Going to post a bit of transcript from Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn discussing this on their podcast (paywalled, sorry!), where he was the counterpoint to the heretic Graham Linehan.
They discussed Graham at length to start with, including this bit:
Walter Kirn: I watched that little clip of him talking, and you know you’re not looking at an ideologue and you know you’re not looking at a bully. You’re looking at a comedy writer with messy hair. How can I put it?
Matt Taibbi: In a goofy sweater, yeah.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, a guy who’s been bullied. Not some uber mensch Nietzsche fascist who wants to get down on the poor weak outsiders of society, but someone who is in a sense one of the outsiders, because that’s where comedy comes from.
Matt Taibbi: And so he’s sort of exiled to the wilderness now.
Then they went on to cover Gladwell, and showed his performance at the Munk debate. Some of the following discussion:
Walter Kirn: Because all Malcolm Gladwell represents, as I say, is a mid-wit weathervane on top of the barn of The New Yorker and The Atlantic issues that go unread, and he is signaling at that point that this is the discourse which will appeal to the largest audience. He didn’t quite realize that he was in Canada and that he was dealing with a kind of higher level of, I don’t know, verbal and rhetorical athletics than he’s used to. He thought he could do what you can do at a party for The New Yorker in Manhattan.
Matt Taibbi: And just bully people.
Walter Kirn: And just bully people. But now having reached his other tipping point, he now realizes that it’s time to do a tactical retreat in order to hold the audience. But once again, what I can’t stand and what I think is your point generally, is that when you drive people out of the spaces in which they feel they’re not being told the truth, you generally drive them in a sense down market. Okay.
If the elite groups don’t police themselves, and if they start not telling the truth, and if they start becoming subject to ideological fashion and self-censorship, you drive people to new places. Those places tend to be less elite. They tend to care less about passing in high society. You go from The New York Times to the New York Post, you go from the New York Post to the Daily Mail, then they come after you with the social opprobrium, that your populist, that you’re deplorable, that you’re hanging out with the unwashed and the stupid and the uneducated and the less expert because they drove you out of those spaces, and now they can demean you for being less socially, intellectually exalted ones, and that’s always how it works.
Matt Taibbi: It’s absolutely like a two-step, right? First, they broadcast their non-factual version of reality that over time people can’t accept. They want to. Right. This is one of the things you learn in media is that people, if you have a big organization behind you, people want to believe you. They tune in and they want to trust you. They were used to that instinct once upon a time, but when they can’t anymore, as you say, they’re driven out. Now, I showed that clip because this is what happens when you leave the nest, is they start throwing ick on you. You are a racist. You are a conspiracy theorist. You lack standards. You’re not good enough for the prestigious institutions. That’s what the whole thing about mispronouncing my name was about. Right.
Walter Kirn: Right. And mostly what you are, mostly what you are is a class traitor. Mostly what you are is someone who has abandoned the world of the educated, the expert, the thoughtful, the good, the moral, the liberal, whatever their synonyms are for virtue. Mostly what you are is somebody who took all the good things from that world and hung out and passed in it and made money in it, and now have betrayed it like it was a fucking team sport, which you didn’t realize. You thought it was a principled vocation, if not a profession, journalism, I hesitate to call it a professional, a habit.
Matt Taibbi: Right.
Walter Kirn: But now you are the black sheep. Now you’re the person who took the goodies, went to the schools, hung out at the parties, and spat it all out in favor of stupid people.
Matt Taibbi: In favor of stupid people with backward beliefs. Right.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. Who are so unconscious that they’re controlled by foreign dictators without knowing it.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Right. Right. They’re not even aware of what dupes they are for the foreign manipulation, and so having kicked you out of the prestigious institutions, that’s what Malcolm calls them, you’ve now moved down market. You’re now online, and now that place, that cesspool is what becomes heavily policed. Right.
Walter Kirn: They make you homeless, and then they charge you with being dirty.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Right. I mean, the metaphor works. It’s like being kicked out of the high class neighborhood in New York, and suddenly you’re in the place where broken windows policing actually happens.
Walter Kirn: Yes.
Matt Taibbi: And-
Walter Kirn: And they’re the police.
Matt Taibbi: And they’re the police, and so it’s a no-win situation. You are in this world where all you want to do is just not lie, right, but for that, at the extreme end of that, you end up like Graham Linehan. You end up with no job, no friends and arrested, right, but for other people, there’s lots of other consequences too. Politically, their point of view isn’t expressed anywhere.
Walter Kirn: Malcolm Gladwell will never have trouble in an airport anywhere in the world.