We Are Never Getting Off This Ferris Wheel

The New Yorker Radio Hour hits a new low

I turned on the radio yesterday at the exact moment that a twangy Southern voice was talking to New Yorker editor David Remnick about the failures of the liberal media. Heck yeah, I thought. That’s my favorite subject! And by that I mean: that’s the thing I’m the most pissed about when it comes to gender!

At first, I thought the guest (someone I hadn’t heard of) was making sense on this edition of The New Yorker Radio Hour.

Remnick: I wonder what your thoughts on Joe Rogan, how you think about him and what influence it might or might not have on what you do. These voices are out there everywhere, and, on the the right, they have a massive, massive media ecosystem.

Guest: To combine this answer with the previous one, the Democrats are too structured. They need to go on all of these podcasts. Kamala should have gone on Joe Rogan and allowed herself to not be so disciplined.

I wasn’t sure what she meant by disciplined, but, yes, Harris should have gone on the country’s most popular podcast. She should not have thought she was better than the people who listen. She must have been reading my worst-selling book, How to Be a Loser.

Anyway, the guest loses me pretty soon after that. Or, more accurately, she levies the same criticisms I do, but to prove the opposite point. The liberal media isn’t biased enough, she says. They have to be more one-sided. They’re too beholden to corporate interests. (Remnick assures her that, despite being owned by Conde Nast, The New Yorker is plenty anti-Trump and is definitely not trying to be objective.)

Then Remnick asks her why she was so hard on Rahm Emanuel, who was a guest on her own podcast and must have said something reasonable about gender issues.

When I heard him buy into the narrative that the right wing defines the left wing by being trans-obsessed or bathroom-obsessed, when they, the right wing, are the people who ran on this. For him to placate to that narrative? And when he said it, I didn’t know he was gonna say it. I felt the adrenaline like come up in me.

And I have friends in Oklahoma who have trans children. And to go back to what my mother said, nobody in their right mind chooses to wake up and think, You know what? Today, I am gonna eff with the conservatives. I’m gonna switch genders, and I’m gonna go try to be a DI tennis player. That’s not what this journey is. And, for the Democrats, we have to be the party of equality. And even if these MAGA people don’t understand what transgenderism is?

That’s okay, you don’t have to understand it. But we’re not going to bully them. We’re not gonna pick them up and throw them under the bus. And the rights that are available for me need to be readily available for those people. And I would even go a step further. Maybe they need a little bit more love and a little bit less throwing under the bus. So when I hear Democrats do this, it really pisses me off.

And that’s why the Democrats lose, because average voters sniff that duplicity out.

Let’s just unpack that a little. The Republicans are accusing Dems of being trans-obsessed but whatever they say bounces off us and sticks to them so they’re really the ones who are obsessed.

We have to be the party of equality, which means giving trans people extra rights.

We’re going to lose because we’re duplicitous if we don’t do this.

There’s more, but I can’t keep re-reading it because it’s making my head spin.

Yes, she’s right, we’re going to lose if we don’t go on Joe Rogan and if we don’t start talking like regular people and if we don’t start treating people equally. But that means acknowledging the binary reality of sex and having some laws and policies based on it. It means not accusing those pushing for that of “throwing people under the bus.” It means not yelling at your podcast guest when he represents the views of 80 percent of Americans. It means allowing people to advocate for women’s rights, for the best care for gender dysphoric youth, and for an atmosphere where rigorous scientific debate is welcome, instead of calling people who want those things bullies.

But rather than say that, David Remnick asks if we went too woke, and she says, yes, but the other side is worse and we need to keep building community, by which she means bigger echo chambers, and then Remnick says he worries about how we aren’t properly exposed to “contrary opinions” and he goes to dinner parties and everyone says the same thing and I’m like…

WELL INVITE ME TO YOUR DAMNED DINNER PARTY, DAVID REMNICK! BECAUSE I WILL NOT SAY THE SAME THING AS ANYBODY ELSE THERE!

Then I ate two bowls of chocolate ice cream. Because this is the worst reality show I’ve ever watched and apparently it just got picked up not just for next season, but for eternity, and I might as well binge eat along with it. If this is the message we’re still circulating, we will never see the finale.