Yasmin Nair is a writer, cultural critic, and longtime contributor to Current Affairs. She also seems to possess an uncanny ability to predict political events before they happen: she warned that Graham Platner was headed for trouble before his campaign imploded, declared that “Kamala Harris Will Lose” when the prevailing wisdom had her winning, and foresaw the failures of DACA and the growing problem of plagiarism in publishing. (She has also written presciently about the political cult of personality, the weaponization of trauma, and the ways trauma discourse can be absorbed into capitalism.) Yasmin has been highly critical of the left for failing to confront problems of sexism, for example in her article "Cesar Chavez and Why the Left Is a Pit of Misogyny."

So, what does Nair see that everyone else misses? She joined editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson for a conversation on political wishful thinking, the repeated failures of liberal and leftist politics to grapple with misogyny, and the left’s tendency to mistake image for substance. The interview has been condensed and edited for grammar and readability. 

More of  Nair's work can be found at yasminnair.com. 

Nathan J. Robinson

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of you writing for Current Affairs. It was the March-April 2016 edition in which you made your debut. Volume One, Issue One. This makes you and me the longest-serving Current Affairs writers. 

Yasmin Nair

Wonderful. I am so proud. Thank you. I'm really honored to be part of the team.

Robinson

Can you believe we've lasted this long?

Nair

Oh man! In this world of publishing, about which we will talk, yes, it's a bloody miracle.

Robinson

Well, we're going to discuss a few things today, and one of them will be the world of publishing, the writing economy, and the decline of attention spans and that sort of thing. But first, in addition to being our longest-serving writer, you are kind of the Current Affairs in-house prophet. And I say this because you have a series of articles that you've done that have weirdly predicted—not "weirdly" when we understand why you're coming to the conclusions you're coming to, but certainly you have said that things were going to happen that other people didn't think were going to happen that then happened.

So people can make a lot of money on the prediction market by just like reading Yasmin's blog and placing their bets accordingly. Because you wrote in August 2024 an article for your website called "Kamala Harris Will Lose,"  You made a few points. You said, "Here are some major reasons why I think Kamala Harris will lose. Harris stands for nothing." You said that Democrats were taking voters for granted and gave the example of the Uncommitted campaign. But I think what's really important here is that you were pointing this out at a time when Kamala Harris was ahead of Donald Trump in the polls. It was right at that moment where, post-Biden dropping out and everyone rallying around her, there was a lot of enthusiasm. She had just picked Tim Walz. It was kind of a bold choice of running mate, and people kind of liked him.

And you rained on the parade somewhat and said, I'm sorry, but if you look at this closely, there are reasons why she's not going to win. I think this is worth revisiting, and you revisited it more recently in a review of Kamala Harris's memoir. I want to ask you, and this will be true of the other topic that we discussed with your article on Graham Platner, which also kind of predicted his downfall, how it is that you were able to notice things that were being missed and what you think it takes to break through people's excitement and the social consensus that's developing and analyze things in this way. I think that one of the things that I see in your writing is a kind of understanding of human psychology and the way that people lie to themselves, or suppress, or overlook the obvious. That there are big obvious things, like the fact that if you don't pay attention to the people who care about Palestine, you're going to disgust a huge part of the people you need to vote for you. But there is a way in which denial forces that obvious truth off the radar of people in this moment of enthusiasm around the Harris campaign.

Nair

 I would like to say that I have some kind of magic crystal ball, but of course I don't, although I do consider myself a bit of a good witch...

That denial has to do with the dehumanizing of millions of people. I have an article coming out titled "Why Did You Think We Wouldn't Care?" where I posed a question: Why did you think we didn't care? Because you thought that the only people who would care about Gaza would be, say, a few thousand people in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Yes, that's what you thought. What you fail to understand is that we live in a world where, if you'll forgive the cliché, we are all deeply interconnected. We are not just people who have Palestinian friends, perhaps. We don't have to have Palestinian friends to care about what happens in Gaza.

I was looking at an image of a woman in, I believe, South Carolina, and she was probably—again, I'm going by looks alone—in her 70s, and she was standing outside a supermarket, ringing a bell and blowing a whistle to warn people coming into the grocery store about what was lying in wait for them in terms of ICE. This was a white woman in her 70s who probably is not hanging out with—and I say this as someone who was practically raised in Indiana. I know that woman. I know what her life is like. I know who she hangs out with. But she cared, and I think the Democrats and too many leftists don't really understand what motivates a lot of human beings. It's not political affiliation necessarily. It's not "my best friend is Latina" or "my best friend is Palestinian." This is how people respond.

I'm watching white men in Garfield pajamas and white T-shirts rush out at 6 a.m. on a cold winter morning, screaming at people to "Get the fuck out of my neighborhood! Don't you dare do this!" I'm watching all of this. I'm watching a woman in a fuzzy red bathrobe, also at seven in the morning, just photographing and recording what's happening in front of her. These are not necessarily people who have Palestinian friends and Latino friends and so on. I have to say, you know this about me, I think, and I think most of my readers know this about me, I don't like human beings.

Robinson

Well...

Nair

I detest human beings. There's nothing but wells of deceit and betrayal, and yet in the last two years, I have just been astonished, and my head and my heart have been broken over and over again as I watch strangers helping strangers. Because I'm also not a humanist, and I will never be a humanist until the day I die. But I do think that there is—

Robinson

You seem to be a reluctant humanist here because I feel like your cynical view here is being eroded!

Nai

Man, I have no idea. I'm like, who are you, human beings? I feel like an alien. I always feel like an alien. I always think, "Oh, these people are absolute rubbish. They're going to ruin themselves." And yet, over and over again—

Robinson

And yet.

Nair

And yet! Look at what's happening. ... I think we are living in an extraordinary period of time. There's been an acceleration of political consciousness, and it may not be that people are reading Gramsci together, and again, this is where I think the left fails constantly. It doesn't understand that, for instance, Gramsci's work did emerge from a very close analysis and a participation in politics that I think many leftists actually don't understand, and that is why I think they miss the obvious signs of, well, why did you think we wouldn't care?

Robinson

You're certainly right that one of the things that I found over the last 10 years is that it is impossible to be completely cynical about people. We've founded this little tiny independent media project that survived because there are all these wonderful people who are willing to give a little bit of money because they understand the value of a thing, and you've got all these people out in the in the streets fighting against ICE agents, and it's been a very encouraging trajectory in some ways.

But I want to get back to this idea of how to perceive, how to understand what's really going on beneath rhetoric and bubbles of enthusiasm. The other big example here was, first off, you writing a piece on Graham Platner early on, in which you said that he seemed a very kind of typical juvenile straight man. And you told me, I remember, over and over and over again, "Something's going to come out about this guy." You were saying to me he's going to have a MeToo. And you said this when you couldn't write this publicly because you can't make an accusation without the evidence. You didn't have the evidence. But you kind of understood. 

Then some people were saying, "Well, there wasn't any evidence back then." And it's interesting because it relates to what you just said. You said, "I know this woman; I know what this kind of woman is like from little things about her that I can see." And it's not stereotyping exactly, but it's like extrapolating, or seeing what some things can tell you, what you can deduce from one answer that Kamala Harris gives to one question and what that tells you about her. Or what certain things tell you about Platner. So tell me a little bit more about, in the Platner case, how you can use little small things to kind of understand more deeply what someone is like?

Nair

Well, with Platner—and to be fair, there was actually a longish article pretty much in praise of him. This was actually at the time when I was even already suspicious of him, but there was a line in there; I remember someone said, "Someone has said that something will come out." And I remember at that time I thought, "Yes, I know that it is going to come out." So it just confirmed what I already thought.

What my suspicions of him were built on, fundamentally, were my many years of experience in organizing and in academia. I know this dude. I know the fucking left dudes. I know left dudes. I know how pathetic leftist men are about masculinity. The left is not a wellspring of virile masculinity, and that's fine. This is why we love the left, because you don't have to be this poseur; you don't have to be this army guy. But that being said, a lot of leftist men and academic men have a real sense of inadequacy around their masculinity, and what I saw very clearly was, first of all: I've met so many Graham Platners. I may or may not have slept with a couple of Graham Platners. I'm not sure. My record goes back too many decades for me to remember. But I have met them. I know what they're about; I know the swagger, I know the lies, and I know what lies beneath, as it were.

So there is experience, but there was also what I saw in the general discourse around him—the constant erasure, the constant rush on the part of many, especially left writers, to beat the rest of us away to say, "Shh, shh!" I was on this podcast with our friend and comrade Briahna Joy Gray, and I remember saying it's as if they're constantly saying to us, "Shh, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up! Don't bring this up!" And that there were whispers and innuendos was not just what drove me to make a very clear assertion that this man would be trouble, but also knowing that this is the history of what happens on the left.

I have lost count quite literally, Nathan, of how many times I witnessed or had to support people who've been hurt by people like Graham Platner. This is just a long, never-ending story on the left. The Cesar Chavez story.

Robinson

Well, I wanted to ask about that.

Nair

We can talk about it. The Chavez story is exactly where the Graham Platner story will always end up. That is kind of the end point of Graham Platner, as it were. And what we owe ourselves on the left, and not just women, but men as well, moving forward is to be really cautious about how we silence each other about the possibilities of men like Graham Platner. Graham Platner never had to happen. He was basically a construction. I called him a Ken doll at one point, the GI Ken doll.

Robinson

You say that because he was recruited in part because of his aesthetic. So the people who went out were looking for that. [Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times said] they were originally looking at a lobster farmer, but they couldn't get a lobster farmer, so they settled for an oyster farmer.

And as they found the guy, they said they knew within 15 minutes he was their guy, and it was because he could speak well in the Bernie Sanders register, but he's tattooed—and they didn't sort of check what the tattoos were, but he was tattooed—and he had that voice, the gravelly voice.

And they just saw the image of, "Imagine this guy being the spokesperson for democratic socialism." He's such a real American man. He's a combat veteran and then didn't think, "Wait, hang on. A lot of combat veterans have had serious trauma. A lot of them struggle with with drug and alcohol problems. There's a lot of toxic masculinity in the military. We might want to learn a bit more about this guy before we pick this guy." They said they knew within 15 minutes!

Nair

It was ridiculous. Now, I also want to credit a podcast I listen to called "The Press Box," which tends to be more liberal than I care for. But one of the co-hosts is a man named Joel Anderson, and I think he put it beautifully when he said, "They went looking for Jason Momoa, and they found Jason Momoa." Now, Nathan, you know how fond I am of Jason Momoa.

Robinson

I know that about you and Jason Momoa.

Nair

If people don't know, they can go to my website and look for articles on Jason Momoa. I was delighted by that, but I think that's also correct. Jason Momoa is what they were looking for. They were looking for basically a GI Joe doll in human form, and yes, they should have asked questions. And now, of course, what's interesting to me is that Morris Katz, for instance, is desperately trying to reinvent that whole story. He did a whole interview with Ezra Klein, who is the king of reinvention. If you have a crappy past and you need to rewrite it, go to Ezra Klein at the New York Times and do a long-form interview with him, where you can just erase everything you did. Morris Katz is now trying to pretend that he was just doing everything he did because he was concerned about social justice, blah blah blah. Bullshit!

This is the part of left politics we also have to understand, which is that increasingly left politics is less about bringing forth and making manifest our ideology and more about creating an entire influencer economy. So Morris Katz, for instance, is not acting politically. I'm sure he believes—he worked with Mamdani, for instance. Fine. I'm sure he believes in all these basic principles of social justice. But Morris Katz fundamentally is a consultant. That's what he is. He's a consultant/influencer. He's looking for the money in all of this. He is not really looking for what do the people of Maine need? For instance. That's not what he cared about.

Also, I'm writing this capstone essay revisiting Graham Platner for Current Affairs, and I'm doing a series of articles before that as background on what happened. If you look at the whole mess that happened that led to Graham Platner being chosen, you realize there were just these little hives of consultants, really. They were not talking to Mainers; they were talking to each other. They literally said, "What are the boxes we can tick off? Oh, Platner ticks off all of them." And actually, he didn't. You should have asked him, "Hey, you're a veteran. Oh, you had a Reddit account. Can we look at the Reddit account? Do you have tattoos?" They even admitted that they didn't want to spend the money. This is what they claim now. "Oh, we just didn't want to spend the money to do an intensive screening process." So you have to then wonder what is the left? What does the left really want?

Robinson

But you're talking there about a kind of broader problem than Platner, which is that instead of the left being a mass participation political movement out of which leaders emerge organically, if it becomes small groups of people thinking about image and who's going to do well on Instagram, that becomes a huge problem. It sort of builds a left on a kind of deception, which is you're finding the next celebrity. I don't know if you've seen the kind of scandals with Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers, who also was someone who's really built up as the next figure of the left, and then behind the scenes there are some pretty serious allegations about the way he ran the organization, and we should care a lot about how people interact with other people behind the scenes and not just about how they look when they're at a podium and how they sound. It matters how they treat other people.

And Chavez is the perfect example of it. Chavez is an icon, right? He's painted in all of these murals. All the streets are named after him. He's someone that so many leftists want as an as an icon. They want this farmworker taking it to the bosses and fighting for the workers. But then Chavez is a very nasty anti-immigrant demagogue and also a misogynist, which is an open secret in the movement, and then everyone has to suppress that because we want the image.

Nair

Right. A misogynist and a man who regularly had young women, women as young as 13 and 15, come to his office. And all of this was in broad daylight. People saw this happening, and people chose to keep quiet. The accusation that we, you and I and many other people on the left, often have to face is from many other "leftists" who will tell us that, "Well, you're just about purity politics," and my response to that is always, "It's not about purity; it is about integrity."

My question for a candidate candidate is not, have you been relentlessly faithful to your partner? Do you recycle? Whatever. It's not that. It is, "What are your leftist principles, and do you hold to them?" The problem, I think, and this is a massive problem for the left, is that the left has failed to understand that issues relating to gender relations and immigration are actually left issues. And I will say Bernie Sanders, when he was contacted by Kamala Harris when she first began her bid for the presidency, what was the first thing he said? Please don't just talk about abortion. Bernie Sanders thinks about immigration in a way where he posits—he's very particular—that if we look at immigration, we have to look at American workers. So what does that mean? Bernie Sanders does not think of immigrants working the fields as workers.

So abortion, for instance, is a labor issue. A woman who is not allowed to have an abortion is then doomed to a life of poverty, often, because in this country, abortion is not denied to well-off women with private health insurance. It is poor women who cannot afford private doctors, who have to then take on the burden of raising a child for at least 18 years and being responsible for that human being, who then see a decline in their earnings potential and so on.

So abortion is a labor issue. Immigration, or immigrant labor, is a labor issue, and yet what is fascinating to me is how often people on the left will only talk about the workers on the other side of that. Who are the workers being threatened by immigrants coming in for cheap wages? Well, hello, excuse me. Are you thinking about the workers picking produce? The workers who are now, as we know, denied handwashing facilities, bathroom breaks—bathrooms, period? Which is why now I can no longer eat a bloody fresh cucumber. Not that this is the worst thing to happen, but you see, what I'm trying to get at is, over the last many, many decades of the "left," we have seen a steady stream of denial of what really counts as labor and who counts as a worker, and we are now at the point where women of a certain class have lost access completely to abortion and where workers are being exploited even more than they were 20 years ago, if that was ever possible.

Robinson

And so you're pointing there to, I think, something that many people on the left will be a little uncomfortable hearing, but it's important, which is that someone like Bernie Sanders, as much as I found his 2016 campaign important and inspiring, is someone who has always been uncomfortable talking about abortion and immigration and has tried to say, well, let's put those issues aside. It's not that Bernie Sanders is pro-life, I don't think.

Nair

No.

Robinson

It's not that he's anti-abortion. It's that he is a sort of—and I wouldn't even quite call him a class reductionist. He kind of started in the civil rights movement. But he's always been someone who wanted to talk about Medicare for All and the minimum wage and not about abortion and immigration.

Nair

And who the fuck can even have minimum wage if they are pushed out of the workforce? Again, a refusal on the part of the left to even think of women as workers. So again, I'm repeating myself, but I think it bears repeating: abortion is a labor issue.

Robinson

Well, I just want to read a little passage from your Cesar Chavez essay, where you say towards the end,

"The prevalence of misogyny and sexual abuse has an effect on activism. When a leftist organization will not confront either, it makes itself vulnerable on at least two fronts. It reduces its organizing capacity and strength by disempowering and humiliating its own members, and it makes itself vulnerable to the right by sweeping matters under the rug and silencing victims and their advocates. People often wonder where the women of the left might be, as if this is some great mystery. The truth is awfully mundane. We really hate working alongside men who keep leering at us and wondering when we might sleep with them, or who treat us as mere minions, only there to create the PowerPoint presentations and clear the chairs and dishes once the menfolk are done with their grand speeches. When women who speak up are silent, they often are told it's because their revelations will only harm the movement."

 

That is precisely what happened to the United Farm Workers, of course. And the United Farm Workers famously collapsed. And so what you're pointing out is that it's first and foremost a moral issue. Abuse is inherently wrong. But you're not going to build a successful left if you don't scrutinize the gender dynamics within your organization and root out the kind of abusive practice. We really need to study the Cesar Chavez example because this is a guy who was a child sexual predator, who nevertheless became a revered icon of the left, even though all of this was known. How would that be suppressed?

Nair

All of it was known. I hesitate to bring it up without a lot of context because I don't want to be seen as blaming women, but one of the issues is that women on the left choose to remain silent as well, and part of that is because they are truly disempowered. And then if you're kicked out of your leftist organization—this was, I think, what Dolores Huerta feared the most. She had a political agenda, and she feared not being able to put it into place because if she raised the issue, she would literally be thrown out. And this is what many of his victims have said. "If you say anything about this, I will see that you're kicked out of the organization."

So yes, there is that problem, but there is also the problem that I have encountered even personally among women, which is that women will turn around and say, "No, we can't talk about this." There is an undercurrent of sexuality on the left where there is, and I know this is going to sound weird, but my God, it's true—there is really a sense on the left that left men need to be allowed to expend their masculinity to do their work. I remember once, and this is admittedly an online conversation, but I've also had similar conversations offline where I talked about this tendency on the left of men abusing women and using us basically as minions or sexual objects, and a woman actually rose up and said, "You don't understand. It's so complicated. We have to excuse them because it's so complicated." And I was like, "Complicated? What's complicated? He needs to put his dick into someone every now and then to get his blood boiling?" I think what we need is a culture on the left where a woman feels free to look at a man and say, "Take your hand off my ass, or I will cut it off along with that other appendage."

We need that kind of culture. And yet, as you know, in this article about Cesar Chavez, I also point to the DSA and especially the New York DSA's habit of sexualizing itself. Creating, for instance, Valentine's Day events. First of all, let me just say I'm not a prude, far from it. And I think if you're not going to look for sexual partners on the left, where else are you going to look for them? So I think it's perfectly fine that left organizing also allows some people to find sexual partners, hookups, or whatever. Blowjobs in the alley, whatever. That's fine. All of that is fine and wonderful.

The problem for me arises when an organization deliberately paints itself as a hypersexual place as well. Because then what happens to people who—for any reason, whether they are 250 years old like I am, or whether that they are simply not interested in sex or both or whatever—enter a hypersexualized political sphere? And are not comfortable interacting because everyone assumes that they're looking for sexual partners while they also look for a fantastic political affiliation? You're losing people on the left and you're making people really vulnerable.

And the example, if I may, very quickly: years and years ago, about 100 years ago, I had a female student, white, very pretty, who wore shorts and was very intelligent; she came to me for advice because one of her instructors was sexualizing her. He would keep coming on to her, and she came to me and said, "I just don't like it. What do I do?" And I said, "Okay, I will talk to this supervisor." This supervisor happened to be a woman who came to me and said, "Oh, he's just like that. It's fine. He doesn't really mean it." And my student just ended up leaving the class. And that is a microcosm of what's happening, I think, a lot more on the left than we care to imagine or admit.

Robinson

I was just remembering as you were talking about the pressures that women feel to stay silent for the sake of the movement, which, of course, the most extreme example is Dolores Huerta, where, in her 90s, she finally came out and said this publicly. She was relentlessly verbally abused in front of other people; Cesar Chavez had assaulted her repeatedly, and she just felt like the movement was so important that she couldn't say anything about this.

I remembered that I had a female friend who worked on a leftist campaign in a fairly prominent position and was shut out of all the important discussions, which were done by a small group of white men, and she felt that she couldn't complain about it because the campaign was important, because she believed in it. The strange thing was that it was harder to speak up about something wrong in a leftist organization than it would have been in a corporate organization. Because in a corporate organization, you don't actually care about the underlying product the company's producing, so you can go public, and hurting them doesn't matter, but with the left, you feel hurting them would matter, and so that has to factor in to whether I'm going to be able to speak up about this.

Nair

Right, and in a corporate environment, you will at least have the possibility of a settlement where you can at least walk away with money.

Robinson

And there's HR.

Nair

And there's HR. Now I know a lot of people listening to this will say, "Well, let me tell you about the many instances where this..." But the point is that structurally, the corporate world functions differently than, say, the left. The other issue with the left, of course, is that so much of it depends upon volunteerism. It is almost entirely based on volunteer energy. So there is that problem as well. Now, with Graham Platner, I do also think that it's important to point out that it wasn't just the left—this amorphous left—being problematic about him, but it was very specific parts of the left media sphere that then kept insisting that we shut up and then made things even worse, even when the accusations of rape came out.

I'm sorry, but Ryan Grim coming out and going on about how the glute massage text was an important detail—just to give listeners and readers some context, what essentially happened is that Ryan Grim made a big deal about the fact that apparently Platner's accuser had texted him prior to his arriving unbidden at her door, saying, "Ha ha ha, I need a glute massage," and then he said, "I'll come over," and she said very clearly and emphatically, "No, I do not want you to come over." And then he did anyway, and then everything ensued after that.

And Ryan Grim's whole point was, "Well, the glute massage—that was an important detail to be inserted. People should know about this." What he was basically saying is a version of what the right often says, which is, "She asked for it. How do we know that she didn't ask for it?" Again, this is the kind of discourse that we are embedded in on the left, and we tend to avoid all of that. My biggest issues with sexism and misogyny, even on a personal level—forget about the institutional organizing level—have been with asshole leftist men. I guarantee you, there is not a single woman on the left who has been an organizer on any level who will not tell you that yes, I have had to fight off or deal with sexism and sexist men on the left. There isn't. I seriously doubt that there's a single woman. We have all had to plow on regardless of the misogyny and sexism that we face, so if that's happening on an everyday physical level, if that's happening on the level of a prominent media man making comments about a woman perhaps having deserved it, then what are we to expect on a larger ideological level?

And I say this as someone who is extremely appreciative of a lot of the work that people like Ryan Grim do. The other problem is that we are on the left are constantly in a hostage situation. We're constantly told, "If you don't let Graham Platner through, the left will collapse, and we'll get Susan Collins all over again." Well, the woman is a damn barnacle. Okay, so for me, the question that no one has asked about Maine so far is, if you are telling me that Graham Platner is the only choice we have, well, my question for you is, given that this woman has been stuck like a barnacle to a rotting ship for so many decades now, what is it about Maine's political structure that you somehow do not have an organic way of finding an excellent candidate with?

Robinson

It's this guy or nothing.

Nair

Constant hostage situation. And it's the same thing when I and Briahna Joy Gray, for instance—this is the reason why Kshama Sawant got on Breaking Points, because she kept bringing it up, and again and again, we were constantly being told, "If you keep criticizing our left media people, it could mean the end of the left media sphere." Are those the only options? Is the only option a veteran with PTSD and a horrible Nazi tattoo, which he claims not to have known the significance of, despite the fact that he is an autodidact who understands the intricacies of American foreign policy? And now claims that he just did not know what the tattoo meant? Oh dear! What's happening here?

Robinson

I take your point to be that there are certain values that should be pretty non-negotiable, and that core feminist principles and sticking to them are one of those. Now, importantly, for people who don't necessarily know your body of work, you are not just a critic of the left, but you are a staunch critic of liberal feminism too. Because I was thinking about how what you're saying there is that those who have made class the end-all, be-all have failed to pay attention to gender, but you also have written a lot about the opposite problem, where liberal feminism that doesn't pay attention to class ends up reinforcing oppressive dynamics.

And one of your core criticisms of #MeToo was that it was liberal, it was famous people often accusing other famous people and it didn't pay attention to, for example, housekeepers in hotels. Where is most of the actual everyday abuse occurring? It didn't pay attention to how immigration status enables abuse. These things were not part of the #MeToo conversation. So I was thinking as you were talking about how that's kind of the inverse of the critique that you're making of the left, which is the critique that you make of liberal feminism.

Nair

Yes. In fact, there's a book written famously written by Jodie Cantor and Megan Twohey. They co-wrote a book on #MeToo, which is considered to be the book on #MeToo. They're both reporters for the New York Times, who broke a lot of the stories. At the end of that book, there's a "conversation" going on in Gwyneth Paltrow's beachside house/mansion, and there's a gathering. And so this last chapter is supposed to be a gathering of all the women who came out for #MeToo, all these celebrities, and Paltrow among them. I forget all the rest of the names, but there's only one woman who's not a celebrity, and she happens to have been one of the workers at McDonald's who raised this thing about her abuse. And all these women go around in this last chapter and talk about how wonderful it is, and #MeToo helped them, etc. And the McDonald's worker hasn't actually seen changes.

So it's the woman, the undocumented laborer, who is slammed in that spot between the fridge and the wall by her boss, forced to service him sexually, and threatened with deportation if she doesn't agree. And even if she's not an immigrant, even if she's a white American citizen, the precariousness of a position is made clear to her over and over again by bosses who basically say, "Look at you. All you have is a high school degree, perhaps. You have no options. I know everyone in this small town that we live in." It's a version of the Hollywood adage: "You will never eat lunch in this town again." Well, for a McDonald's worker, it's much more stark, and so those women are not accounted for. I never cared for Me Too, frankly, because I saw it from the very beginning as something by and for famous women, and it's not that that doesn't matter.

But we also know that even now, many years later, #MeToo, even for celebrity women, isn't actually working the way it should. One stark example is that Gwyneth Paltrow was in a movie recently—all these movies all sort of blur into the same, so it's really hard for me to distinguish between them sometimes. But she was in this movie about maybe a year ago now, that was about her as she's now I think in her 50s, and she has this affair with a much younger woman, and so she she talked to an interviewer about how they had not sensitivity trainers—what are they called? Every set now has to have the option of an intimacy coordinator. And so she was offered an intimacy coordinator for her sex scenes, and she just laughed about it, and she said, Oh, that's ridiculous. I'm from a time when we just did it, and we just went into it, and we didn't have intimacy coordinators.

And I remember thinking, "You're part of the #MeToo movement. You're one of the big names of the#MeToo movement. And here you are mocking the idea of an intimacy coordinator. So it's not even hypocrisy. It's let me make use of this movement. Let me use it to get my name out there as the famous woman who is a part of this movement against, yes, a horrible man, certainly. And now I'm just going to brush it all aside because it's convenient to me.

I just think that things don't change for women below a certain level of income or access. Things have not changed. If anything, they've become a lot worse for undocumented women. Times are completely disastrous now.

Robinson

Well, this captures a lot of the left critique of liberalism, which is that we may look at E. Jean Carroll suing Donald Trump and finally getting some justice in the form of $50 million. She had to fight very hard for that. She obviously deserved that settlement. But it only helps E. Jean Carroll.

Nair

It only helps E. Jean Carroll.

Robinson

And one of the left critiques of the celebration of Barack Obama ascending to the presidency is obviously it's very symbolically important—it was very meaningful to many Black Americans as a symbol of progress; however, we know that Black wealth, on the whole, actually went down over the course of the Obama administration. 

The classic example is it's like changing the composition of the board of Goldman Sachs. The board of Goldman Sachs is the same; its function in the economy is the same, but there are different people on the board. And you and Eli Massey wrote a great article years ago for Current Affairs called "Inclusion in the Atrocious," where you talk about the importance of paying attention to how power works and not just the diversity of the people who are in power, and sometimes this can result in totally crazy things like rainbow imperialism, like Israel planting the pride flag in the ruins of Gaza.

Nair

Horrible, yes. That's just vile.

Robinson

Massacring queer Palestinians by the thousands, and then having the audacity to say, "But look, our our military has gender diversity. How can you possibly complain?" So these are the real extremes of only looking at representation and not looking at underlying power dynamics, and I feel like that's a thread that runs very strongly through much of the work that that you do.

Nair

Obama is an excellent example. I keep posting over and over again that my journal colleagues need to look more into Obama and the new "presidential center." It's not a library. It's a center. There is no fucking library! It's just a goddamn center.

The thing about Obama is that we can't stop at looking at exactly what you point out: that during his tenure, yes, exactly, the possibilities for the improvement of Black wealth have decreased a great deal. But we also now have to look at what Obama is now after his presidency and what he's doing on the South Side of Chicago. So the Obama whatever-the-hell-it-is—the obelisk or the Obamalisk, as some people have referred to it—is actually the center point of a massive project of gentrification. Now, admittedly, the South Side of Chicago has been the site of waves of gentrification for decades and decades. Yes, absolutely. But with Obama, it's accelerating. People are already, and there are news reports about this, being driven out of the neighborhood. People are no longer able to either buy or even rent. Rent is becoming exorbitant, for instance. And Obama is at the center of that very much so.

So the question is always about what do we gain by having a person of color as the president? What do we gain by having the board of a weapons manufacturing company be more than 50 percent women? We don't gain anything if we're not actually critiquing the structural inequalities that these people then bring about. So Obama is someone I refer to as an apex neoliberal. He is very much at the heart of a new kind of diversity agenda, where having been the first Black president gives him a world of international scope and power to really, basically, make a lot more money. That's really all he wants to do at this point, and he's making a lot of money, and I think people are reluctant to critique that because they don't want to be seen as racist.

And I say this as someone who, first of all, has disliked Obama from the time he ran, even before he ran for the Senate. As always, yes, I took one look at his book. I remember it was in a bookstore, and I said, "He's a grifter," and sure enough, that's exactly what he's turned out to be. But at the same time, Nathan, I was at the house of a couple of friends along with a couple of other people the night that he was elected, and I remember crying. I know. I know.

Robinson

Isn't it crazy, just the contradictions we can retain within ourselves?

Nair

I just wept. I wept because I understood the force of history. I understood what happened that night, and all of us were just bawling. And I still get really emotional. There's this famous photograph of Obama bending his head to a small Black child who wanted to touch his head because he said, "I want to see if it feels like mine." I swear.

Robinson

That brings tears to your eyes. I know.

Nair

I cry.

Robinson

You can't help it.

Nair

You can't help it. I cry. So the point I'm trying to make in revealing so much of myself to listeners is that there are contradictions, and there are reasons for us to be really happy and to take pride and joy in many of the things that we have seen in our lifetimes. But we have to constantly be the bitches of the left. We have to be. We cannot be sucked in by neoliberalism to the extent that we are, and I think the things that we see in relation to the widespread misogyny of the left, or Harris and so on. We have to take all of that into consideration.

Robinson

This is important because this is one of the things that I think people who hear some of your more incendiary remarks might not realize about you is that you don't like canceling people. You retain the ability to harshly criticize someone while recognizing—I heard you when you were talking about Ryan Grim. You're like, "The independent media aspect is important. I believe in the journalism. I'm going to give him credit when he does a good piece of journalism. And I'm going to harshly criticize him when he's like, 'Why didn't you talk about the massage?'"

Interestingly, you were both the person who was telling me over and over, "Platner's going to have a big #MeToo." And as soon as the accusations came out, you were the first person to go, "I'm skeptical of these allegations. "

Nair

Yes.

Robinson

And at first I was like, "You were the one who was saying they were going to come out!" But then I realized, no, there's no contradiction here because you can believe that the abuse is likely and also retain your belief in due process for the accused, in the importance of evidence, in an anti-carceral feminism, and in restorative justice for people who commit serious offenses—you have to hold all those things together. It's difficult.

Nair

And I'm really glad you brought up the question of prison abolition. Yes, exactly—I was the first one to say I don't necessarily think we have to believe the women. There's this prevalent idea that "believe the women" means just that: believe women no matter what. It doesn't. It doesn't mean that at all. [Michael Pollak] years ago—and I've written about this in an article of mine. You can look up his name and you can find the the related article. But he said years ago, and I agree with this: "Believe the women" doesn't mean "believe them no matter what." What it means is you look at them and say, "Okay, you are telling us about a horrible, horrendous thing that has happened to you. First of all, what resources do you need? What do you need for us to keep supporting you?" And then you begin the restorative justice process, and we can talk about what that really means, but that is a longer process that needs to happen. But it does not mean that everything that the woman said is absolutely true just because she said it happened. That is not the prison abolitionist restorative justice framework. The restorative justice prison abolition framework is, who has had harm done to them?

This is again a really critical part of prison abolition people don't understand is that the harm has happened to both parties, and that is why prison abolition is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for your rapist friend; it's not a knife embedded in a birthday cake that you send off to him in prison. It's a radical rethinking of the world, which says prisons are a manifestation of the deep damage done to society and the result of a process where we all believe that the only way to end violence and despair and suffering is to perpetuate it within what is effectively now a concentration camp system. So that is the important part of prison abolition and restorative justice that people don't understand. So, for instance, a lot of people online and elsewhere were saying to me, "Well, if you're really a prison abolitionist, you would support Graham Platner. You would support forgiving him." No, no, no. That was never the issue. The issue for me always with Graham Platner was, motherfuckers, you should never have chosen him in the first goddamn place.

So let us go back to that original point, which, of course, is what the left doesn't want to do. Now, if we were to talk about restorative justice or prison abolition in relation to Graham Platner, we would have to go back so long into the whole system and the process. First of all, he should not have been chosen. We know this now. The man has problems, and the man, instead of being given resources, perhaps—or perhaps he was given them. He's from a wealthy family. It's not like he didn't have any options, even though he was acting as if he were just a poor white boy sent into the army by people like Susan Collins. Okay, there is no draft, idiot, so shut up. All of these narratives that he was pulling on from various Hollywood movies—that's a whole other topic altogether. But the point about prison abolition and transformative restorative justice is that the process is embedded in a complete rethinking of how we live in the world and what resources we give people who are hurt by, for instance, the wars that senators send us into.

That is what prison abolition is about. It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It has to go much further back than that. So the same people who accuse me of being a hypocrite in relation to prison abolition because I am saying Graham Platner should not have been chosen are also the same people who will then turn around and say, "Let's throw this person into jail." Hasan Piker, for instance, recently said that he doesn't believe in prison abolition because, when the time comes, we have to have a way to deal with the people who've been dragging our friends and families out onto the streets and putting them into black boxes. Okay, again, that doesn't help, Hasan. It doesn't help because the damage comes from society that is so deeply broken that there are no resources, and there is a way for people who have elemental cruelty baked into their bodies and cells that they feel empowered to treat people the way they do. That's the damage that we have to deal with, and it's not going to happen if we perpetuate it.

Robinson

Yes, look, there's part of me that wants to see George W. Bush in a prison cell. That's part of me, and then there's another part of me that goes, "Well, actually, don't you really want to see him planting flowers in Iraq?"

Nair

Yes!

Robinson

Wouldn't that be better?

Nair

I want him cleaning. Now I have plans. I have such beautiful plans for all these people who are perpetuating violence. It includes, for instance, going into the buildings that they destroyed and rebuilding them and cleaning them out.

Robinson

Yes, fixing the thing you broke.

Nair

Yes, right. I would love that.

Robinson

Doing this for the people you hurt.

Nair

I would be happy to be the construction manager. "You missed that brick over there."

Robinson

Putting George W. Bush in prison does nothing for Iraqis.

Nair

Nothing. Nothing.

Robinson

It satisfies a sense of vengeance, but it doesn't build anything in Iraq.

Anyway, we could go down to our list of war criminals and the penance they're going to have to do. Netanyahu is going to have to spend a very long time on minor construction projects.

But there was one final topic that I wanted to talk to you about, which is writing and the kind of deep analysis that you do, that I do, that is lengthy, that is researched, that is a form of writing that has no institutional support, no money behind it anywhere. There are grants for investigative journalism. Nobody wants to pay someone to do deep, opinionated analysis. And yet, I think one of the things that I want to convey to people is that if we don't have that, we miss crucial features of reality. No one was was better at explaining what was really going on in the Harris campaign and where that would go than you. People can revisit your essay where you laid out exactly why she was going to lose months before she actually lost. You laid out what some of the problems with Platner were long before those problems caused the downfall of his campaign. Without that kind of writing, nobody's pointing these things out, and it has to be in writing, and it has to be at length. So I assume you agree with everything I've just said.

 

Nair

Oh, absolutely. I'm nodding away. Yes. I think that the publishing world is currently in, shall we say, something of a crisis, but it is also a world that has bought into certain narratives about itself, certain kinds of depressing narratives. And I think that one of the narratives, for instance, is a very popular one promulgated by one of our favorite magazines, The Atlantic, which is nobody is reading! But if you actually talk to booksellers and publishers, especially independent publishers, not the big five, you will hear—and also, if you just know your own friends—everyone is actually reading. Maybe they're reading shorter pieces. Maybe they're reading romantancy. Maybe they're reading more nonfiction, etc. This is just an Atlantic campaign once again to make The Atlantic more relevant than it should be.

But I think that part of the problem with this narrative that the publishing world keeps putting out about itself is that we end up believing that there are only certain kinds of intellectual writing work that matter. I noticed, for instance, that the AP did this whole article with people like Ryan Grim, which frankly just read like a PR spot to me, but that's a whole other matter. It went on about how yes, all these sites like Drop Site and Breaking Points are doing investigative work, and I think the investigative work, by the way, is fundamentally important. But people also don't understand what it costs.

And so, if you really support the work of investigative journalism, you should fund it. The Cesar Chavez story took five years, and this is something that readers also need to understand. All of which is to say that you can't have investigative journalism, however, if you don't also have a cadre of people doing analysis, doing the kind of thinking through issues that can accompany that investigation. So, the investigative work that the Times did is fantastic, and I say this as someone who literally, truly, absolutely loathes the Times. I think the Times is a plagiaristic machine. I think the Times has horrible politics. But that investigation of Cesar Chavez took five years to do.

However, you can have the investigation, and you can say, "Look at the facts. Look at what happened. It is horrible." Yes, but there has to be an analysis behind that, which actually allows for the investigation to even be seen as necessary, and that analysis is actually something that emerges from decades and decades and decades of feminist analysis, for instance, and feminist critique of gender relations and power relations embedded in political organizing and so on.

So without those decades of analysis and understanding, there is no investigation of Cesar Chavez. It's just as simple as that. The two cannot exist without each other. You're absolutely right. You have to have analyses that accompany, or sometimes is even athwart, against the investigative journalism. And I will also say that there is a group of people who could really make a difference in terms of how we fund and understand the importance of different kinds of writing, and that group is readers everywhere. Readers have become accustomed to getting everything for free. They treat journalism like a buffet. "Give us more analysis. Give us more investigative journalism." I'm so tired of readers who will snarl at us, saying, "Why aren't you sending investigative journalists out to do this work?"

Well, would you like to spend $200 a minimum per night for accommodation, to pay for equipment, and to pay for litigation that might come about? All of this costs money. All of which is to say, yes, thank you for what you said about my work, and I think that's the work the Current Affairs does, and that deserves to survive alongside the sometimes fetishized world of investigative journalism, and I have done both. There's a reason why we call it "gumshoe journalism." It is literally even physically painful sometimes to get that work done. But it is no less arduous to do analysis. I think that is what we need to convey, whether to funders or readers or whoever. These are different kinds of work, and they absolutely must be funded and supported the same way. You cannot have investigative journalism without our analysis. And you cannot just have analysis without investigative journalism. Certainly.

Robinson

That's a good note for us to conclude here on because it allows me to say to our listeners that all of this makes a very good case for subscribing to Current Affairs at currentaffairs.org/subscribe and donating to Current Affairs at currentaffairs.org/donate so that we can keep up this work for another 10 years. We've only been able to make it because of the support of our readers and listeners who we love, and most of whom are wonderful and do not demand investigative journalism. They're wonderful people, and we are very grateful that they have enabled us to build a leading progressive independent magazine.

To support Yasmin's work, people can read her blog/website at yasminnair.com, and you can go to the archives of Current Affairs and read all the pieces that she's written for us, including her wonderful review of Kamala Harris's memoir 107 Days, which she published late last year. Also one of my favorites, "The NYT Book Review Is Everything Book Criticism Shouldn't Be," from 2024. Thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs.

Nair

Thank you, and thank you for your words about my website. I am also an independent freelance writer, so any support that people can give me would be fantastic. But also support Current Affairs. What I would say to people is find the media that you find most useful and interesting. Make sure that the media outlet pays its writers. And if you like what Current Affairs provides, understand that all of that labor does not emerge from the ether unbidden. It is a lot of work, physical and intellectual work. Support Current Affairs. Support the Times if you must. I suggest you don't, but support the Times. Intellectual work, journalism, and writing are labor. Everything is labor, people. Support the labor. Support the labor.

 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth. Image of Graham Platner by Hannah Yoest, licensed under Creative Commons. Image of Yasmin Nair courtesy of Yasmin Nair.