Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / David Volodzko: Fired For a Tweet

Transcript

David Volodzko: Fired For a Tweet · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Okay, you as well, the safe space with dangerous ideas, here's a dangerous idea for you.
• 0:07
  How about we not fire people on ruin their lives and ruin the lives of their young families
• 0:14
  for the crime of being silly enough to try to have a nuanced conversation on Twitter?
• 0:20
  How's that, how's that for a crazy idea?
• 0:28
  An equally crazy idea. How about we not try to debate whether or not Hitler was worse than
• 0:33
  Lenin or Lenin was worse than Hitler on a social media platform designed to amplify irrationality,
• 0:41
  to reinforce people's pre-existing beliefs and to demonize other people's positions?
• 0:48
  Today's guest did that and was fine for it, but both things are wrong. I hazard a guess in my
• 0:56
  ethical metric that the firing was worse than the foolish engagement on Twitter,
• 1:03
  but you can judge that for yourself after hearing his side of the story. He's a journalist.
• 1:08
  I received a message from him just on Twitter, hoping that he might be able to chat to me,
• 1:14
  and I didn't know the guy, turns out I had once interviewed him many, many, many years ago
• 1:20
  on Half-Pose Live about logging in Asia. He's been a bit of an expert on Asia. He's lived in Asia.
• 1:28
  He lived for four years in Japan. He lived for six years in South Korea. He lived for three years.
• 1:33
  In China, he spent a year traveling around Southeast Asia. He spent two years in the
• 1:38
  Poland, India. He was apparently homeless in Mumbai. I wish I'd asked him about that. That's
• 1:43
  not interesting. Of all the places you could choose to be poor. Why choose the place with the
• 1:49
  largest slum in the world and one of the poorest metropolis in the world? But maybe you don't have a
• 1:55
  choice in the matter. Nonetheless, he's a lefty. He's a democratic socialist. He's married to a
• 2:02
  diversity equity and inclusion trainer from Peru, the pair of them have lived in Peru in South America,
• 2:10
  all of which is to say this is a guy who is reasonably cosmopolitan. If he's a fascist,
• 2:17
  he certainly does a good job of hiding it by marrying a Peruvian and living in Asia for
• 2:24
  year after year. I won't preempt his tale here. I'll let him tell it himself, but
• 2:32
  last story short, he moved from Peru to Georgia, the state of Georgia. I mean the American state
• 2:40
  of Georgia, not the state of Georgia in the form of USSR. And then he got a job, a big,
• 2:49
  high profile, important job as far as journalism goes. There are not a lot of jobs like this anymore.
• 2:54
  And a big newspaper in a big city, the flagship newspaper of a major US market
• 3:01
  as a member of the editorial board and a columnist. That is a high prestige position. And David
• 3:10
  Velosko lasted one column. And now he's out on his ear. He needs your help. I'll be subscribing
• 3:16
  to his substack. It's an incredible tale of cancel culture. It's honestly heartbreaking and
• 3:25
  shocking that this is happening in 2023. If this was in a 2017 story or even a 2021 story,
• 3:33
  I'd be like, oh yeah, those were crazy, heady days before we understood how pernicious the
• 3:38
  effect of social media is and how deranging it is on people's good judgment. But the idea that
• 3:44
  by 2023, we're allowing social media, uh, uh, brew ha ha's and mischaracterizations by a mob
• 3:54
  to have real world effects that we haven't all decided as a community and that publishers and
• 3:59
  editors haven't decided that we're just going to quarantine and firewall social media as being
• 4:05
  its own garden of horrendous stupidity. And uh, what takes place there. It's like, you know,
• 4:12
  what goes on in social media stays and social media should be the adage. Uh, anyway, that didn't
• 4:18
  happen and I just hope that we can publicize this and I hope you enjoy hearing David Velosko
• 4:24
  tell his tale.
• 4:36
  Well, nice to meet you. Yeah, good to see you. Well, I guess many years ago we spoke briefly once.
• 4:43
  Well, it was, there was, uh, there was an Asian, uh, an Asian American young lady who was in the,
• 4:52
  in the news for having accused people of racism, I think unfairly.
• 4:57
  Soap, yeah. And I came on right after that segment or right before to talk about illegal Chinese
• 5:03
  logging. Amazing. That's right. You remember that. That is so funny. Yeah, that is bizarre.
• 5:12
  You know, I remember the context of that day and how surreal it was. Yes.
• 5:18
  So will you via webcam or will you in studio on that first? I was, uh, no, I was, it was webcam. Um,
• 5:26
  actually, I think, I think it might have been a phone call and I remember I didn't know
• 5:30
  this story, the, the sui park story. So I was like, you must have been on before me because I was
• 5:35
  like listening and I was listening. I was like, what is this is wild? That's hilarious. That is
• 5:44
  why I was hard to believe. Yeah. And then we're like, so David, tell us about illegal logging in
• 5:50
  Miami. Right. Right. Although, now I guess I have my own story to tell about similar wild. Yeah,
• 5:58
  exactly. I mean, let's get straight into it and then we can talk about your background a little
• 6:04
  and your history. But also what were you doing in in Georgia? This is the state, the US state of
• 6:10
  Georgia, not the, the country of Georgia. Uh, and who were you living with and what was your job
• 6:16
  at the time that you were offered a, a position at the Seattle Times? Uh, Georgia was interesting.
• 6:22
  No family ties. Well, actually, strangely enough, up on my mother's side, if you go back far
• 6:27
  enough, I think I did have an ancestor who was maybe a slave in Georgia, uh, before fleeing the
• 6:35
  United States. But that's another story. Uh, no, no connection. Really? You look very white, David,
• 6:42
  for a descendant of slaves. My mother's from the Bahamas, uh, our family's mixed, uh, my mother
• 6:47
  married a guy of, uh, Russian descent. And I'm, I'm as white as it gets. So yes, that's wow. They
• 6:53
  rubbed the dominant, that dominant Russian gene, just steamrolling all the oppressed peoples of
• 6:57
  the world, including inside your own genome, David. Sorry, go ahead.
• 7:04
  Georgia was a, was a, you know, it seemed great access to nature and, and, uh,
• 7:09
  Atlanta's a fantastic city. Uh, so it was really a decision. It was a, I'd been out of the,
• 7:15
  out of the US for a better part of 20 years. And when I came back to the US, I wanted to be close
• 7:21
  to family. So we all picked Georgia as a place we could all live together and buy houses and
• 7:26
  walking distance and sort of, you know, be together as one big happy family. So we did that.
• 7:31
  It was great. Um, and, uh, so I was there. Uh, my baby daughter was born while we were there.
• 7:40
  Oh, congratulations. Thank you very much. Uh, she's eight months old. So it's just, it's just
• 7:45
  becoming okay. It's what I always say to parents at eight months, uh, as the, like that was for me,
• 7:50
  the first moment at which it started being like, oh, this isn't the worst thing that's ever
• 7:55
  happened to me. But the first eight months, months were pretty much the worst thing that's ever
• 7:58
  happened to me, whatever that's what that, I, that resonates. It was, it's like, it was like,
• 8:05
  it was like, am I going to sleep again in the future? What, like, am I going to be able to? Like,
• 8:10
  it was just, it was like twilight zone and I was, I was just in a constant days. Um, and she was
• 8:16
  exceptionally more colloquy than even the doctors were like, this, this is unusual. But we've,
• 8:21
  we've never seen that. You know, that's bad. Yeah. When the doctor's like, what's up, bro?
• 8:26
  Your baby is annoying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But now she's, as, you know, she's not colloquy
• 8:34
  anymore and curious and, and as cute as, as a, as a thousand puppies. So, um, but, uh, so we were
• 8:43
  there and, um, at the time I was working for a financial analysis news outlet. Uh, and, um,
• 8:54
  then we were in, we were in Atlanta. We were getting settled. We were having a good time.
• 8:58
  I got the offer, uh, and it was a tough call. I got the offer to be a columnist and a member of
• 9:03
  the editorial board at the Seattle Times, which just means, you know, selling the house,
• 9:08
  moving across country, leaving the, the sort of family unit that we had created. You know,
• 9:14
  where my, my parents and my brother and his wife and kid and it was, it was a tough decision,
• 9:19
  but it was also quite a, uh, uh, prestigious role and, uh, and Seattle was appealing. Uh, we,
• 9:26
  you know, very progressive city and we're quite progressive. So we thought it would be great to try
• 9:32
  living there. Uh, and so we, we pulled the trigger and decided to make the move and came out.
• 9:39
  And, uh, I'm sorry, David, what does it mean to get that call? Like, how do you, uh,
• 9:44
  no newspaper has ever called me and been like, would you like to be on the editorial board? Like,
• 9:48
  why are they looking, why are you on their radar at all? Have you applied? Do you know someone?
• 9:53
  What's the, no, I have pushed on. Yeah. I, I, I mean, I had been applying to various places. I,
• 10:01
  usually am sending out my resume here and there, you know, trying to take advantage of opportunities.
• 10:06
  And, um, so I did, I applied. Can you knew that they were looking for a columnist?
• 10:11
  You went applying on spec? Yeah. There was a, there was an ad put out, uh, that I applied,
• 10:17
  applied to. So for the editorial board and a columnist position.
• 10:21
  Hmm. And was there a piece of writing associated with that application? Uh, yes. I think there was
• 10:27
  like a test. There was even something that to me, it was like a series I'd never experienced it
• 10:32
  before. It was a series of, uh, what felt to me almost like, um, like an IQ test, uh,
• 10:38
  followed by an EQ test. Uh, so some of the questions were more analytic based, which makes sense to,
• 10:45
  to understand that you have, uh, analytical capacity and then also questions about your ability to,
• 10:51
  you know, how you might deal in a, uh, uh, social environment, which also makes sense because,
• 10:57
  you know, when you're on the board, you are engaging in topics, sometimes debating them and you,
• 11:02
  I think it's important to have a personality where you, you know, you're not cantankerous and,
• 11:07
  and you, you're a good faith, um, debater. Uh, so actually just explain to people who don't,
• 11:14
  if you don't know the inside, uh, working some of these type of what the editorial board does.
• 11:17
  What does it mean to be a member of the editorial board? Okay. Yeah. Well, um, you'll have a, uh,
• 11:24
  uh, there are multiple members, you'll sit down, you'll discuss issues that are relevant either
• 11:31
  to the city or the, the greater region and you'll publish editorials. Editorials will not have the
• 11:37
  name of the person who wrote the editorial on them because you're speaking with the voice of the
• 11:42
  paper and so part of that means you have to understand the paper's position on several issues.
• 11:47
  So you're not writing your own opinion about this issue. You might not even, your opinion may not
• 11:52
  even map onto the opinion of the paper and a given editorial, but you have to come to understand
• 11:58
  the editorial, the board and the paper's position on issues and then think about what the paper would
• 12:07
  have to say about a particular issue. This could be anything from endorsing a, uh,
• 12:12
  a city council candidate to writing about, um, you know, maybe there's a new policy with regard
• 12:20
  to Orca preservation and whether or not readers should consider supporting that or not.
• 12:26
  I love how Pacific Northwest, that example that you reached for is you're talking specifically
• 12:31
  about Orca preservation. That would be something the Seattle Times would be agitated about.
• 12:37
  Not so much in Georgia. I imagine, uh, your average person at Atlanta is not overly
• 12:41
  exercised on a daily basis about Orca preservation. But yeah, that's a good explanation. So basically
• 12:47
  newspapers have generally, most newspapers have a news division which reports on the news and is
• 12:53
  supposed to be politically impartial and then they have an opinion section where, you know,
• 12:59
  columnists write their opinions, uh, that's on the op-ed page, the page opposite the editorial.
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  And then most people will be familiar with there being an editorial like in the same section as
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  opinion, which is an unsigned opinion of the newspaper and the formal position of the newspaper.
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  And that's what's what you were going to be involved in writing in addition to writing columns
• 13:21
  that would have your name on them about political and cultural issues, is that right?
• 13:27
  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And, uh, so I would say, well, I wrote one one in my first and only column.
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  And it wasn't even about Orcas. You sure weren't about Orcas, David?
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  On size 2020, baby. I wrote an editorial about Orcas.
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  So what happens? You get it, you pack up your house and you drive the moving van like the
• 13:49
  Beverly Hillbillies across the country and you land in Rany, Seattle?
• 13:53
  Yeah, basically, the wife and baby flew out ahead of me. I drove the moving van.
• 14:01
  They went and were doing apartment hunting while I was driving across country camping along
• 14:08
  the way, which was nice. So I got to see Yellowstone, for instance, in places like that.
• 14:14
  It helped save money on hotels and also absolutely gorgeous.
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  And then I arrived by the time I got there. My wife had already found us an apartment.
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  Now there were, there was a decision process in the beginning, which I later ended up regretting,
• 14:31
  but she was asking, you know, where should we settle? Because there's, it's obviously cheaper
• 14:36
  outside Seattle. And I said, well, you know, I've been reading these articles about how, you know,
• 14:40
  a lot of people during the pandemic and with the protest in Seattle, a lot of people have left the
• 14:46
  inner core of the city and the city leadership is making efforts to revitalize the downtown area.
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  And since I'm not a native Seattleite, I think it would be a good, a good symbolic gesture for
• 14:59
  us to take up residence, the newest editorial board member in the heart of the city, right? And
• 15:03
  live in the city, if you're going to be writing about the city, live in the city, right in the city.
• 15:08
  So I said, if there's something available and you can find it, let's get an apartment like
• 15:12
  right downtown, which we did, which was expensive, not too expensive, but, you know, I thought it
• 15:21
  was a good move. And could you break the lease on this apartment? How long was the lease?
• 15:27
  So we wanted to lock in a price because we got the sense and we were right that the price was
• 15:32
  going to go up very soon. So we locked it in for a year and a half. The thing is, when you do that,
• 15:38
  you save money, but you also risk a higher fee when you try to break the lease. And that's what
• 15:45
  you do. And you may have to break the lease. If, for example, you get fine from your job after
• 15:50
  writing one article just as a hypothetical, then that would be problematic. So first day of work,
• 15:56
  what's that, what's first day of work like? Oh, it's great. You know, you're in the room,
• 16:03
  the members are all seasoned experts in the particular areas in which they focus, you know,
• 16:10
  being things like downtown Seattle politics or education. So you're talking to people who,
• 16:19
  you're talking to people about local issues that are that these people, they really, really know
• 16:24
  what they're talking about. And so you're in a very encouraging environment. And it's, I really
• 16:31
  felt the need to try to get up to speed as quickly as I could, reading all the books I could,
• 16:36
  trying to gain knowledge about the local issues. So I would have something meaningful to add to
• 16:41
  these conversations. You know, the first few meetings I was sitting in silence listening to
• 16:47
  local experts debate important topics. And I'm taking notes and studiously writing things down.
• 16:54
  Okay, okay, that sounds interesting. And I caught up to speed on a few issues somewhat quickly and
• 17:02
  was soon, you know, writing my first editorials. The environment was very collegial and friendly.
• 17:10
  And the discussions about these issues were it was always done in sort of, you know,
• 17:18
  it was always civil discourse. It was never, I guess I thought that maybe it could have gotten
• 17:23
  heated, you're debating contentious issues, people might have different opinions, but
• 17:28
  there's always a very collegial atmosphere. Yeah, you're basically the Supreme Court, you know,
• 17:34
  of yeah, you treat each other nice, even, even skillier in Ginsburg, get along and they're
• 17:39
  polite. And so how far, how long have you been in Seattle and how long has your family been in
• 17:44
  Seattle at the point at which you actually put pen to paper for your first column that you're
• 17:49
  signing? Your name is attached to it. I think it was roughly about a month, about a month in.
• 17:56
  So my first month, it was just a couple of editorials a week. And then into my second month,
• 18:04
  I wrote the first, my first column. And had you been noodling on what that was going to be?
• 18:11
  I had an idea what I wanted to write about, which was something near and dear to my heart,
• 18:16
  which was the astronomical cost of child care in Seattle, because believe it or not, the cost of
• 18:22
  child care in Seattle exceeds the cost of putting a kid through college. Right. Sadly, that does not
• 18:30
  surprise me, given the cost of child care in Australia, but yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it was just,
• 18:37
  you know, when I saw that, I mean, some of the numbers I saw were three thousand, four thousand
• 18:41
  dollars a month. Yeah. Ridiculous. We don't have that kind of money. This is, there's cheaper,
• 18:47
  they're, they're available, but you know, so this was something I wanted. I was researching,
• 18:55
  talking to people, different experts, collecting information, thinking about writing something about
• 19:01
  this. But my boss thought and repeatedly nudged me to maybe consider writing about
• 19:10
  a statue that was in the neighborhood of Fremont in Seattle, the statue of Vladimir Lenin,
• 19:18
  which I had never heard about. And who's your boss at this point? Who are you saying your boss is
• 19:22
  the editor of the paper? The sort of the head of the editorial board. Yeah, right. Okay. And the
• 19:28
  editorial board, just for future reference for people, is separate from the publisher. Yeah,
• 19:35
  different people. And I was like, yeah, that sounds that, you know, okay, a statue. I mean,
• 19:43
  personally, I hadn't seen the statue. I find it mildly offensive that there is such a statue,
• 19:53
  and it wasn't hard for me to connect to this story personally because of my family background.
• 19:58
  I mean, my grandparents on my father's side were Russian refugees, and we've lost family members
• 20:04
  as a result of the legacy of Vladimir Lenin. So they were Russian refugees, specifically,
• 20:10
  not from some random famine, they were Russian refugees, specifically from the Bolshevik Revolution.
• 20:15
  No, later than that, World War II arrow. Oh, got it. Okay. And they came and settled in
• 20:19
  way New Jersey. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Okay. And is that why the head of the editorial board
• 20:25
  thought that you would be appropriate to write about the silliness of having a statue of Vladimir
• 20:30
  Lenin in the city? I don't think that that information was known until I wrote it in the column.
• 20:36
  I never discussed it with anybody. So, you know, especially not the personal details about
• 20:41
  family that are in the column. So why do you think he suggested it to you? You know, I honestly don't
• 20:49
  know. Maybe it's, it is a bit of a perennial issue, which I frankly, I wasn't fully aware,
• 20:58
  I had seen some of the earlier stories that have been written about it. But I only ask, I just
• 21:03
  ask because I don't think there's anything fishy going on. I'm not playing anything, but it seems
• 21:07
  like, it seems like a perennial local story that's a bit ham-fisted to try to get a non-local
• 21:15
  to write about immediately. You know, there are just some of those local stories that have been
• 21:19
  that are so well-worn in a city that if anyone who hasn't grown up in that city starts talking
• 21:25
  about them, you can immediately pick them as an outsider. And this, I'm just wondering if this is
• 21:28
  one of those things where everyone in Seattle knows about the fucking Lenin statue. Some people
• 21:33
  think it's a lock. Some people think it's, think communism was great. You know, but everyone's
• 21:39
  been round the horse on this so many times that it's like, I don't know, trying to... It is,
• 21:44
  that is exactly, you're, you're perfectly describing it. I mean, I had people reach out to me
• 21:49
  afterwards who even said, like, listen, your, your column was well written. I don't mind that. It's just,
• 21:57
  you are beating a dead horse. Like, do you realize how many times we've...
• 22:00
  Everything that could have been said has been said. Oh, yeah, thank you for parachuting in from
• 22:05
  Georgia. I'm telling us about how silly our statue is. Yeah, welcome. It's tricky. It's a, it was a
• 22:11
  tricky assignment. Yeah, it's something that I think maybe I, I mean, I had seen the earlier stories,
• 22:17
  I guess I just didn't realize that it was that, that much of a dead horse being beaten again.
• 22:23
  Maybe I think perhaps my boss might have realized that and, and known better than to nudge me
• 22:29
  in that direction, but I don't, I can't really speculate as to why they thought it would be
• 22:34
  a good idea. But it almost feels like, let's try it. Let's try throwing the new guy in the deep end
• 22:39
  and see how you see how he goes. You know, it's getting him up to speed real quick. Or, or, or maybe it was,
• 22:45
  you know, maybe it was just that statue really is offensive and we, we want to raise our voice
• 22:51
  against it one more time. I, I mean, I do find, I do personally find it offensive, but I also,
• 22:57
  as I write in the column, say, I don't think it should be torn down because I believe, you know,
• 23:02
  I'm a democratic proceduralist. I think that, you know, if the community wants to keep it,
• 23:05
  and that's how they feel about it, and they're okay with it. Okay, you know, but at least I can let
• 23:10
  them know how when newcomers come to the city, this tolerant progressive city, and you've got
• 23:16
  a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the middle of it, maybe I can remind people how that feels to some
• 23:23
  of the members of the city. So that's sort of the angle that I took with this. And where is this
• 23:27
  thing? And what is the, how did it come to be that there's a, I mean, yeah, we don't even have to
• 23:32
  get into, I mean, let's just part the whole controversy about statues begin and the re-evaluation
• 23:38
  of statues that's happened over the past, I guess, five years or four years or so. Yeah,
• 23:46
  scandal noted, as I like to say, scandal noted that there are lots of statues of bad white people
• 23:52
  who oppressed minorities, and the question of whether or not their statues should remain. But
• 23:58
  while we're in a mood for re-evaluating the historical contribution of people who we have statues
• 24:04
  to, it would be, it is weird to have a Lenin or a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot or a, or even a
• 24:14
  Che in statue form. So where is this thing and why is it there in the first place and what the
• 24:22
  locals think of it? It's in the neighborhood known as Fremont, which is kind of a, you know, a
• 24:29
  quirky sort of hipster, hippie-esque neighborhood. There are, it was originally discovered in a,
• 24:36
  in a Czech scrapyard by a guy named Lewis Carpenter. He was, I think he was teaching English at the time
• 24:44
  and he saw it, it was about to be melted down and turned into park benches. And he thought to
• 24:49
  himself, well, I should take that thing, I should take it back to these states, which cost him like
• 24:54
  40 grand to do that. And I should stick it out in front of an Eastern European restaurant that
• 25:00
  I want to do, because that'll bring a lot of attention to my restaurant. And later when people
• 25:06
  made remarks to him when he did bring it back and they said, this is Lenin, what do you, he said,
• 25:11
  I don't know anything about Lenin and communism, never heard about that before, which obviously,
• 25:17
  you can't believe that. And then, tragically, he was killed in a car accident and another individual
• 25:27
  then got the statue off the family and it was erected on private property in Fremont in this
• 25:34
  neighborhood. And it stands there to this day. I believe that the family is willing to take,
• 25:40
  I want to say 250,000 for it or best offer. So if it's on public, if it's on private property,
• 25:48
  what's around it? What does it look like? Who, who is looking at it? And what is around it that
• 25:53
  it's on private? It's on a corner right in the middle of the main strip. There's a couple of
• 25:58
  shops all around coffee shops, restaurants and stuff and some of them are playing off the theme.
• 26:03
  So there's, for instance, like a, a, a dumpling shop right next door and they call themselves like
• 26:10
  sourced dumplings or something and then there's like red stock of the shop and they're all kind of
• 26:15
  like, you know, so it's like an open unmarked mini mall in the sense that it's not public land,
• 26:21
  but it is public in that people walk across it. Just this tiny strip, yeah, but the rest of it is
• 26:26
  just the main strip of Fremont, yeah. Weird. And is it ironic? Is it, is it Seattle hipsters like
• 26:33
  thinking this is kind of cute? Like I'm like, wear a Che Guevara t-shirt or? It's both. So some
• 26:41
  people make fun of it. At one point they put a dildo on his head, they put them in a tutu,
• 26:46
  they dress them up properly. I mean, they do all this stuff, but then at the same time,
• 26:51
  this past July 4th, there was, you know, communist stood in front of it and gave speeches and handed
• 26:57
  out pamphlets and I can't tell you how many emails I received when I wrote my column telling me that
• 27:03
  what kind of a person I am for disparaging Lenin, their hero, you know, who never did anything wrong
• 27:09
  and never heard anybody. So there's definitely people who take it very seriously and have undying
• 27:14
  respect for him. Some of them told me to my face that he is their greatest hero and that
• 27:22
  and that whatever violence he did commit was necessary. Right. Again, let's just park the
• 27:32
  let's park the double standard here that you're about to get fired for appointing out not the
• 27:37
  double standard about you're getting fired. I mean, the double standard that people have towards
• 27:41
  the horrors of communism and fascism, which is ultimately what you dipped your toe into and
• 27:45
  and what triggered that hysteria because if a group of neo-nazis, excuse me, I have a call
• 27:55
  as you may be able to tell by my voice and my disheveled to me now, but if a group of neo-nazis
• 28:01
  were going around apologizing, saying anything positive about fascism, then all hell would
• 28:07
  break loose. But you're sort of allowed to gloss over the crimes of the Bolsheviks and, you know,
• 28:14
  to the listener who may not be paying full attention to the history of communism in the 20th century,
• 28:19
  this isn't a statue of Marx, right, which could where there could be some debate. Well, he didn't
• 28:25
  know what he was doing. He was talking about theory. He's the founder of communism, but communism
• 28:29
  has never been truly tried. You know, he wasn't a bad person. He didn't hurt anybody. He's just a
• 28:34
  progenitor of ideas and ideals. His words have been misused or abused. I think, I mean, correct me
• 28:42
  if I'm wrong, but you probably have a different attitude towards a statue of Marx or Engels. This is
• 28:47
  Lenin, not quite Stalin, but let's say halfway between my Huxen's to Halloween ride.
• 28:55
  No, I even said at one point I believe on Twitter that, you know, if this was a statue of Marx,
• 29:02
  like that's completely different. You know, he believed in a democratic organic evolution of
• 29:08
  his ideas into, you know, he was not a fan of, you know, slitting throats and taking heads. So
• 29:16
  there's a world of difference. I'm not a Leninist. I'm not a communist, but with any ideological
• 29:24
  position, I draw the line at taking in his life. And I thought that was something that would not
• 29:29
  be terribly controversial. Right. So the villain, as always, in such situations where the mob
• 29:37
  gets its way is not the actual initial transgression, but the brohaha on Twitter. You write the article,
• 29:43
  the article comes out, you get the inevitable pile on from people saying, yeah, but, but, but, but,
• 29:50
  and you respond how? So similar to the point that you were just making, I got into a discussion
• 29:57
  where I was essentially making the point that, um, listen, if this was a statue of Adolf Hitler,
• 30:03
  nobody for one second would tolerate that because we all know exactly how evil Adolf Hitler was,
• 30:09
  right? And yet we seem to not realize how bad Lenin was. And in my opinion, Lenin,
• 30:18
  psychologically speaking, was even worse than Hitler. This was the point that I made on Twitter
• 30:23
  that blew up. I was very careful to point out that Hitler was obviously worse in terms of the
• 30:28
  actual scale of human suffering that he that he literally caused the number of lives. And the
• 30:35
  uniquely evil nature of industrial genocide. And I'm not blind to that. My own grandfather
• 30:42
  almost died in a concentration camp. I Nazis killed, they cut off branches of my own family tree.
• 30:49
  I'm not, I'm not unaware of the horrors of Nazism. But I do think that in a certain way,
• 30:56
  Lenin's psychology, like, if you like to be technical, like Lenin strikes me as a type one psychopath
• 31:03
  and Stalin is like a type two psychopath. Stalk, sorry, Hitler. Hitler is like a, uh, a jaw-free
• 31:10
  baratheon of, of Game of Thrones, like hotheaded, wild, insane, killing everyone all over the place.
• 31:17
  Lenin strikes me more as like a Hannibal Lecter, highly intelligent,
• 31:22
  unem-like calculating, and there's something more terrifying about that to me. If Hannibal Lecter
• 31:28
  had been a buffoon, if he had, like, an average IQ, he wouldn't be as frightening for one thing.
• 31:35
  That's one part of it. The other part of it is just that, uh, and this was what got me into trouble
• 31:41
  on Twitter was making the argument that, um, that Hitler believed that the people that he targeted
• 31:49
  and he wrote about this in Mein Kampf. He wrote about this at length in, uh, in chapter two of Mein Kampf
• 31:55
  where he's in Vienna and he's sort of, he just, he describes that he's making the transition from
• 32:00
  having this tolerant attitude towards Jewish people to becoming, to embracing anti-Semitism and
• 32:06
  whether or not he actually made this measured, reflected, like, transition,
• 32:11
  or if he's just lying to make himself look like he actually, like, thought about it or he was just
• 32:16
  always a bigot. Um, but that's, that's actually what the title of the book is, right? Mein Kampf is
• 32:21
  not his struggle to take power. It's his struggle against anti-Semitism, believe it or not. And
• 32:27
  he, he comes up, he comes to this conclusion, the way that he arrives at anti-Semitism,
• 32:32
  and this is common, even the great Gregory Stanton, who's, uh, Gregory H. Stanton, who, uh, is, uh,
• 32:38
  the, uh, who heads up genocide watch, and he wrote that famous list of, like, the 10 steps to genocide
• 32:43
  in a society. One of them is you dehumanize the target. You have to start thinking of them as
• 32:49
  not human and usually, like, as a bacteria or a weed or an insect. These, it's common across
• 32:55
  genocides around the world. Hitler starts doing this in chapter two of Mein Kampf. He starts talking
• 32:59
  about Jews as if they're like a pestilence and a virus. And the reason for this is because
• 33:05
  you need to think of other humans as not human so that you can justify what you're going to do to
• 33:11
  them. Because if you think of them as human, it's going to be harder for you to do that because you
• 33:16
  still have some sense of even monsters on the scale of genocidal tyrants still have some sense of
• 33:23
  the value of human life. So they have to kind of separate out and stay like, well, these people
• 33:27
  aren't really human. So we can do whatever we want to them. The difference is that Lenin didn't
• 33:33
  feel the need to do that because he was fine killing innocent people. Even by his own standards of
• 33:39
  innocence, he would, so it's sort of the difference would be like someone who, I guess you could say
• 33:46
  someone who racistly kills somebody who thinks that that person is posing a threat to their
• 33:52
  family, but it turns out they're not. They're innocent. You're just a racist monster versus
• 33:57
  somebody who would murder their own family for sympathy votes to get elected into office.
• 34:03
  There's a difference between these two types of evils and these two types of ways of thinking.
• 34:08
  I think this is an interesting philosophical moral discussion that belongs nowhere near Twitter.
• 34:15
  And I completely understand the your interest in wrestling with it. I don't agree with
• 34:25
  the weighing up of different evils once you reach a certain threshold. I think it's,
• 34:30
  it feels, it feels unsamely and this obviously triggered something in Twitter as well. It feels,
• 34:36
  it feels unsamely when you have, I mean, imagine that Lenin and Hitler had only killed one person
• 34:43
  each instead of many, many millions of people and one's initial reaction to being confronted with
• 34:49
  two murderers was to start discussing whether or not one murderer was like particularly
• 34:55
  motivated by this or particularly motivated by that. It's a kind of a read the room moment,
• 35:00
  right? Where it's like, well, hang on a second. Can we just focus on the fact that they're both
• 35:03
  murderers? Why are we passing details and kind of reading tea leaves about the relative ethical
• 35:10
  standing of each of these two monsters? So just and also obviously on Twitter you don't have the
• 35:16
  opportunity to articulate what you just articulated to me with as much nuance as you just,
• 35:20
  as you just gave it. So what sort of the listener understands what you, what you say that you
• 35:25
  tweeted was, and I'll just read it verbatim so you can hear it. In fact, while Hitler has
• 35:31
  become the great symbol of evil in history books, he too was less evil than Lenin because Hitler
• 35:38
  only targeted people he personally believed were harmful to society, whereas Lenin targeted
• 35:43
  even those he himself didn't believe were harmful in any way. And then you try to save it with a
• 35:51
  doomed follow-up tweet in which you say, Hitler was more evil than Lenin if we're looking at what
• 35:58
  they did to people and that's a pretty important metric for assessing evil. And then you say,
• 36:06
  in terms of death and destruction, the Nazis were more evil and you say, Hitler was more evil in
• 36:12
  terms of how many he killed. So, so I mean, when I think about my experiences on Twitter, I think
• 36:20
  what the hell are you doing? You put people down, put your phone down, how are you even thinking
• 36:27
  that it's going to land when you're trying to compare the relative evilness of two of the most
• 36:34
  toxic and controversial villains of all time? Well, what I would say to that is two things. One,
• 36:42
  I've had nuanced discussions on Twitter before and there was something unique about the situation
• 36:47
  that I think actually relates to Seattle and my position on the board. But also, I'm recapitulating
• 36:54
  there a slight variation on an argument by the Yale historian Tisniger who has written about the
• 36:59
  comparative evils of Stalin and Hitler. People have also compared Hitler and Mao. People have said
• 37:05
  Mao is more evil because he killed more people and other people say no because those were like
• 37:09
  famine and indirect and whatever henna rent made the comparison like this argument of these
• 37:15
  comparisons goes back like 70 years and nobody has ever accused any of those people of being
• 37:20
  Hitler rights. Yeah, right, Twitter is the problem. But these arguments are nuanced and some people
• 37:30
  might say, well, this is like comparing infinities because the evils are such a scale like who can
• 37:35
  even compare them or you could say, well, the psychological motivations behind different types
• 37:44
  of genocidal violence are important to understand and important for us to see how they evolve
• 37:50
  because they could be taking place in society today and they're different and it's important to
• 37:54
  look at that. I completely agree that, you know, Twitter is not the place for that. The reason
• 38:02
  the question of course is, well, then why didn't you know that already? And the answer is, well,
• 38:07
  I've had conversations along these lines. I mean, I've done journalists to work on communism and
• 38:12
  neo-Naziism in the past and genocidal violence in different parts of the world and talked about
• 38:17
  those issues and, you know, people come at you with odd hominem attacks. They'll still look at your
• 38:22
  name. David Joseph and they'll attack you for being Jewish. They'll look at the fact that you have a
• 38:26
  Ukraine, I have a Ukrainian flag in my account. They'll attack me for that and occasionally some death
• 38:34
  threats maybe here and there. This wasn't entirely different thing. This was this was more death threats
• 38:38
  and people telling me to kill myself within within hours than I could possibly keep track of.
• 38:42
  This exploded so fast and so violently that I had never seen anything like it before.
• 38:48
  And did that start from the original article or did that come about once you tried to defend
• 38:54
  yourself on Twitter? So the article I did receive some, I guess, yeah, a hate mail you could say,
• 39:00
  but no, no death threats or anything of that nature. It was when I made the argument on Twitter that
• 39:05
  people immediately started to attack me and that's where it came from. But it was in the most
• 39:11
  bad faith way you could imagine twisting what I said. So for instance, one person responded to me
• 39:17
  saying, well, you know, Stalin did some really good things to to which I replied, okay, Hitler had
• 39:26
  environmental protection programs. So what? Because nothing could possibly balance the evil that
• 39:32
  like what are you what are you talking about? And people saw that and said, oh, look, David is saying
• 39:37
  that Hitler had environmental protection. David is defending Hitler. David is a hillerite. And I'm
• 39:41
  like, no, I'm attacking someone for saying such an argument. It didn't matter. It didn't matter
• 39:46
  because it was so bad faith. Have you ever had ever had a Twitter pile on before?
• 39:52
  About big public. No, the problem was something you tweeted when viral and bad way. Man,
• 39:58
  you just got unlucky that the first one was one where the stakes were so high because many of us have
• 40:04
  been burned several times and just realize how radioactive social media is. How the algorithms
• 40:13
  are designed to amplify things that are going to enrage people or reaffirm people's prejudices.
• 40:19
  That is what they're all about. They're just they're just after they're pretty good. The algorithms
• 40:24
  that mindlessly feeding people what's going to generate likes and clicks and shares. And someone
• 40:29
  saying that Hitler had great agricultural policies is catnip to the algorithm. And so that's just
• 40:35
  going to go far and wide. And to me, it's like, even hearing you try to justify the idea of a
• 40:41
  rational conversation about things that are so nuanced in moral philosophy. And so misunderstood
• 40:48
  and toxic and polarizing in contemporary culture is it's it's it's quaint. It's like someone standing
• 40:55
  in the middle of a thunderstorm like a hurricane inside a port of toilet convention where there's
• 41:04
  shit flying everywhere. And they're trying to like polish a diamond in the middle of a hurricane
• 41:09
  of feces and are wondering why the the diamond keeps getting dirty. That is not a bad that is not a
• 41:15
  bad description. Yeah. I mean, now the thing is like a lot of the noise coming at me was from,
• 41:22
  you know, random accounts that had been created within within days or hours and a bunch of other
• 41:27
  accounts where if you just look at the account, they're obvious they're they're self identifying
• 41:32
  themselves as communist or Leninists. And so there's a lot of that. And I ignored a lot of that
• 41:38
  coming from those individuals. What really caught my attention was that there were several journalists
• 41:43
  with large followings who jumped in on the pile on who who I know for a fact. I mean, they
• 41:50
  must have known better. They must have known that I wasn't saying any of the things that I was accused
• 41:56
  of. And yet they were they were spreading it. And they were adding their own commentary to it. And
• 42:01
  they were one one of them. This is a local journalist whose name I won't repeat but said that my and
• 42:09
  said it in a way that almost seemed that they had reason evidence to believe this. My ancestors were
• 42:15
  actually Nazis who had killed thousands of Jews. And they put this out on Twitter and people were
• 42:26
  engaging with this and with this tweet. So I responded. Do you have German ancestry? No, no, no. My ancestors
• 42:35
  were targeted by Nazis. It's the he flipped it. He took the truth and just flipped it completely
• 42:41
  around. So this is, you know, it was just did you have a talk to him about that about that tweet?
• 42:46
  I quote tweeted the the tweet saying, okay, saying basically, okay, so my ancestors were not Jews
• 42:54
  who were killed by Nazis. They were Nazis who were killed by Jews. And then underneath that,
• 43:00
  I put some of the other sort of instances in the past where this specific journalist has told
• 43:09
  some pretty horrific lies or or smeared people for other reasons that I had found and said just
• 43:15
  for people to see like look, look who you're dealing with this person is not a reliable source.
• 43:20
  Man, I think I can think of there would be that if you have a Ukrainian flag and this person is
• 43:25
  full of Kremlin propaganda about Ukrainians being Nazis that he thinks that your sympathy for Ukraine
• 43:32
  makes you a Nazi. I don't know. Maybe do you have it? Yeah, if you have Ukrainian.
• 43:38
  No, you're right. I believe that the original tweet actually did say that my ancestors were
• 43:43
  Ukrainian Nazis. So yes, you're right. That's probably what triggered it. Right. Okay. Because
• 43:50
  yeah, because the Kremlin is on an anti-fascist campaign in Ukraine. And then you would
• 43:55
  reprimand it for publicly chastising this person who publicly chastised you as colleague,
• 44:01
  or it was part of the ultimate firing. My response to him. So I was there was a review
• 44:10
  of the exchange where there was a determination to be made about what had happened to me.
• 44:15
  And sorry, when did it first come to your attention, David, that this had gone,
• 44:20
  this had essentially spilled outside of the firewall of social media. Because I think what's
• 44:24
  interesting about your case and one reason why I want to publicise it and one reason why I want
• 44:27
  people to back you and to have a spine when things like this happens is not so much that social
• 44:33
  media is going to do what social media is going to do, but that people outside social media in
• 44:39
  the actual institutions of power and authority or what should be, people who should know better
• 44:46
  are being coward by what goes on on social media. And I think we need to build a better firewall
• 44:50
  between social media mobs and quote unquote real life. So a lot of point do you get the
• 44:55
  the inkling that this has started to spill out into real life? Yeah, no, I agree with you. I mean,
• 45:00
  I think that these Twitter mobs should just be ignored and they'll go away within days that
• 45:04
  they'll find another target. It didn't spill out into real life until
• 45:13
  let me think. So it was blowing up. I contacted my boss. I was like, this is different than what
• 45:18
  then the attacks I've received in the past for other journalistic work I've done. This is
• 45:23
  more personalised. And the response is basically, it's Twitter, you know, who cares? And I say,
• 45:31
  what should I do here? What's the right thing to do? And the response was,
• 45:38
  can't tell you what to do with your account. It's your, you know, do what you will, essentially.
• 45:45
  And I was like, okay, okay. But I was quite shaken, the death threats, and there were even references
• 45:53
  somehow. Somebody knew that I do have a baby daughter. One person referenced my daughter.
• 45:57
  Another person was engaging with a family member who doesn't even live on the West Coast.
• 46:01
  And so I was starting to get a little freaked out. And I was shaken. And I was talking to my boss,
• 46:09
  like, you know, expressing this, like, this is really getting to me. And my boss was like,
• 46:14
  just step away from the, you know, just step away, have a glass of wine, try to collect yourself
• 46:21
  and stop looking at Twitter, really. And then that, that the Ukrainian Nazi thing,
• 46:29
  journalist, and the fact that it was a journalist really struck me and I made my response to him.
• 46:35
  So then there was a determination made as, you know, let's see the tweets. Let's see what happened
• 46:42
  looking at the tweets. Okay, you obviously never defended Hitler or any such thing. This is ridiculous.
• 46:48
  This is a bunch of lies. And I said, yeah, I know that. Okay. Well, then in that case,
• 46:55
  you're good. We've got your back. We're not going to stand for a lying Twitter mob coming after
• 47:01
  one of our own, just smearing you in this way. And I was like, okay, thank you.
• 47:08
  And this is happening, how and where is this a fun call with the head of the editorial board?
• 47:14
  Right. And a couple hours later, the same person called me back and fired me.
• 47:17
  This is the same boss that you were talking about earlier.
• 47:20
  Yeah. And the reason given was that I had that Ukrainian Nazi journalist
• 47:27
  that was considered an engagement after I was told just step away and have a glass of wine relax.
• 47:34
  Was that journalist at the same newspaper at the Seattle Times? No.
• 47:39
  No, this is no different person. This is the person who accused man,
• 47:44
  sisters of being Nazis. This is a journalist who runs a blog.
• 47:48
  But it's quite, it's known within certain circles. So I felt the need to respond
• 47:53
  because this is a semi-credible journalist smearing my family.
• 47:58
  Right. But also a semi-credible journalist potentially has connections with your employees,
• 48:05
  publishes editorial colleagues who ran on Twitter whose account was created three hours ago.
• 48:11
  It may not. Potentially. I would say unlikely. But potentially, yes.
• 48:16
  Or at least then more likely to be sympathetic towards that person's legitimacy
• 48:23
  and your misjudgment in amplifying that criticism of you that may would be if you were arguing with
• 48:33
  an account with a picture of an egg on it and three followers. Or maybe not.
• 48:37
  No, yeah, no, no. And somebody might have contacted the paper to say, like, look, look, you know,
• 48:44
  in fact, somebody did contact the paper to stay with my response. You know, my ancestors were not,
• 48:52
  my ancestors were not Jews who were out of my Nazis. They were Nazis who were,
• 48:56
  somebody said, oh, look, he's confessing that his ancestors were Nazis who killed tens of thousands
• 49:00
  of Jews. My sarcasm was read as literal and my reputation was read as a confession.
• 49:07
  And, you know, again, the most bad faith reading imaginable. But somebody contacted the paper
• 49:13
  with this information to say, look, he's saying it. His ancestors were Nazis. And this
• 49:20
  ended back to me as people are saying this without you.
• 49:27
  Right. And then it becomes less about what's true or about what you said. And it becomes more about
• 49:35
  what a lot of people are saying. And so it kind of brings bad, a bad image to the newspaper
• 49:40
  regardless of whether or not you're at fault. You've sort of instigated this thing. And so a lot
• 49:44
  of people are saying, you know, you know, that's a way for people to avoid having to take responsibility
• 49:48
  for their actions. It's just a point to this mystical lot of people saying kind of climate.
• 49:54
  And try to bolster the reputation of whatever they're trying to defend by defending it from
• 50:02
  these imaginary, quite unquote, a lot of people who are saying something that you don't have any
• 50:07
  control over and that the newspaper can't refute. So that second call, when your boss calls you
• 50:16
  back, what time of day is it? And when you saw the number light up on your phone, did you know
• 50:21
  what was going to happen? So, so the night before, after I responded to that, that sland
• 50:29
  of that journalist, the last thing I got was I was told, okay, look, you know, HR says,
• 50:38
  let let the Twitter mob die off. Just let it just let it fade. And I was like, okay, I find it.
• 50:44
  And in the morning, there was a review of the exchange and a determination was made like
• 50:50
  you were complete, you're innocent here. We've got your back. This is a lying mob. You know,
• 50:56
  maybe the conversation you were having was too nuanced for Twitter about the comparison,
• 51:00
  but you're not in any way saying these horrible things. And this is being articulated to you how,
• 51:07
  in a phone conversation from your boss while you're still at home in the morning,
• 51:10
  or are you in the office at this age? It was a Zoom call with me and my boss and another journalist.
• 51:18
  Are you working from home at this day or do you work from the office?
• 51:22
  It's a mixture. On this particular day, I wasn't planning on going into the office some days,
• 51:26
  I do, and some days, and I don't, and on this day, I wasn't. So, I got this phone.
• 51:32
  Sorry, I can't do it because of the delay. That other journalist was brought in, why?
• 51:35
  Brought in because they had experienced a similar pile on, and so they were there to let me know that
• 51:40
  this does happen. It is unfair. You might be freaking out a little bit, but I'm here to let you
• 51:44
  know that we've got your back. You'll get through this. I've been there where you are.
• 51:50
  You'll get through it. I got through it. You're okay. You didn't say any of these things that
• 51:54
  they're accusing you of. This is nonsense. And of course, journalism being journalism,
• 52:00
  the truth is what matters, right? Facts matter, right? So, the fact is, you never said any of these
• 52:07
  things. We looked at everything. It's not true. We got you. Okay. Thank you because I was worried
• 52:14
  about that. No, don't worry. We got you. Okay. A couple of hours later, I pick up the phone,
• 52:21
  effective immediately, et cetera. And when you say you pick up the phone and you're about to call
• 52:26
  you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm just wondering what your side of mind is, like how nervous you are
• 52:33
  at this point. Do you know what he's, they use suspicious that? No, no, no, no, no, no, no idea.
• 52:38
  At all, I, I, I, I naively believed that when I was told repeatedly and repeatedly and
• 52:47
  emphatically that they had my back, I, I took that at face value. And so what did he say to,
• 52:54
  to how did he, how did he pull off the pivot? The reason given was that I had continued to engage
• 53:01
  after I was told not to engage, which is interesting because I was literally told we can't tell
• 53:06
  you what to do. But I was also advised. And to me, it felt like friendly advice because I was
• 53:11
  like, I'm freaking out. I'm kind of worried. And it was like, just have some wine and chill man,
• 53:14
  step away from Twitter. That was then interpreted as a directive, which is instruction. Yeah.
• 53:21
  Right. And I violated that when I told this journalist, when I disputed that my ancestors
• 53:29
  were Nazis, that, that was my, that was my further engagement.
• 53:35
  So what's actually going on? Because I mean, you know, you can get caught up forever in the,
• 53:39
  in the minutiae of what, of why they claim that they got rid of you. But obviously,
• 53:45
  you came in, they had a shit sandwich on their hands on social. And instead of having a spine
• 53:52
  and being like, well, it's just a mob on social media. And he's an idiot for having engaged.
• 53:57
  They're like, this is a firing offense. And we have to turn your life upside down.
• 54:01
  What do you, do you have any suspicion about? Is it the, the editor that your boss changes his mind?
• 54:08
  Is it that the publisher steps in and goes, what the fuck is going on? Is it the shareholders?
• 54:15
  I don't even know if it's a public company or the shareholders get in touch. What do you think?
• 54:21
  My, my guess, I mean, I have no, you know, this is pure speculation. But my guess would be that
• 54:29
  the proper course of action was taken, that was handled the way that it should have been handled
• 54:33
  with the determination and analysis of the evidence. And then, and that was all as it should have
• 54:39
  been. And the conclusion was, you didn't do anything wrong. And, and then everything, that whole
• 54:44
  process was just completely overruled, I think, by the publisher. That's, that's my guess.
• 54:50
  So they did everything the way they should have done it. They came to the right conclusion,
• 54:54
  which is you didn't do anything. You probably shouldn't have gotten into that conversation.
• 54:58
  But we got you here. No, you're fine. We're not going to fire you over a bunch of lies.
• 55:03
  And you don't have any evidence for this, but it's just the speed of the turnaround that makes you
• 55:07
  suspicious. The speed of the turnaround and the, and the, and what I perceive to be
• 55:12
  the deep authenticity of, of, of, of the message that they, that they had my back. I mean,
• 55:19
  it was told to me in a way that was meaningful. Like, right. It was, it was told with,
• 55:27
  with emotion almost. I mean, it was like, don't, don't worry about this. You're fine. Like,
• 55:31
  it was really, so the, so the turnaround from the same person didn't make any sense.
• 55:36
  That it just, and within hours, I mean, that just, to me, that has to be, I don't know,
• 55:43
  an order from on high, perhaps. And again, the one for people who don't know newspapers,
• 55:49
  newspapers, you know, although they are supposed to be notorially independent,
• 55:54
  ultimately they're answerable to the publisher who owns the entire paper and is not
• 55:58
  intervening on a daily basis in editorial decisions. But does, is held liable for whatever the paper
• 56:05
  says, ultimately, and is able to overrule what the editors want to do. So once you're fired,
• 56:12
  what do they leave you? What, what kind of severance do they leave you with? What happens to
• 56:16
  your lease? What happens to your family? What happens to your job? What, like, where are you?
• 56:24
  Yeah, despite the reason being continued engagement, a public statement was put out that if you
• 56:30
  read it, makes it sound like I was fired for the accusations that I was facing for defending
• 56:37
  Hitler or being a Hitlerite or something of that nature with an apology in the message that,
• 56:42
  you know, we're sorry for hurting the community or something to that effect.
• 56:47
  So what happened after that was obviously there's no story in, you know, Twitter, Twitter,
• 56:55
  falsely accused a journalist of being a Hitlerite. That's not a story.
• 56:59
  Journalist fired for being accused of defending Hitler. That's, that's a story. So then the
• 57:05
  headlines rolled out as a result of my firing and, you know, several outlets covered it.
• 57:12
  And the headlines weren't good, you know, because some of them took, they took the worst possible
• 57:18
  angle. The fired for defending Hitler was one that I saw. So facing a steep lease that,
• 57:27
  frankly, we can't afford, just moved here less than two months ago. Not sure where to go next or how
• 57:37
  to afford getting there. Not, I mean, it's just, yeah, as you put it, my world has been turned upside
• 57:46
  down in that sense. And I'm still in the middle of figuring things out, but it's not, it's not
• 57:53
  only am I now without a job and in a situation with my apartment here and all of that, but try,
• 58:00
  the prospects are trying to find a job when I've been smeared in this way at, you know, and any,
• 58:05
  any potential employer looks and says, they Google my name and the algorithm pulls up headlines that
• 58:13
  say that I defended Hitler. It's not, it's not, I mean, that's, that's a curse.
• 58:23
  Well, you can't hide it. You're going to lead with that time. You're going to make it, I mean,
• 58:28
  you're a thing of like, so he's this thing that happened. That was the debate. That was,
• 58:33
  that was an internal conflict that I was having, which is there's, there's basically when you're
• 58:37
  in a situation like this, there are two paths. You know, what I wanted was a very nuanced middle
• 58:42
  of the road path where I could reason my way, you know, that's sort of what got me into trouble
• 58:47
  in the first place as one friend told me. He was like, this is your, this is Mr. Good Faith David.
• 58:52
  This is exactly what you were doing on Twitter, engaging these people, whereas if you would just
• 58:56
  ignore them, you know, like you're, you're, he accused me of being too good faith. And he's like,
• 59:02
  now you're trying to sort of go, you're trying to do it. No, you have two very stark options.
• 59:08
  And it's either go, go dead silent. And maybe in two years, which I can't afford, but maybe in
• 59:14
  two years, you know, you can start applying. Or the other path is, you know, try to tell the story,
• 59:23
  tell the truth, your journalist. So tell the truth, tell what happened to you. Maybe write and
• 59:27
  say about it. You know, like, lead with, lead with that. And, and lean into it because honestly,
• 59:36
  you've been put in a situation where you don't have a third option. That was sort of like the
• 59:42
  bitter truth that he's a good friend. And I didn't want to hear that necessarily. But I think that
• 59:48
  is where I am, unfortunately. I'm so sorry, David. It's just a horrible position to be in with
• 59:54
  the responsibility of a young family at the same time. It's not like you have the luxury of
• 1:00:00
  swanning around, you know, crashing on friends, counters and stuff at this point in your life.
• 1:00:07
  So how are you paying bills? Well, we have to try to find a way. Yeah. So my, my wife has a job,
• 1:00:16
  she still has her job. Me personally, as, as you know, this is a pattern that is, that is
• 1:00:24
  happening with other journalists, but I have a substack now. That's the only means of income
• 1:00:31
  that I have at this point. For many years, I had been, as I mentioned before, I've been already
• 1:00:37
  been writing about neo-nazism and other forms of fascism and communism and genocidal violence.
• 1:00:44
  And because of the nature of the accusation leveled against me, I thought, okay, I'll, my substack
• 1:00:51
  will be about political extremism and fascism and communism. So I'll just, you know, that's a
• 1:00:57
  meaningful subject that has always spoken because of my family background, because of this whole
• 1:01:02
  scandal that's something that speaks directly to my experience recently and over the years.
• 1:01:10
  So that's what the substack is about. That's my source of income right now.
• 1:01:15
  That, that's my only source of income.
• 1:01:18
  Well, hopefully that becomes wildly successful and pays you more than this,
• 1:01:24
  the other times a word of, because that is the future of people who want to actually wrestle with
• 1:01:29
  big ideas outside of the sensorious, hysteria of the mob. Where can people go? Where can people
• 1:01:38
  find you to check out your work and hopefully subscribe? It's called the radicalist.
• 1:01:43
  My last name,
• 1:01:46
  V-O-L-O-D-Z-K-O dot substack dot com. Sounds suspiciously Nazi, I've got to say.
• 1:01:54
  Suspiciously Nazi. Right. Right. David, good luck. Stay in touch. Hopefully you get a few subscribers
• 1:02:03
  out of this. My, I will be one of them. Thanks. And it's the, it's an incredible story. I would have
• 1:02:09
  thought that it was Derriger in 2020 or 2021. I'm, I'm surprised. Yeah, it's happening.
• 1:02:18
  I thought we'd started to, I thought we'd started to quarantine the madness of social media.
• 1:02:25
  And I understand that it's not representative of anything. But there you go.
• 1:02:31
  David, break the leg. Thank you for telling us about it. Good to talk to you.
• 1:02:34
  Thank you. Have a great day.