Premium: When Did Everything Become A Matter of Life or Death?

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So we're back here with Maud Marin and in our full episode we started talking about, you know, the the way that your uh resolution two hundred forty eight and your New York school board just caused so much controversy and so many people were quite invested in basically preventing the conversation. I mean your resolution was basically saying

Hey, I think we need to have a broader conversation with more stakeholders that are affected by our policies around sports and gender identity. And that is a very reasonable approach, but it created such a huge backlash. I mean Why do you think that this like I guess crisis of I don't wanna just say free speech as part of it, but it's also like a crisis of

discussion and consideration. Like why do you think it has reached such a bizarre place? This is more extreme than I mean, I'm I'm in my forties, but I can't think of any other time when things have been just so polarized to where It's not just seen as a difference of opinion, it's always a life or death matter. And and I'm not sure why have we gotten it. Yeah. Yeah. You know I wanna you asked me earlier, Sasha, about like

ha the good faith or trying to ha attribute good faith to the other side, which gets hard sometimes. So I'm gonna give you what I think is a true answer. And it may not sound like good faith, but I really just do think Um, when you don't have facts or reason on your side, you can't tolerate the conversation. Right? Like there isn't a good reason to say

this three year old little boy knows that he's a girl and we're gonna socialize him as a girl up until when he's nine and we're gonna shove him f uh puberty blockers and like by the time he's sixteen or seventeen he's gonna not have a penis anymore. Like that is a tragic and long form abuse and mutilation and d and I just if that if there was a real good reason to do that, you could talk about it. And I don't think there's a real good reason to do that to a young person.

Which is I say that knowing that there are adult trans people who are who report being truly happy with their lives and happy with their transition and But I just don't I think if you had facts and reason on your side, you could tolerate a conversation. And I find that so I found that about academic merit. I found it about COVID school closures. I find it about trans.

ideology in our schools and trans healthcare. It's like I'll I'll tell you what my opinion is, but then I'll back it up with I'll you know with the the the facts and the data and the analysis that's out there and the other side won't do that so they resort to calling you names and making sure that you're pilloried in the court of public opinion. There may be a more generous and way to look at it, but that In my gut that's what I think it is.

I think you're right, but I think how they probably square it is there are some things that you really shouldn't listen to because um they're almost contagious and we really have to be very careful for people Not me myself, this person is thinking. I wouldn't be um I wouldn't suddenly start thinking it, but other people would. And these are the things that I think people the general consensus that people think is that there are some terrible ideas

like Hitler's Mein Kampf. Right. They're just so awful that they shouldn't ever be given the light of day. Okay. And uh so therefore we can't put them in front of anybody's ears and they're thinking I myself could handle it but most people can't which is a very derogatory way of Right. Feeling about humans in the first place. But secondly, w back to Sasha's point.

It's this idea that everything is life or death, rather than I just disagree with you over masks or I just disagree with you over how to handle, I don't know, grades in school. Everything is suddenly in this extraordinary soundbite culture, everything has turned into Mein Kampf. That it's it's in an extraordinary escalation of importance of every given issue.

Well that would be Stella, that is a much more generous interpretation and one that's kinder to the other side than what I than what I was giving. But I will say to you that I think masks is a good example of the lack of reason in it because Five minutes before COVID hysteria hit

n no one was saying you should wear a no one in New York City really almost you know, okay, maybe there's an exception here or there, but people didn't walk around with masks. I have a cold now. Like people ha y people had colds all the time and some went to work and some didn't.

And then when COVID hit it was like if you didn't wear your mask, you were a bad person that was probably gonna kill the people in your community and kill the people like you wanna kill the grannies. You wanna kill the grandmas, you wanna kill the kids. People were My school elementary school would send home notes saying And I felt like, you know, I was with this band of p I just got at a certain point I was like, I'm not wearing a mask anymore, it's ridiculous and they would

send notes saying if you are dropping off your kid, of course they can't compel you to wear a mask as you're walking down the street, but they wanted you to start wearing a mask before you turn the corner onto the street where the school was And they put it in print absurdly to sit because they wanted everyone masked. And I was like, No, I'm not doing it. I won't mask. But that I understand with the trans stuff where people feel like

Okay, even to to say that trans isn't real is like to deny someone's identity to to think that that's where you are like some ideas are so outside the pale that you can't even discuss them. But with masking it was like No one ever did it. Then all of a sudden it was a life or death thing. Then everyone got over it. Like the people that were crazy mask people, they hit their peak mask moment too, and then they just stopped doing it and they stopped wearing masks and the so it was like

It was part of that thing that we saw in the the humming and the the thing. It's like It's this weird group dynamic thing where you become part of the group of the good people. You wear a mask. You never dead name people. You, you know, reject all external forms of merit in a school because it's part of white supremacy culture. You know, it's like you're part you want to be part of the good group. And that requires two things. Like one, adopting all the shibbolus of your good group.

but also casting constant stones at the you know at this shamed woman who needs to be driven out, you know? And it's like it's on steroids around all these different topics.

Can I tell you something really interesting that happened to me? It was a personal experience. Like I I used to be a very big like Colbert Report and the Daily Ship and all of these people. Like th those weren't my jam. And Uh what's the British guy's name? Uh the British comedian. Yeah. This week with John Oliver. Okay, John Oliver. Yeah. So anyway, I I would watch particularly John Oliver and what he did a really good job of.

Is showing the absolute craziest, most horrible, bizarre fringe ideas coming out of the right. And being kind of in that mind space all the time It put me in this position to where whatever's opposing that craziness, sign me up. Yeah. Like whatever it is, I don't need to know much about it. As long as I don't ever end up there, that's fine.

Then when I started doing this gender work and I realized that the messages we're hearing about support trans kids and they know who they are, I realized that all of it was BS. Yeah. And then it made me understand like the formula of this show, the John Oliver show, the Colbert report, whatever.

Is actually so skewed that your entire audience is gonna have a warped perception of everything. So I think there are also ways that Like the the media creates this genuine fear that like everybody on the other side is at risk of slipping into some horrifying thing. And so you just you rally with your people and you're like, I don't care what your policies are, give'em to me. I just want to be opposite of that. Such a good point.

Yeah. And it's just so extremist making. It's so dangerous. And if you never engage with like intelligent people who have valuable arguments from the other side. You can easily kind of mischaracterize them. And I mean somebody you you've run for office and you're in politics like This is the name of the game. How do you combat that in your political career?'Cause this is actually a really messy problem, I think, in America.

I think a huge, huge, huge part of it that we as a culture a society we don't know how to grapple with is social media. Because you're a hundred percent right, Sasha. You're like, I'm on team good, that's team crazy bad and I don't want anything to do with them. But what we get, but that used to be, I mean, John Oliver and John Stewart and those guys, like, that's already cable television, so it's a select audience.

most Americans used to watch like one of three broadcast networks and they were all kind of the same anyway. You know, it's like we used to have a shared source of information. We don't anymore.

And I think that's why you get like now we have like the there was a culture of um respectful dialogue, even with people yelling at each other, but like when when when candidates lost an election, the concession speech was always about I will help so and so in any way and that you know, they you always used to do that like reach out to the other side. Now you have people posting the most nasty things about their opponents and these horrible things and it and the sides get like deeply polarized.

It's a real loss to not have a a common culture where you say, We had an election, you won, I lost, but now I'm here to support you and help you because we all work for the American people or for the true you know, like that slipping away. slipped away like very rapidly in a way that's super bad because we are now deeply pitted against each other in this way that's like I mean, I grew up with like a dad who voted Republican and a mom who voted Democrat and they, you know, it's like

Yeah. They would joke that they cancelled each other out at the you know, on election day and that was that and then you'd just go eat a family dinner and it wasn't such a big deal. Now you have these people that are literally at each other's throat.

over politics in a way that feels to me and I think to a lot of people like fundamentally different than how it was um twenty five years ago, you know, bef twenty pre Twitter, Facebook, b pre the out people are getting their information certainly around trans issues.

the for instance, the boxing stuff at the Olympics, I was talking to a woman who I think I mostly agree on about a lot of things and she was saying to me, um Oh, but you know, it was like testosterone that they were testing and that it and I was like, No, it was like a chromosome test that they had the legal right to appeal and they didn't appeal and it and she and I probably get information from a lot of the same sources.

But she was like convinced that maybe they weren't being quite fair to this boxer, you know, and I thought, My gosh, this is someone who I'm like probably agree with about ninety eight percent of stuff. The people who are being fed this idea that this poor Algerian woman is being like hounded by these terrible people who are calling her names because of the way she looks. They're just consuming a totally different diet of information.

And it makes it really hard to have that kind of conversation because you've just both It's like the Tower of Babel, but for information, not language. You know, you're just swimming in different pools of information. And so how can you talk to each other? Because you're like you have these different the wholly different you know, information feeds going into you day and night and you're not you're not there's no common ground to have the conversation.

I agree with you. Um i i it was it was an extraordinary conversation but I I I do feel I've I've massively reduced my time on Twitter and so I'm casting around for looking for information on other sites if you follow me. Because, you know, you like you you like reading what's going down and uh like I go on to Quora a lot these days. But I presume because of algorithms, we're always fighting algorithms. Uh y you know what I mean? So my ability To get out of an echo chamber.

is massively reduced. How to get out of an echo chamber. We've got to get somebody on one day. That's great. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Because I don't want to be in an echo chamber. I'm actively seeking not to be in an echo chamber, but I just want to read I I look at my husband and he's just reading like let let's say his sites and I'm l reading my sites and it it just it's it it's a real modern day problem, but it really is, you know.

Yeah. But thank you, Maud. That was uh that was really, really interesting. Stella and Sasha, thank you so much for having me on. It was great to talk to you both. Lovely. And I love your glasses. They really brightened up our our visuals today. Th this is like our modern um conundrum. People either love them or hate them. Love'em. We're on the love'em side. Thank you. Thank you. Great to talk to you both. Thanks, William. You too. Thank you for being a premium subscriber of our podcast.

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