#1228 - Bari Weiss

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Four, three, two, one. Hello, Bari.

Bari Weiss (0:08)

Hi, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

And now we're live. Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it.

Bari Weiss (0:11)

Thanks for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

It's very fortuitous. Your timing comes right in the middle of this big hubbub about this Native American elder and this young boy with one of those stupid fucking red hats on.

Bari Weiss (0:25)

Yep.

Joe Rogan (0:26)

Would you have ever imagined that a slogan like Make America Great Again would be so divisive?

As somehow or another like that, that would be like, Make America Great Again, which sounds like they just want to make things great, like all positive, and a red hat with white letters. Has there ever been a time like that, where an object like a red hat with white letters was so repulsive to half the country?

Bari Weiss (0:50)

Yes. Well, I mean, some people see it as the equivalent of a white hood.

Joe Rogan (0:57)

I don't know about that.

Bari Weiss (0:58)

They do.

Joe Rogan (0:59)

I believe they do.

Bari Weiss (1:00)

They do. They believe that wearing it, that a 16-year-old wearing that hat sort of carries intense moral weight that surely we know that a 16-year-old is not aware of all the implications of wearing that hat.

Joe Rogan (1:13)

Yeah, but the problem with that is Kanye wears it.

Bari Weiss (1:15)

Right. Fair enough.

Joe Rogan (1:16)

It doesn't really work.

Bari Weiss (1:17)

I agree. I'm just saying there are people who really make that argument.

Joe Rogan (1:21)

I get it. I know they do.

Bari Weiss (1:22)

And people who are paid for their opinions.

Joe Rogan (1:24)

Well, yeah. Well, there's also people that are calling for this child's name and address. They're calling to dox him and publicly expose him.

This is a child. He's 16 Is that what he is?

Bari Weiss (1:34)

He's 16 years old. And one of the things that was just so amazing about the whole brouhaha around it, I mean, it was in a way like this perfect encapsulation of our outrage culture, right? Because people saw a tiny clip of this video and it was like a Rorschach test. You saw in it this morality play of what it looked to be was a group of mostly white kids from Coventry Catholic School. I think it's in Kentucky. And it looked like at first glance that they were smirking and smug and had these sort of shit-eating grins on their faces and that they were surrounding this older Native American man. And I have to tell you, I had a visceral reaction to it. The second I saw it, like so many other people, I was like, this is, you know, where we are in our broken culture and they're bullying this guy and here's the rise of the, I had all of those reactions. The challenge of what it means to be a journalist is to not see people as signifiers or as stand-ins just based on their identity. And that's what like 95% of the press corps did.

They sort of leapt to, they leaped to assume that, you know, our visceral reaction was accurate, when in fact, when you actually looked at like the two-hour video of the whole interaction which also included this group of black Israelites or Hebrew Israelites they call themselves, it was not that at all.

The Native American man had walked up to this group, the four other guys had been heckling the group beforehand, calling them crackers, calling them Satan, calling the one black kid in the group things that can't even be said. So it was just far more complicated.

And what was really, really disheartening is that the initial outrage was enough for the mainstream press to report on it. Like Twitter has kind of become almost an assigning editor for places like The New York Times and The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. And then when the actual truth of the thing comes out, when we move past the outrage cycle, they have to sort of write the follow up story to the fake outrage to begin with.

Joe Rogan (3:47)

Defending the fake outrage instead of backing up and saying, we made a mistake.

Bari Weiss (3:51)

Right. Well, some people said that they made a mistake.

Joe Rogan (3:54)

That's wonderful. That's a good sign.

Bari Weiss (3:56)

Yes.

Joe Rogan (3:56)

It really is.

Bari Weiss (3:57)

But one of the things that was so horrifying was that people that are supposed to be adults, you know, people with blue check marks on Twitter were saying things like, this is the face of white patriarchy, this 16 year old kid.