The Backchannel

Mike Cernovich is notorious on the left because of his past behavior as a social media troll, beginning with Gamergate, and continuing on through Pizzagate and countless other Twitter flare-ups. He's often lumped in with the alt-right, even though his actual politics are a mixed bag of economic populism, anti-interventionism, border restrictionism, animal welfarism, and mild support for Trump, putting him somewhere slightly to the left of David Frum. In the era of Trump, however, it's not your policy preferences that define your politics, it's your positioning within the Culture Wars.

Katie Herzog knows this well. Katie, who writes for The Stranger, is gay and an out-and-out leftist. Yet if you ask certain of her detractors on Twitter, they might tell you she's a fascist homophobe. Why? Because she frequently criticizes certain quarters of the left, particularly when it comes to identity-based issues such as de-platforming and cultural appropriation.

Mike and Katie have almost nothing in common politically. But they do share a point of view on how on internet shaming and social media mobs are shaping our political discourse, a perspective informed by their own experiences. Mike has been both the target and the perpetrator of online pile-ons, a role he seems to relish. Katie has been more on the receiving end, and while she doesn't quite enjoy the experience, she certainly hasn't ducked for cover in her writing on the cultural battles of the left, either.

With the Mueller Report completed, many are still left wondering what exactly occurred in the 2016 election. Did the Russian government work with the Trump campaign to hack Clinton campaign emails? Did the Trump administration engage in collusion with the Russian government to impact the election? 

While we don't have the full text of the report, the answer appears to be no.

But many political watchers are still skeptical. Cenk Uygur, the co-founder of The Young Turks, is one of those skeptics. He thinks that the report far from exonerates President Trump and that some form of illicit collaboration between the Russian government and Trump is likely.

Freelance journalist Michael Tracey, on the other hand, thinks that the entire saga has been dramatically exaggerated by a combination of Democratic Party officials looking for a scapegoat for their 2016 election loss and a liberal media susceptible to Russiophobia.

Welcome to the Russiagate episode of Extremely Offline.

It's unusual for a freshman member of Congress to draw as much attention as Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar. In just a few short months in Congress, she has been the center of numerous media firestorms after making repeatedly making remarks her supporters believe are exposing the influence of a powerful lobbying group and what her detractors would say is anti-Semitic.

On Capitol Hill, her own party's leadership has condemned her remarks on the influence of the pro-Israel lobby.

Omar Baddar, deputy director of the Arab American Institute disagrees with Schumer. He thinks the Congresswoman is being targeted by a powerful political machine that is distorting her message in order to defend a  status quo that is supportive of the Israeli government.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor at the Jewish Daily Forward, agrees with Omar that the occupation of the Palestinians must end and that we need to change U.S. policy towards Israel. But she believes the Congresswoman's rhetoric has been needlessly polarizing and often moved us further away from a just solution.

When President Trump signed into law the First STEP Act, a wide-ranging federal prison reform bill passed this past December, he marveled at the wide bipartisan vote that got it across the finish line. Indeed, everybody from the Koch Brothers to former Obama adviser Van Jones helped build the wide bipartisan coalition that passed the legislation.

But while most of America now agrees on some form of criminal justice reform, there are still major divisions. On issues like how we tackle violent crime to if and how we should end the drug war, local and federal politicians continue to sharply disagree.

Joining us for this episode are two guests, both of whom are the sons of police officers. But that's where their similarities end. 

Jonathan Blanks of the Cato institute is an ardent critic of policing and the prison system as it is constituted today, arguing that American society often turns to incarceration and punishment as a substitute for more comprehensive solutions that tackle the root causes of crime.

Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute argues that while some reforms may be needed, we shouldn't underestimate the prevalence of violent crime in America and the need for tough policing to keep communities safe.

With Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both offering their own form of challenge to the Democratic establishment, which candidate would have a better shot at succeeding? Which candidate would ultimately make a better president? To answer that question, on this episode we'll ask two of their strongest supporters.

Adam Green is the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, an organization that helped elect Warren to the Senate in 2012 and that quickly endorsed her presidential bid shortly after her announcement. He argues that she brings policy expertise and a winning message that is unmatched by other candidates.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founder of Jacobin Magazine, America's leading socialist publication. He argues that what America truly needs is an outsider who preaches democratic socialism in order to remake our economic and political systems.

This week, we have two guests on opposite sides of our debates about what should be done with the economy. Lee Fang is a reporter for The Intercept and a long-time journalist who has been critical of the structure and function of American capitalism. He looks around the world and sees democratic socialist policies as those which best promote human prosperity and freedom. With rising health care costs and student debt, many Americans are coming around to his point of view.

Kmele Foster, on the other hand, is the libertarian anarcho-capitalist co-host of the breakout podcast The Fifth Column, and he thinks that the free market has proven that it can lift literally hundreds of millions of people out of poverty within the last few decades. He would argue that socialism sounds good on paper, but simply doesn't deliver on its promises.

This episode features two guests from opposite sides of the debate over the state of the Democratic Party and the left. First, we have Jonathan Chait, a long time left-of-center writer who argues that the Obama years were a stunning success and form the trajectory the party should pursue in the future. Opposite Chait we have the Washington Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig, who argues that the Obama presidency’s shortcomings are part of why democratic socialism is the path forward. On Twitter and Facebook, these two camps, which overlap with the 2016 Hillary vs. Bernie divide, snipe at each other endlessly, engaged in a forever war for control of social media narratives. In this episode, Bruenig and Chait leave those Twitter tribes behind for a respectful, substantive discussion about Twitter, abortion, Obama, healthcare reform, liberal democracy, and the culture of left-wing campus activism.

Co-produced by Leighton Woodhouse and Zaid Jilani
Moderated by Zaid Jilani
Music by Breakmaster Cylinder

It's time to admit it: when we argue online, we’re not actually trying to persuade anyone. We’re not even trying to ‘win’ a debate. We’re trying to “dunk” on our rivals, “own” our political enemies. We’re just performing for our followers, who are usually people who share our politics, our attitudes, and our biases.

That kind of discourse might be entertaining, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. We don’t learn from each other or about each other. We don’t sharpen the arguments we make for our favored policies. All we do is widen the divisions of our politics. We harden our alliances with people like ourselves, while increasing our contempt for people who think differently. We feel even more certain of our own opinions, while becoming even blinder to their shortcomings. It’s an unhealthy, dysfunctional way to approach our disagreements with others. It’s profoundly harmful to our democracy.

On this podcast, we aspire to be the opposite of “extremely online.” What does that mean? It means we want to bring people from warring political tribes together to have substantive, respectful conversations about both their common ground and their differences — the opposite, in other words, of a Twitter flame war.

Extremely Offline is our small contribution to combating political polarization in America. On this show, we’ll bring together people from the populist left and the identity-based left, the center left and the far right, paleoconservatives and socialists, and every other permutation we can think of. We’ll have far-ranging discussions that do not elide our political differences but that are rooted in mutual respect.

Our first episode is with two guests who are both critical of the way mainstream liberals talk about race in America, but from very different directions. Briahna Joy Gray is Senior Politics Editor at The Intercept, where she argues that liberal discourse often isolates racial issues from economic issues and that we can't tackle structural inequality in America without discussing both at the same time. Coleman Hughes is a columnist at Quillette, who argues that liberals and the left often overlook cultural norms when we talk about the roots of racial inequality.