Social Studies

We’re currently teetering on the edge of a world historical mass global famine. The United Nations Security Council has acknowledged as much, as have political leaders in France and the US.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a key factor in the looming catastrophe, but there are other contributors, as well. Those include surging natural gas prices driven by years of misplaced faith in the promise of renewable energy technologies, global supply chain disruptions, and drought in the American West.

I spoke to Emmet Penney, editor of the indispensable GridBrief about what he calls the “Black Cascade” of converging global energy, food and logistics crises. If he and other prognosticators are right, we’re looking at another long year ahead: one full of humanitarian emergencies, political instability, and likely further geopolitical conflict.

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine feels a bit like something out of another century. It’s not just that it’s a land war in Europe, reminiscent of the mechanized industrial era. It’s that Russia’s casus belli is the opposite of strategic; Putin’s war aims seem mythical and weirdly ancient. Beneath the proximate causes, such as NATO expansion (if you’re even willing to believe that’s anything more than an excuse), lies a vision of Russia as a fallen and now resurgent imperial power, and Ukraine as a vassal state gone rogue. And the split identity of Russia as both an eastern outpost of modern Western civilization and a kind of Asiatic suzerain over a vast and wild expanse of steppeland warrior tribes — a national pathology that goes back centuries — is deeply insinuated into its paranoia over Ukrainians’ gravitation toward Europe. The war is being waged with modern technology, but in spirit, the conflict is feudal.

I don’t think you can get a complete picture of Russia’s anxieties and ambitions without considering the country’s pre-modern history. Nobody — and I mean nobody — is better at elucidating those themes than my friend Razib Khan. You’ll know Razib from the last podcast episode I posted (some time ago), which was me as a guest on his show. This time we switched mics.

Razib is a population geneticist and a huge history nerd, and his knowledge of the churn and mixture of human populations globally over the course of millennia is awe-inspiring. Our conversation took us from the Vikings to ancient Japan to colonial America, but I tried to keep us focused on the history of the region that is now serving as the potential prelude to the next world war.

Be sure to sign up for Razib’s excellent Substack.

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Happy New Year!

Last month, my friend Razib Khan had me on his podcast, Unsupervised Learning. I highly recommend subscribing to it. It was a great conversation as it always is with Razib, so I thought I’d share it here.

Enjoy.

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This week I have Catherine Liu on the podcast, Professor of Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine and author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. We had a great conversation about the PMC. Hope you enjoy it and learn a thing or two.

—LW

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I met Mike Cernovich a few years ago when I was making a documentary based on Angela Nagle’s book, Kill All Normies. Back then I had the same impression of him that you likely did, and that you probably still do: I thought he was a Trump-loving, men’s rights-touting, right wing troll.

But after chatting with him, I liked him anyway. Mike was thoughtful, honest, candid, reasonable, self-disparaging, and fair-minded. I’d read the New Yorker profile of him. I’d seen the tweets and heard the slander. I’d even interviewed Zoë Quinn, Mike’s Gamergate nemesis, (I liked her, too), who’d told me exactly what she thought of Mike Cernovich (she despises him). Liking this guy was not what I’d expected.

I could have easily made the decision then to tell everyone who’d listen that I’d met Mike Cernovich and he was exactly the piece of human garbage you’ve been told he was. My milieux back then was pretty conventionally left-wing, so that would have been the easiest thing to do. (I did in fact say basically that about Lucian Wintrich, who I also interviewed for the same film, because that’s exactly how he came across to me.) I probably could’ve even gotten VICE to run it.

But that would have been a lie. And even worse, it would have cost me the opportunity to get to know someone who came from a completely different political tribe than I did — an enemy tribe, no less — to learn what values he actually holds and why he holds them. It would have cost me the chance to learn, for the hundredth time, that the cartoon characters the media writes about rarely measure up to the actual human beings they’re meant to describe (Wintrich being the exception to that rule).

Over the years, Mike and I DM’d quite a bit on Twitter and became friends. We shared some important things in common, such as a deep moral concern for the welfare of industrially exploited animals, and a reflexive distrust of the elite, whether they’re dressed up in right wing or left wing garb.

As it turned out, by the end of the Trump presidency, we came to share another thing in common: a deep contempt for Trump.

Mike went to the mat for Trump in 2016, and among liberals, he’s still regarded as a Trumpist. But Mike has in fact come to loathe the man, for reasons we go into in this podcast.

Mike didn’t benefit politically from his turn against the former President. It certainly didn’t do anything to soften his image in the liberal media (nor did he try to capitalize on it by selling himself as a Lincoln Project-style turncoat to the MSNBC crowd), and it earned him plenty of enemies among his own erstwhile fans. But along with the rest of us, he had watched this undeniably buffoonish administration embarrass itself, and instead of making excuses, he was honest about it.

Whenever I discuss my fondness for Mike publicly, somebody trots out a bunch of his old tweets and demands that I answer for them. It’ll probably happen this time, too. But I don’t take the bait, not only because it’s a boring subject but also because I don’t demand of others that they justify everything that their friends and associates have ever said, so I don’t acknowledge that as a legitimate expectation of myself. Mike has a big megaphone to speak for himself, anyway. He doesn’t need my defense, and I don’t feel obligated to defend myself.

Regardless, I’ll probably lose a few followers and subscribers for “platforming” Mike Cernovich (whose own platform dwarfs my tiny little perch in the first place). But if Mike is comfortable losing some friends by being honest about what a pathetic little worm of a man Trump is, then I guess I can follow his example and lose a few by being honest about what a smart and decent guy I believe Mike to be.

If you’re skeptical about that, then just go ahead and listen to the episode. If, after hearing him for yourself, you remain unconvinced, then fair enough. I make a point of not letting political disagreements get in the way of personal relationships, which is the entire reason I became friends with Mike Cernovich in the first place. But I think you’ll change your mind, even if only a little bit, about Mike.

—Leighton

P.S. I’ve already released the next episode of the podcast, with Catherine Liu, to paid subscribers only. I eventually make every episode fully public, but if you’d like to hear them a few days in advance, here’s the button:

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A little while back I had this conversation with my old podcast partner Shant Mesrobian when we were both guests on my friend Wayne Hsiung’s podcast, The Green Pill. I think the discussion was really fun and interesting so I wanted to share it here.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

—LW

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Last week I interviewed Alex Gutentag, a former Oakland public school teacher and, in my opinion, one of the best writers on Covid-19 around. Like me, Alex comes from a leftist background rooted in the labor movement, and, like me, she’s become highly skeptical of much of what has become conventional wisdom on the left. In her case, the source of her skepticism is what she believes to be a massive overreaction to Covid, which has come at the cost of our civil liberties and from which some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations on the planet have richly profited.

—Leighton

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This week on the podcast, I had Kmele Foster from The Fifth Column, Anna Khachiyan from Red Scare, and The Intercept’s Lee Fang on to talk about vaccine mandates and what they may or may not suggest about the future of our civilization.

If you’re enjoying the pod, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! I’m told it actually makes a difference.

—LW

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Justin Goodman, my guest on this episode of the Kerfuffle podcast, is Vice President of the White Coat Waste Project, a group that opposes taxpayer-funded scientific experimentation on animals.

I’ve been a huge admirer of Justin and White Coat Waste for a long time, for reasons we get into in this episode. Our discussion is about animal rights, an issue I care about more deeply than just about any other. But we get into other subjects as well, which recent circumstances have made relevant to literally everyone on earth, such as Anthony Fauci’s history as the head of the NIH’s NIAID, where he continues to fund the torture of thousands of animals, and how that exploitation may have led to a lab accident in Wuhan that turned the world upside down.

Some of the descriptions in this episode will be hard to listen to, but it’s a moral imperative that we know what’s going on behind these laboratory doors, paid for by our hard-earned tax dollars. It’s literally madness.

—LW

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My podcast guest this week is a lung doctor and a medical research scientist whom I’ve known since we were both little kids. Katie Hisert, MD, PhD, has an even wider scope than most experts on how microbes like SARS-CoV-2 virus operate, having observed them both from the hospital bedside and in the laboratory.

Media reports on Covid-19 have become so politicized that I’ve found it nearly impossible to find reliable answers to basic questions about transmissibility, what’s known and unknown about the vaccines, and other critical questions. You can’t get any more reliable than someone like Katie, so I took this opportunity to get into some of the dicier stuff: Ivermectin, vaccine risks, etc. I learned an enormous amount from this discussion and sincerely hope that others will, too. I highly recommend giving this episode a listen.

—LW

P.S. I’m releasing this episode publicly at once rather than giving it to paid subscribers in advance as I normally do, because of the urgency of the subject matter.

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