The Backchannel

Facing a well-funded challenger from within her own party, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) dispatched a mailer pointing out that he is backed by a number of out-of-state big donors who made their fortunes on Wall Street. An article in Vice News quickly pointed out that every donor listed is Jewish, leading to complaints by some that these mailers are antisemitic. Omar's defenders argue that their religion is irrelevant. Who's right? Daniel Marans, reporter at HuffPost, joins The Backchannel to discuss.

Apologies for the poor audio in this episode.

• Vice article: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ep45wj/ilhan-omar-campaign-accuses-opponent-of-being-in-the-pocket-of-wall-street-and-only-references-jewish-donors

• Daniel's latest on the race: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/unions-blast-antone-melton-meaux-ilhan-omar-challenger-jackson-lewis-law-firm_n_5f1a3cb5c5b6296fbf401fd4

Former Ohio Republican governor John Kasich will get a starring role at the Democratic Party's national convention this year. Meanwhile, a group of former Republican consultants are making big bucks with the Lincoln Project, a Super PAC blanketing the airwaves attacking Trump. The left, understandably, feels like it's lost control over the election's narrative. But is it is a self-inflicted wound? The Backchannel discusses.

Has the National Labor Relations Board gone woke? A ruling by an all-male, all-Republican three-member panel says that employees who use offensive language during a labor dispute can now be fired for that language. Zaid Jilani, Leighton Woodhouse and Shant Mesrobian discuss whether this move towards political correctness is actually cover to make it easier to fire workers during what are usually tense labor organizing campaigns.

• Bloomberg story on the ruling: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/nlrbs-gm-ruling-gives-employers-more-slack-to-discipline-speech

• The NLRB decision: https://aboutblaw.com/R8U

Correction to something said in this episode: In the anecdote about the Seattle Times reporter, he was actually suspended and then resigned about a month later. He was not fired outright.

The Backchannel's Zaid Jilani and Shant Mesrobian talk about the latest speech crime moral panic on a university campus, this time at Fordham University.

Faced with large scale protests and a dire economy, cities around America are defunding their police services. Everywhere from Baltimore to Seattle to Portland are considering large cuts or have passed large cuts in the recent weeks and months since the protests started after the death of George Floyd. Many would argue these cuts would improve policing by forcing cities to rely on non-police alternatives. But in this episode, we call into question that premise.


• Read Leighton's 2015 piece here: https://gawker.com/50-years-after-the-riots-watts-projects-and-lapd-learn-1723326136

• New Yorker story on the Albuquerque police: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/son-deceased

People's Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig tells us what the racial wealth gap in America really is and what to do about it.

Journalist Michael Tracey joins The Backchannel to talk about his trip interviewing people whose businesses were destroyed by rioting. Tracey's interviews highlight the human impact of the riots, demonstrating how many working class people and immigrants suffered from the consequences.

For our regular listeners of Extremely Offline: It’s been a while! Since we effectively closed down XO, the world has gone to shit. We’re not necessarily saying the one caused the other, but just in case, we’re bringing the pod back, but under a new name.

Zaid and I, along with our friend Shant Mesrobian, have launched a new show on YouTube called “The Backchannel,” and we’re going to stream it here as an audio podcast, as well. The format is a little different, and a little looser, than XO, but with the same spirit of free discourse, and with some of our past guests popping in from time to time. This is our first episode, featuring Zaid, Kmele Foster from the podcast The Fifth Column, and Katie Herzog from the podcast Blocked and Reported, about one of the worst books ever written, White Fragility. Hope you’ll stay a subscriber.

—Leighton


• The Fifth Column: http://wethefifth.com/
• Blocked and Reported: https://www.patreon.com/blockedandreported/posts

With Andrew Yang's insurgent bid for the presidency in the headlines, many are asking what it means to be Asian-American in today's America. To start with, what do we mean when we say "Asian-American"? Does it mean being descended from the world's most diverse continent? Is there a distinct Asian-American culture or politics?

I'm Zaid Jilani and my co-host is Leighton Woodhouse. We're the hosts and producers of Extremely Offline, a podcast that brings people from different political tribes together to talk across differences. We also both happen to be Asian-American. But to help us decipher exactly what that means, on this episode we're joined by two other Asian-Americans.

On the right, we have Wesley Yang, a contributor to Tablet Magazine and the author of the book Souls of Yellow Folk. On the left, we have returning guest Lee Fang, a reporter for The Intercept.

We hope you enjoy the following conversation, where all four of us wrestle with what it means to be Asian in America. And if you'd like to help us continue to produce these episodes, please consider contributing to our Patreon at patreon.com/extremelyoffline.

Further Reading:

The Souls of Yellow Folk, by Wesley Yang

“Cancel culture” is the less-than-perfect name for the tendency of extremely online people to form mobs and publicly shame others in response to perceived cultural and political transgressions, from sending racist tweets to selling food of a culture that’s not your own. Sometimes it’s celebrities who are cancelled for choosing a “problematic” role in a movie or making an offensive joke on stage. Sometimes it’s regular people who posted something dumb or misconstrued on Twitter, or who got caught on camera doing something insensitive or misunderstood in real life.

From the perspective of cancel culture’s critics, such incidents are examples of a dangerous tendency toward mob justice on social media platforms and in some offline spaces as well, like college campuses. From the perspective of its defenders, it’s the product of the democratization and social leveling of the internet, which has allowed for previously excluded voices to make themselves heard in the public arena, ruffling some feathers in the process.

Osita Nwanevu, a writer at The New Republic, has made the latter case, in a provocative essay called “The Cancel Culture Con.” In it, he names, among others, the journalist Jesse Singal as someone who has raised a false flag against cancel culture. Jesse, who has, many times over, been targeted for cancellation himself, wrote two essays for his newsletter in response to Osita’s piece.

If you have the time, you’ll get more out of this episode if you go back and read Osita’s piece in The New Republic, and Jesse’s two responses, which you can find at jessesingal.substack.com; our discussion gets somewhat into the weeds of that dialogue. And if the phenomenon of cancel culture is entirely new to you, we especially encourage you to read them first.


Background reading/viewing:

• Osita’s New Republic story: https://newrepublic.com/article/155141/cancel-culture-con-dave-chappelle-shane-gillis

• Jesse’s responses

1.     https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/on-cancel-culture-the-new-republic

2.     https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/a-followup-point-about-narcissism

• YA fiction article by Kat Rosenfield: https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html

• San Francisco mural controversy: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/george-washington-history-mural-san-francisco-arnautoff/595363/

• Leighton's 2017 documentary adaptation of Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies, which Jesse appears in: https://vimeo.com/263452186