indigenous people because I am not that? I reject that. That would be such a complete fetter on all kinds of discussion and discourse. Everything would just grind to a halt if that were to be accepted. So I just reject it. Now, of course, that’s not to entirely to discount the fact that we all, to some extent, are creatures of who we are — and that may influence what we say, and what we write, and what we think. Of course, I recognize that. But other than that, no.

This is all part of what I regard as a grotesque and extremely dangerous identity politics movement, which wants to confine everybody to an increasingly smaller identity silo and reject their legitimacy when it comes to commenting on anything that’s not within their silo. This is contrary at all human progress and thought over millennia. It’s a fairly recent thing and I hope it dies a quick death.

TH: At the end of the book, you offer a Citizen’s Manifesto, a list of actions for Canadians — things like replace deference to establishment institutions and individuals with informed skepticism. When you think about that list, what do you see as the most pressing action for us all to think about?

PS: I don’t think this is on the list as such, but I think the most important thing is for each individual citizen to take responsibility. To accept that they have a responsibility to pay attention, to think, to try and discern the good arguments and weed out the bad ones, to criticize when appropriate, to speak out if necessary, but in a careful, informed and skeptical way.

We haven’t talked about the famous Freedom Convoy. My problem with the Freedom Convoy is, as far as I can tell — I may be wrong on this, but I don’t think so — that that consisted largely of shouting meaningless slogans and the people shouting these meaningless slogans were doing it for who knows what reason, but it didn’t have much to do with political philosophy. You may disagree with me on this; I think perhaps you do.

TH: I think I do.

PS: [Laughs] Yeah, okay. Well, that’s another discussion. But I think each and every citizen, everybody walking down the street out there, has this responsibility to pay attention to what’s going on and not to be afraid to speak out intelligently and skeptically if necessary.

TH: Hear, hear. On the Convoy, I thought Rupa Subramanya’s reporting was incredibly thorough on this point, and that there was a lot of concern about the actual vaccine mandates. And there was a lot of concern about economic inequality within the ranks of that protest. So I would just add that as a last note. Let’s end on this: Where do we go from here? Are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? What do you think happens next in this country?

PS: Well, that’s a big question, Tara. I wish I could be optimistic, but I don’t feel particularly optimistic. I feel that there’s a lot of negative forces at work and they feed off each other. I’m alarmed in particular about what I see as the increasing disappearance of a true sense of a Canadian identity, that crosses all provinces and territories. I think that’s taken a big beating recently. I think we are all tending to become more and more narrowly defined, which is not a good thing.

In my new book, which will come out next year sometime, I talk about identity politics … We’re all getting more and more narrowly defined, squeezed into our little corners, told in effect to disrespect those who are not in our little enclave. This is very bad and this has to be stopped if possible. But I don’t see how that’s going to happen. So I wish I could be optimistic and cheerful. But hey, I’m a Russian Jew. What do you expect? [Laughs]

This transcript has been edited and condensed.

Lean Out with Tara Henley is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

“We’re liberated, and we’re miserable.” That’s the title of a chapter in Christine Emba’s new book, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation — and one I think a lot of people will relate to. The sexual revolution held lots of promises of freedom and liberation, but in many ways, it just hasn’t delivered. We’re in the midst of a sex recession. Marriage is in decline. And, according to a Pew survey, nearly half of American adults say dating has gotten harder for most people over the last 10 years, and fully half of single adults have given up on dating entirely.

Women know this. Men know this, too. But many are not willing to talk about it publicly. Because to critique where the West has landed on sex and intimacy is to critique feminism, and to question the overreach of #MeToo. Add to that: To focus on relationships between men and women is to risk offending the progressive consensus, which sees the whole conversation as reinforcing heteronormative discourse.

Christine Emba wades into these troubled waters in her debut book. She’s an opinion columnist and editor at The Washington Post. And she joins me today to talk about the mess between men and women — and how we might get out of it.

TH: Christine, welcome to Lean Out.

CE: Thank you so much for having me.

TH: It’s really great to have you here. I found this book quite surprising, for a lot of reasons. You go after some sacred cows here; as the subtitle suggests, this is a provocation. Add to that, I found your politics did not necessarily fit into any particular box, which is refreshing. I want to start with your background. You are a Christian evangelical who converted to Catholicism. You write in the book about remaining a virgin into your twenties. How did you decide to write a book about the sex crisis between men and women?

CE: [Laughs] All of that intro is true. First of all, I really like the fact that my politics are not that easily identified, frankly. In the first review of Rethinking Sex that came out, Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times said the same thing. She was like, “Christine Emba is a heterodox thinker; she quotes Roger Scruton, but also Andrea Dworkin.” I think that’s helpful because I think both sides have some wisdom here.

But back to your main question. You know, I’m an opinion columnist at The Washington Post, and my focus is ideas and society. During the #MeToo moment in 2017, 2018, I was writing a lot about these cases, about the Harvey Weinsteins, the Matt Lauers. But I was also very interested in the not so cut-and-dried cases, the Cat Person, the Aziz Ansari. These situations that were consensual, and so, not criminal, but still sort of deeply bad. That so many young women and men, but especially women, seemed to relate to, seemed to think was the norm. That made me think of my own situation, my own friends and peers. How starting from the outside of the modern sexual world, looking in, to becoming part of it myself, I’d come across, again and again, this disconnection between what people actually wanted — real relationships of care — and what they were settling for. And even saying was good.

Fly-by-night hookups in which the next morning they were left disappointed, and sad, or pretending not to care, not to have feelings. Pretending that sex didn’t mean anything to them, even though it obviously did. I was interested in exploring these tensions. How did we get to this place? What parts of the sexual revolution and feminist movements had perhaps taken a turn from their original destination? And what were the assumptions that I and my peers were holding about sex that might actually be hurting us, rather than helping us to the human flourishing that we desire? These were more personal questions, I think, than just the top-line stories. And there were so many of them that it did feel like it needed a book to explore.

TH: There’s so much to pull from what you just said. The “deeply bad” you speak of — the impression I get from the book is that this is bad sex, bad encounters, uncomfortable sex, uncomfortable relationships. How did we get to a place where women and men are so unhappy with their romantic lives?

CE: Navigating our love lives has always been difficult. But today the general outlook has become not just jokingly sad, but actually depressing. And the pessimism comes at a moment when we might actually expect the opposite. We’re living in a golden age of sexual freedom. The average age of first marriages is rising. Birth control is widely available. Most people are accepting of premarital sex. We’ve breached the ramparts of repression, post-sexual revolution, and the wall of silence that supposedly prevented us from expressing our sexuality has fallen. And yet it hasn’t made us happy. Many people today actually feel a bit lost. And I would suggest that part of the reason why is that our definition of freedom is skewed. We have defined freedom, in a liberal capitalist society, as the freedom to go your own way. To not be bound by any rules or restrictions. To not be bound by other people. To not have ties.

Freedom means the freedom to move. But that freedom can look a lot like loneliness. When you excise your feelings from the conversation, when you forfend to connect with anyone for fear of dimming your career prospects, because you’re afraid that having feelings might trap you — then, yeah, you end up not being able to share your feelings and being alone. And that is what freedom has looked like for a lot of people.

I also think that people do need boundaries to help structure and shape behaviour and move them in the direction that they would like to go. So that they know what to expect when entering a sexual encounter with someone. So that a first date looks like a first date. And not, as one woman told me, “we had sex, but then he surprised choked me.” I think there’s a lot of confusion and a lack of connection in this moment.

TH: I think you’re right about that. I do want to talk about feminism. This is one of the sacred cows. There’s a point in the book that really surprised me, where you were talking about how we have actually primed young women to be the kind of sexual partners that young, uncommitted men want. You know, buying into this idea of no-strings-attached, transactional sex, with really low expectations on the act, and, on account of the rise of porn, often involving quite degrading things. Walk me through your main criticisms of feminism in this context.

CE: In Rethinking Sex, I do a deep dive into how the feminist movement was, in my opinion, co-opted over the course of the sexual revolution and into the moment that we live in today. The early feminist movements really had a revolutionary idea in mind: Smashing a patriarchal system that centred male preferences, and toxic value systems, and replacing it with a vision in which women and their distinctive concerns and femaleness were equally valued and respected.

But our post-feminist movement asks for less. I try to work through how this shift happened in the book. Rather than dismantling a male-dominated system, they redefined female progress as just gaining power within the existing system, which meant adopting its values. Instead of a revolutionary, almost utopian society where women were valued as women, and ostensibly female virtues were actually taken seriously, female desire taken seriously, female humanity taken seriously — we just kept the same ideals and stuck a woman in. So the boss is still the ideal, it just now looks like a #GirlBoss. Playboy is still fine, as long as women can be playgirls. When it comes to dating, it looks like women and men accepting this approach to sex, and women even trying to adopt the male ideal in order to wield what’s seen as its power.

TH: To be fair, the status quo not working for men either, which you point out in the book. We can talk about incels later, but even the median experience of men is not great. When you look at the data around the dating apps, it’s a very small pool of men doing all the dating and many men are not finding dates. They’re not finding companionship, or they’re finding the kind of empty encounters that are feeling quite uncomfortable to them as well.

CE: Men aren’t asked in this society to be better, or more loving, or more open people themselves. And they also still face the same pressure to lean into stereotypical roles, making it harder for them to ask for and achieve the connection that many of them actually want. If this standard is upheld, the most stereotypically masculine man is still the winner. And men who don’t act like that, or who can’t live up to that bad ideal, feel left out. They end up feeling like the losers.

TH: In the book, you talk about the sex positivity movement. You write that there is this thread of feminism that was profoundly anti-sex, and particularly anti-heterosexual sex, and that didn’t believe it was possible to have healthy sex in the context of patriarchy. But you point out the sex positivity movement makes the opposite mistake by refusing to judge any behaviour whatsoever.

CE: I spend a lot of time in Rethinking Sex trying to figure out how we got to the current moment and how it diverged from the original goals of the feminist movement. I have to point out that there were good things there. Those revolutions happened for a reason. But so much of that conversation was co-opted and warped. And the idea of sex positivity was a key loss, actually. The feminist journalist Ellen Willis coined the phrase “sex positivity” in a very specific context. She was writing against feminists in the movement who said that sex with men wasn’t possible, that to be a good feminist you had to separate entirely from heterosexuality, that change was never going to happen. She wrote about being sex-positive in the sense that women’s desire for relationships with the other sex is good — and we can be positive about that.

But today, the idea of sex positivity has ballooned beyond its original scope. It’s not just the idea that women’s desire is valid, but it’s the idea that being a good modern woman, or a good liberal, or a good feminist, means just sort of being up for it all the time — with an emphasis on adventurousness and never saying no. Being sex positive in the current moment seems to mean having as much sex as possible and always enjoying it.

TH: I’m quite critical of feminism, although I grew up in very progressive circles. Part of it is what you were talking about earlier, the #GirlBoss thing, and understanding that there was some wrong turn where we, as women, defined equality as the ability to compete as men in the labor market. But then also with the excesses of #MeToo. There’s a moment in the book that I just found amazing. You’re quoting Ezra Klein in relation to a California bill on adopting affirmative consent standards for sexual assault investigations: “It will settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt and creating a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent. This is the case against it. And also, the case for it.” And later he says, “men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.” Your thoughts?

CE: [Laughs] I found that piece so, so fascinating. I’ll read the sentences that I write after that: “There is something to be said for this sort of fear. Perhaps men should be nervous, so nervous that they make an analysis of their actions in the same way women do. Yet, even a stricter, more punitive version of consent doesn’t solve the deeper problems of our sexual culture, and creates others too.” You know, not every sexual misstep is a crime, but if we enact a legal regime around what sex is good and what sex is bad, and punish people based on consent, we ignore the fact that our rules are so impoverished that they’re easy to misconstrue. Plus, as is the case with everything else in our criminal justice system, we end up levying the harshest punishments against the poorest or brownest or otherwise most undefended, not necessarily those most in the wrong.

One of the threads running through the entire book is that the idea of consent, as the standard by which we judge sex, is impoverished. It’s not enough, for a number of reasons. Consent is a legal criteria. It’s an excellent and necessary baseline. The baseline is the floor; it’s not the ceiling. We should be striving towards something higher than just that baseline. And I suggest that the ideal that we should be striving for is willing the good of the other. This is an ideal that is not criminally enforced, or enforced by the state. It’s something that we have to enforce ourselves. We have to have a social understanding of what sex looks like, and what the good looks like, to reach for something higher.

TH: Back to the fear piece, one thing I hear in interviews a lot from women is that men are scared now of asking women out. That is counterproductive to the human flourishing that you talk about. So many women want partners, a home life, a domestic life, a satisfying romantic life. But if men are too scared, because of that fear that Ezra Klein writes about, is that not counterproductive for all of us?

CE: Right. I mean, back to earlier in our conversation, I talk about that too in the chapter “We’re liberated, and we’re miserable.” There’s no clarity for men as to what they’re supposed to do, or allowed to do, or what their actions will be read as, and whether they’ll be punished for them.

So, in a world where sex is everywhere, there are a lot of men who find themselves afraid. [They think] if I ask out a woman, maybe she’ll assume that I’m going to pressure her into sex? Or if I talk to someone at work, is that going be read as a sexual thing? Because there aren’t really any boundaries. And so, men, rather than finding themselves in that position, would rather not [participate]. They only go to dating apps, where it’s explicit that everyone is there for dating. Or give up on the scene altogether.

I talked to a number of psychologists about this, too, especially psychologists working with younger people. One said to me, “Young men are terrified. Men in their twenties are terrified and they talk about it a lot, because there’s just no clarity about what they’re allowed to do, what they should be doing, how women will respond apart from just, I guess, the rule of don’t rape someone.” But that’s a really low bar. We need a lot more clarity than that.

TH: Getting to incels, now. There’s a genre of books about women who are alone and childless. They go on a quest to understand their romantic lives — and often don’t come up with an answer at the end of it. There’s sympathy for that position. We don’t hear much sympathy for incels. You have expressed sympathy in this book.

CE: I have in this book, and I have in the past. A couple years ago, to some backlash, I wrote a piece in the Post entitled “Men are in trouble, incels are proof.” For the readers who are not familiar, incel is short for involuntary celibate. It’s a self-imposed name that young men have given themselves; they define themselves by their inability to find a sexual or romantic partner. In this book, I do take pains to point out that I am not sympathetic to what seems to be, in many cases, an incel-held ideal that men deserve a woman, and they deserve the woman that they want. They deserve a hot chick who will do whatever for them. That’s not fair; nobody deserves someone else.

But I think the discussion of loneliness, the fact that people want a romantic partner, want a connection, and find themselves unable to find it — I do think that that is sad, and that inability to connect with someone, to find a partnership that contributes to your human flourishing, would be sad for a man. And is sad for women, too.

I think that one of the great losses that we are beginning to see talked about, and are trying to come to terms with now, is that so many people have chased a fiction of what freedom looks like, what sex looks like. And they’re finding that it’s left them empty-handed. That’s sad for anyone, male or female.

TH: And I would say, we all do deserve love. We all deserve connection. That doesn't get talked about enough … Another piece in the book is that you’re in your thirties now and [women] have this biological clock ticking away in the background.

CE: Rethinking Sex is both talking about how we’ve misunderstood consent as a rule for sex, and also about assumptions that we’ve made about what sexual culture should look like, what sex means, what we should act like, that are not correct. That are faulty, or even hurting us.

One of the assumptions that I critique is the idea that in sex, men and women are basically the same. Which to me kind of seems obvious. But, you know, in writing this in the book, it felt almost like a taboo to say men and women are not the same. They have different concerns and different vulnerabilities when it comes to sex. For women, the biological clock is definitely a major one.

I’m arguing for the idea that we should be willing the good of the other. And that means seeing the other person and keeping their vulnerabilities and differences in mind. When it comes to trying to find a partner, if you want to have children, women have more urgency because our biology is different. When you think about treating someone fairly in a relationship, and caring for them, that would mean taking that into account, considering the fact that the female timeline might be different than the male timeline. And not wasting someone’s time, when it comes down to it.

For women, I’m looking at Lean In feminism and #GirlBoss feminism — this idea that you need to succeed in your career first and foremost, rather than do anything else. This idea that we can almost pretend that truths of biology and fertility are not real, that we can somehow escape them. That might be something to think about early on.

TH: I recently had Rob Henderson on the podcast, and he has this concept of luxury beliefs. It’s the idea that certain views are fashionable in the elite classes but have a huge impact on the lower classes. We have seen elite marriage hold pretty steady but working class marriage has completely fallen apart. What do you think about that piece?

CE: I am very familiar with that term, and I find it fascinating and so useful. I think that it’s really evident when you look at the statistics for marriage. It is the elite classes who say, “Freedom, feminism — that means that you should do whatever you want. Don’t worry about getting married. Every family formation is great, or none at all. Do what you will.” Then they just end up in heterosexual marriages by the time they’re 35 and go on to have very stable nuclear families. Elites who choose not to do that are still buffered from consequences. Because you might have money to pay for fertility treatments, if you ignored your biological clock and find yourself wanting a child late. Or you have money to be a single parent, or even simply a wealthy single person into old age.

But then for non-elites who have followed these directions — “don’t find a partner, don’t get married, have kids out of wedlock, do whatever you want” — they are not buffered in the same way from the consequences. Whether it’s trying to start a family alone and finding that really expensive and hard, or being with multiple partners and then finding oneself with none. Experimenting throughout most of your youth and then finding yourself alone later. That looks different when it’s not buffered by money and education and a class cushion.

TH: I thought it was so interesting that you drew on a Catholic saint for this idea of willing the good, and that you are introducing a religious concept into what has been a very secular conversation. Could you comment on that, to close?

CE: I suggest willing the good of the other, which is Aristotle, by way of Saint Thomas Aquinas. It’s his definition of love, actually. And not just romantic love — care for the other person. Willing the good of the other, I argue, is a better standard for sex because it asks us to see our sexual encounters as mutual, to actively care for the other person’s wellbeing, as much as we would our own. And in willing their good, it implies that we are actually trying to figure out what the good is. Both broadly, in terms of what the good of sex is, and also for the other person.

When I talk about religion in the book, and my faith, I bring it up because I think people want context for how this person decided to become an expert on sexual ethics. I’m not; I’m a regular person trying to figure it out. But I do think that religious traditions are a history of how we, as people, have come together and tried to think through big issues and create ethical frameworks that stand the test of time. So, I think that it is silly to discard any sort of religious understandings of sex because they’re seen as old fashioned. They worked for a reason; maybe there’s some wisdom there.

Willing the good of the other, I think, is a helpful and useful standard because it’s not necessarily just Christian, or just Catholic. I cite from Buddhist teachings and Jewish teachings. The golden rule, this idea that it’s important to treat the other as you would like to be treated, is basically universal. The idea that there is a higher good that we should look for, that we should be aiming for and trying to embody, and even trying again to embody when we inevitably fail — that is in some senses a religious idea. But it’s valuable to anyone. It’s this thought that we can be better than we are, and that we should try. That our personal desires don’t trump the wellbeing of other people.

This transcript has been edited and condensed.

Lean Out with Tara Henley is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com