\n<\/p>\n
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube<\/em><\/p>\n On this week\u2019s episode of The David Frum Show<\/em>, The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the Trump administration\u2019s hostility toward NATO. David discusses why NATO was created, what it does, and why we should care about it. David also analyzes the United State\u2019s global leadership role and why so many bad actors advocate for isolationism.<\/p>\n Then David is joined by his Atlantic<\/em> colleague Helen Lewis to talk about the proliferation and importance of right-wing \u201ccomedy\u201d podcasts. They discuss why some comedians seem to go right-wing and why a growing audience is drawn to their uninformed rhetoric. Lewis also addresses the complicity comedians and their audience share in the rise of MAGA.<\/p>\n Finally, David closes the podcast with a discussion on Edith Wharton\u2019s Autres Temps<\/em> and how it speaks to moral panics, social pariahs, and so-called cancel culture.<\/p>\n The following is a transcript of the episode:<\/em><\/p>\n David Frum:<\/strong> Hello, and welcome to another episode of The David Frum Show<\/em>. I\u2019m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic<\/em>. My guest this week will be my Atlantic<\/em> colleague Helen Lewis, and we\u2019ll be talking about comedy and politics, and how the two combine. My book this week will be not a book but a short story: Autre Temps<\/em>, by Edith Wharton.<\/p>\n Before I turn to either, I\u2019m going to anticipate something that will be said in the dialogue with Helen Lewis, where she talked about one of our challenges in the face of the way modern media works is to keep rediscovering old truths. And so I wanna open this show this week by talking about an old truth.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve been reading in the news, you [may have] seen that the NATO alliance is under even more intense pressure than ever before. The Russians are demanding from the Trump administration not only that Ukraine not be invited into NATO, but that NATO actually step back. And the Trump administration is very hostile to NATO, the vice president even more than the president. [Donald] Trump has often speculated about quitting NATO entirely. And the new National Security Strategy published by the Trump administration is seething with hostility to Europe and NATO allies. So I thought today, I would talk about NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a little bit of rediscovering the old truths: How did it happen? Why was it a good idea? What\u2019s it for? Why do we care?<\/p>\n Well, let me recapitulate a little bit some history that, probably, we all know somewhere in our brains but have lost sight of. At the end of World War II, Europe was in ruins, and the Soviet Union was the dominant military power on the continent of Europe and in the Middle East and Asia too, was menacing, threatening, and aggressing against the shattered remains of a war-torn continent. Americans realized they had two urgent tasks if they were to ever enjoy any peace, security, and prosperity for themselves: They had to rebuild the economy of their defeated enemies, Germany and Japan; they had to rebuild the larger economies of Europe and northwest Asia; and they had to provide some measure of security because the last thing anybody wanted was to get Europe and Northwest Asia back into the game of arms racing for security, army against army. America would provide security for all, guarantee security for all, prevent the rise of independent security threats within these zones, and would use peace as a way to bring prosperity and use prosperity as a way to secure peace. And so NATO came into being.<\/p>\n It was formally declared in April of 1949, and originally, it had 12 members: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This group pledged that an attack by any one of them would be an attack on all of them. Now, this was a very unequal pledge. Obviously, if the United States were attacked, it would be nice to have Luxembourg by your side\u2014everyone would appreciate that\u2014but it wouldn\u2019t help. But if Luxembourg were attacked, it would make a great deal of difference to have the United States by its side. So although it was a defensive pledge of mutual aid, because, in 1949, the United States was the only nuclear power of the group\u2014United Kingdom would soon follow\u2014but in 1949, the United States was the only one, ultimately, NATO was a one-way military guarantee: American power, including American nuclear weapons, would protect the other members of the alliance.<\/p>\n NATO gradually grew, and along the way it grew, it took on new forms. In 1952, Greece and Turkey, neither of them on the Atlantic Ocean, joined. And NATO then sent a message\u2014Greece and Turkey had been historic enemies, and NATO now became an institution that said, Not only are we defending our members against the threat from the Soviet Union, but we\u2019re also pledging that we\u2019re going to impose peace and security on our members, that Greece and Turkey are coming in together to signal that they may not love each other any better than they used to do, but there will be no more hostilities between them<\/em>. And indeed, except for a brief clash in 1974, NATO has done a pretty good job of keeping the peace between Greece and Turkey with so many historical grievances between those two countries.<\/p>\n In 1955, West Germany joined, and NATO was saying that the enormous strength of West Germany\u2014indispensable to European security but also a potential threat to people who remembered fighting the Germans in two world wars\u2014West Germany would come in and join a collective club, and that NATO would become a way for the strength of some to become a resource and a source of security for others and not a threat to them. You didn\u2019t have to fear German power if West Germany belonged to the same alliance that was guaranteed by the United States.<\/p>\n In 1982, Spain joined. Spain had been a dictatorship since the Spanish Civil War, until the middle of the 1970s. Then Spain made a transition to democracy. When NATO was founded in 1949, there was one nondemocracy among the 12 members; that was Portugal. But from then on, NATO said\u2014it became a rule: You can\u2019t be a NATO member unless you\u2019re a democracy<\/em>. And Spain had to wait until it democratized to become a NATO member, which it did in 1982.<\/p>\n NATO achieved its greatest triumph in 1989 with the end of communism in Central Europe and the beginnings of the peaceful reunification of the continent. After 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics, Russia and others, NATO became a way to secure the loose nuclear material, to make sure that there were no bombs that went off. The Soviet Union at [the time of its] breakup, I think, had something like 50,000 nuclear warheads, very poorly secured, and many scientists who had nuclear know-how that could be sold. NATO became the instrument by which the warheads were secured\u2014many of them were converted into peaceful electric power\u2014and the scientists were provided with gainful employment so they would not be tempted to sell their skills to some bad actor.<\/p>\n In 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO, as if to say that Europe was no longer accepting the border imposed on it by the Stalinist division of Europe at the end of World War II, that Central Europe would join Europe and would be protected by Europe in the same way that other European democracies were.<\/p>\n In 2004, NATO got its largest expansion, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, and the three Baltic republics: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Now, this last, the joining of the Baltic republics, is now a big MAGA talking point, that Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump will say, It was so terrible that we allowed Estonia to join<\/em>. They forget that, in 1994, the biggest advocate of those countries joining was Newt Gingrich. In fact, letting Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into NATO was point No. 6 in the 1994 Republican Contract With America. They listed 10 things they wanted Bill Clinton to do, and No. 6 was admit Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into NATO\u2014forgotten now, but important to remember. More members joined: Albania and Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia, and, in 2022, Finland and Sweden.<\/p>\n Now, the record of NATO is that once you\u2019re in NATO, you are safe, home free. You no longer have to fear the Russians. Those Russian neighbors, Georgia and Ukraine, who were not admitted to NATO were both attacked: the Georgians by Russia in 2008 and Ukraine first in 2014, when the Russians took Crimea, and then again in 2022, when they made their lunge at Kyiv and tried to take over the whole country.<\/p>\n There are people who wanna forget all this history and forget the incredible achievements, and they\u2019re usually motivated by two things. I get it, that the leaders of Russia and China prefer to see their neighbors isolated, weak, and defenseless. And I get it too, unfortunately, that there are people in the United States, in allied countries, and certainly posing as Americans and Europeans on social media who want the Russians and Chinese to have what they want: isolated, defenseless, vulnerable, weak neighbors.<\/p>\n But I think there\u2019s something that is going on that is much less obvious, much less rational, and much more sinister. And that is, there are people in American life, American politicians, including at the highest levels of this country, who say\u2014one of the things that happened when the United States became committed to defending freedom abroad after World War II was it became committed to reforming itself at home. During the civil-rights movement, it was again and again an argument for why the United States had to end racial segregation inside the United States: How could the United States champion democracy abroad, which all Americans in 1962 wanted to do, if it defended segregation and the denial of the vote based on race at home?<\/em> And so the need to defend democracy abroad, the shared consensus that the United States should do that, led to social changes at home that made America a freer and more equal society. Well, supposing you wanna undo those changes, supposing you think the United States is on the wrong track and it needs to be more authoritarian, more reactionary, more hierarchical, more oppressive at home. Well, obviously, then, just as the desire to project and protect democracy abroad led to social changes at home, the undoing<\/em> of those social changes at home requires withdrawal from those commitments abroad.<\/p>\n And so it\u2019s not an accident that isolationism and reaction and authoritarianism go together; they\u2019re the same project. And when people are attacking America\u2019s obligations, both through NATO to European allies and through other treaty agreements\u2014Japan\u2019s not a member of NATO, but there\u2019s a NATO-like treaty with Japan; Australia\u2019s not a NATO member, but there\u2019s a NATO-like treaty with Australia, ditto New Zealand. And the United States is drawing closer and closer to countries in Southeast Asia, and many are contemplating some kind of collective-security agreement for that region too. With the people who are opposing all of this, they\u2019re not just saying, I wish China would rule the world. I wish Russia could dominate its neighbors<\/em>, although some of them think that. <\/em>What they\u2019re saying is, I don\u2019t like the kind of country America is going to have to be if it\u2019s going to be a force for freedom in the world. I want a different America, a more brutish America, more reactionary America, more authoritarian America, more racist, more sexist, more corrupt America. And in order to achieve <\/em>that end, I need to unravel the foreign policy that is pressing us to do more and do better<\/em>.<\/p>\n So when you defend NATO, you\u2019re not just defending the peace and security of the world, although you are. And when you speak for NATO, you\u2019re not just speaking for the ideals of collective security that have made this planet such a better place since 1945 than it was before 1945. You are upholding and vindicating the best American ideals for Americans here at home, and those who are on the other side are trying to unravel the best American ideals for Americans here at home.<\/p>\n And now my dialogue with Helen Lewis.<\/p>\n [Music<\/em>]<\/strong><\/p>\n Frum: <\/strong>Helen Lewis is the author of two books: Difficult Women,<\/em> published in 2020, and the Genius Myth, <\/em>published in 2025. A graduate of Oxford, a past deputy editor of The New Statesman,<\/em> she joined the staff of The Atlantic<\/em> in 2019, where we are all very proud and pleased to call her a colleague.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, she attended the Riyadh Comedy Festival, and that is going to be the jumping-off point for our discussion today.<\/p>\n Helen, welcome to The David Frum Show<\/em>.<\/p>\n Helen Lewis:<\/strong> Thank you very much for having me.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> So, okay, Riyadh\u2014<\/p>\n Lewis: <\/strong>(Laughs<\/em>.) Yes, Riyadh.<\/p>\n Frum: <\/strong>\u2014never been there. It\u2019s probably more exotic in my imagination than it is in real life.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> I think it was more exotic about 20 years ago. I talked to our colleague Graeme Wood, who, obviously, interviewed Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, for the magazine a couple of years ago, and he\u2019s someone who\u2019s been to the region a lot, and he talked about the speed of the transformation. So when I was there, yeah, it felt very particular, but it felt very different in ways I wasn\u2019t expecting.<\/p>\n So I was expecting, for example, for it to be a very conservative Islamic country. So the standard Saudi dress for men is a long white robe and a headdress; the standard Saudi dress for women is either a full-face veil or a hijab and covering, like, all of your body in an abaya. But the thing I wasn\u2019t quite expecting was that, obviously, there\u2019s been a huge influx of migrant workers. So actually, what you also have is a class of Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, perhaps, men who are dressed in what you think of as kind of Western dress, but are all of a particular age and obviously all male, there to work on the huge<\/em> amount of construction projects that are happening. And that really underlined, to me, the fact that this is a country that is trying to do something\u2014it\u2019s trying to \u201cspeedrun modernity\u201d, one of my interviewees put it.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Yeah. Did you see unveiled women?<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Some\u2014very occasionally. Okay, so you see tourists who are unveiled who are moving around, and, of course, one of the reforms by Mohammed bin Salman is that he\u2019s stepped down the religious police so you don\u2019t get hassled. I didn\u2019t get hassled. I walked around\u2014I initially turned up with everything, just on the basis that you wanna be as respectful and discreet as possible when you\u2019re reporting, and then I realized it wasn\u2019t really necessary. And very occasionally, you do see a Saudi woman with her face, although not her hair, usually, uncovered.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Yeah. And at the comedy festival, was alcohol served?<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> No. No. Well, I\u2019m sure it happens privately, but that\u2019s the one big Sharia taboo that has not been bust open publicly, along with, of course, famously, the two rules for comics performing at the festival, right? One: We don\u2019t criticize religion<\/em>. Although, actually, Louis C.K. had a few pops at Catholicism, so what we really mean is: We don\u2019t criticize Islam<\/em>. And two: We don\u2019t criticize the royal family<\/em>. Although I noticed that my royal family came in for some stick; that\u2019s apparently fine.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Yes. Now, remember the old Cold War joke about the American saying to the Soviet, I can criticize the president of the United States, and nothing happens to me<\/em>, and the Soviet replies, I too can criticize the president of the United States, and nothing happens to me<\/em>, so the same way. Although the lopsidedness of which religions you can criticize applies outside Saudi Arabia as well as inside. (Laughs<\/em>.) Were the comedians as funny without alcohol?<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> (Laughs<\/em>.) That\u2019s a very good question. I don\u2019t drink very much anyway, but I do think there is a reason why comedy clubs have a two-drink minimum, and it\u2019s not just to get their profits up, right? It\u2019s to get everybody kind of loosened up.<\/p>\n The atmosphere was odd. It was held in the box arena in Riyadh. I\u2019s an in the round, so like a wrestling arena, essentially, 360-degree audience. It was a bit like people were just excited to be there, that it was happening, which, I guess, imagine being a 21-year-old in Saudi today, and there\u2019s huge bursts of Western cultures coming at you from the outside\u2014you can probably get it through a VPN\u2014and now, for the first time in your country, you\u2019re gonna be able to hear a stand-up comedian, even when you can remember from your childhood what Saudi Arabia was like. People were laughing.<\/p>\n I mean, Louis C.K.\u2019s set was one of the most morbid comedy sets I\u2019ve ever heard. (Laughs<\/em>.) It was all about death and decay. So I felt that was a real challenge if you turned up your big night out in Riyadh.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> But this is a large venue.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Mm, yeah, several hundred people.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> So it doesn\u2019t have that kind of intimate feel that we sometimes associate with comedy clubs in New York or Los Angeles.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Right, and it could not have been less underground. Andrew Maxwell, who performed there, described the fact that he and Louis C.K. went to a Riyadh comedy club the night before, and they listened to comics performing. But this was more like a kind of classic arena show, more Madison Square Garden\u2013type feeling, which have always got a slightly odd feeling, those shows, right? Because it\u2019s people who\u2019ve come for a kind of big night out, rather than people who are massive comedy fans, basically.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Were women allowed to perform?<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> This is the funny thing. There were a couple of women who did perform at the festival, not very many, but then, you could say that about American comedy clubs, to be quite honest. I looked into the gender ratio of guests on Joe Rogan\u2019s show, and it\u2019s less than one in 10 of them were women. Comedy in the podcasting circuit that spun off comedy\u2014the Saudi Arabian gender ratio, actually not that different to what you might see in Austin or Los Angeles.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Well, that\u2019s actually the main thing I wanted to talk to you about. So I am not a big comedy consumer; I get most of my comedy insights secondhand, from members of my family who like it more than I do. It isn\u2019t that I dislike wit and humor, but I don\u2019t like the sort of the constraint of it and the idea that I\u2019m a consumer of your wit, which may or may not be witty, so, it\u2019s not been my thing. Bt I\u2019m interested in it as a social artifact because, believe it or not, not so long ago, it wasn\u2019t a big deal in North American culture, and suddenly, it is. The idea of filling a stadium that I would think of as a music venue with consumers of spoken-word performance like this, that would not very often have happened when I was younger.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Oh, right. Yeah. It didn\u2019t seem that strange to me, because I grew up on people already doing comedy tours, but you\u2019re right. It was more, when I grew up, more people touring kind of regional venues rather than some of the kind of mega, mega\u2014I mean, one of the reasons that this has happened is that Netflix, for example, has a whole strand called \u201cNetflix Is a Joke\u201d that they pour huge amounts of money into. They had Dave Chappelle performing for that. Just the amount of money\u2014I think, particularly, as DVD sales have cratered, and everything\u2019s gone to streaming, live performance has become more and more important to people. So part of that does account for the rise of, I think, comedy in the culture.<\/p>\n And the second thing is the growth of this kind of alternative, \u201canti-woke\u201d\u2014I know that\u2019s a phrase that will probably make some people want to claw their eyeballs out\u2014but the kind of anti-woke comedy scene that has formed in Austin around Joe Rogan.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Yeah, that\u2019s, I think, the main thing I wanna talk to you about today is\u2014and something has happened, and it\u2019s hard to come up with a vocabulary for it. But I used to be a quite frequent guest on the Bill Maher show; I haven\u2019t been on for a while. And I don\u2019t have the dates at hand, but I\u2019m guessing I would\u2019ve started in the late \u201900s and appeared for the last time sometime before COVID. And one of the things I became aware of, over time, was that I had begun to be invited on the show as sort of a token Republican, and by the time my appearances on the show came to an end, I was noticing that Bill Maher was frequently much more right-wing than I was.<\/p>\n And now, partly, I had shifted in some of my political views, but so had he, and I don\u2019t think he was shifting alone. And maybe right-wing<\/em> is not the correct word, because Maher remains very forceful in his opposition to President Trump, but I notice with many of the comedians\u2014and maybe COVID was the decisive moment or maybe \u201cwokeness,\u201d whatever we mean by that\u2014something happened in the second half of the 2010s, where suddenly, comedy became something you would categorize as of the right, rather than of the dissident or the left or the progressive or some other form.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Yeah, I\u2019ve been thinking about this because I think my career probably tracks that change exactly. When I first started writing, in the 2000s, that was the time in which your view of Republicans was, they were family-rights conservatives, you know? It was kind of finger-wagging, very churchy guys who were telling you that gays were going to hell and women should kind of be stay-at-home. This is very offensive to you, as somebody who was around the Republican Party at this time\u2014I\u2019m not saying that was a true and accurate depiction; I\u2019m saying that\u2019s what it felt like to somebody who was 18, 20 at that time, right? That the Democrats were the cool party of Bill Clinton and maybe smoked a little pot, whereas the Republicans were very straight-laced\u2014they were the party of eating your greens and starching your shirt.<\/p>\n And then what\u2019s kind of flipped\u2014and I think we can discuss what we mean by \u201cwokeness\u201d\u2014was that we went through a period where the kind of cultural dominance of the left meant that you had this hyperfixation on kind of purity and in people getting canceled, which I know is still something that people will deny ever happened. But the example I would give is maybe the ur-example of this. Shane Gillis is a comedian, incredibly funny, just naturally very, very funny guy, and does some extremely good material about what it\u2019s like to get a bit older and start kind of complaining and grumbling about stuff. He says he has this worry about \u201cearly-onset Republicanism,\u201d where you get very annoyed about the fact there\u2019s a Black guy in every advert. And so he\u2019s not coming from a particularly right-wing point of view, but when he got hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live<\/em> back in, I think, 2019, 2020, they found some old sketches in which he had put on kind of, I think, a sort of comedy Chinese voice. And so what he did was he went away, and he built up a podcast, and it became Matt and Shane\u2019s Secret Podcast<\/em>\u2014phenomenally successful, maybe one of the top-earning ones on Patreon. He then got offers from Netflix to do his specials there. He performs a lot at the Comedy Mothership. And sure enough, what happened? He was invited back, maybe a year ago now, to host Saturday Night Live<\/em>. So he describes that arc that we\u2019re talking about, where, actually, the mainstream became\u2014the kind of bit that young people maybe felt was preachy became the left.<\/p>\n Now, I think the people who disagree with me on this, the people from that sort of more Bluesky-ish tendency, would say what\u2019s actually happened is that a lot of these guys have hit middle age, and they\u2019re very rich, and they want lower taxes, or<\/em> they don\u2019t like being talked back to. And I do think that is not an unfair criticism in some of these cases. Some of these guys have just had a lot of fame and attention and money, and you would kind of expect them to get a bit more annoyed with the youth of today, shaking their fist like Grandpa Simpson.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Well, you raise a lot of points there. As you said, there\u2019s a story that I think a lot of the people in this world would like to tell, which is: It\u2019s not about left versus right; it\u2019s about conformity versus nonconformity. It\u2019s about the hypocrisies of society versus the dissent and truth-telling, and just whoever\u2019s in charge, we\u2019re against them<\/em>. So when the people who in charge are\u2014and it was never thus, but let\u2019s pretend it was thus, and it was important to some people: If the church lady is in charge, I\u2019m against the church lady, and when the wokeist scold is in charge, I\u2019m against the wokeist scold, but I\u2019m still me; I\u2019m the same person, same pot-smoking, norm-defying Lenny Bruce figure I always was<\/em>.<\/p>\n Lewis: <\/strong>Right.<\/p>\n Frum: <\/strong>And I don\u2019t wanna say that that\u2019s completely wrong, but I think one of the moments\u2014again, I\u2019m overprojecting from my Bill Maher experience\u2014but one of the moments where I soured on the whole experience of being on the program was I was there with my elder daughter, who, much missed, and she was in the audience, and Maher had a whole bit where he was just railing on young people.<\/p>\n And what was going on here was not just a rebellion against the wokeist scold. It was also something, as you say, what happens when you get older. And it\u2019s not a universal rule, because I find, as I<\/em> get older\u2014and I\u2019m a pretty materially comfortable person, and I don\u2019t like paying taxes; I do it, but I don\u2019t love it\u2014is, as you get older, you also can become more sympathetic to the struggles of the young, as you get more distant from Who are you? What are you gonna do on this earth? Who are you going to do it with?<\/em>, all those problems that you, one hopes, have settled in your life by the time you\u2019re in your 50s and 60s. And you then have a little bit more scope for compassion for those who are not settled in these situations in their 20s\u2014i\u2019s very hard not to know who you are and what you\u2019re doing and who you\u2019re going to do it with\u2014and you can go in that way too. But there seemed to be sort of a mood of not<\/em> going that way, of being contemptuous and disdainful. And then sometimes, the young, like anybody else\u2014I mean, we had a big story in The Atlantic <\/em>about how the young in America are much more anti-Semitic than the people over 60; that\u2019s not good. But sometimes, they also are telling you about new things that you need to know about, whether you like it or not, and it\u2019s worth listening.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Yeah, I think you capture exactly the debate and where it is, and so you have to be very careful about picking apart what the different currents are. I do think it is probably true to say that the people who are most likely to be offended\u2014when I kind of came up, one of the big things that happened here was Jerry Springer: The [Opera],<\/em> and the people who were protesting against that were, essentially, fundamentalist Christians.<\/p>\n And then I think now, when I think of stuff getting protested, actually, it\u2019s probably more likely to get protested by radical trans activists, for example, who think that perhaps you shouldn\u2019t have a cisgender actor playing a trans character or whatever it might be. That\u2019s the feeling of balance that I think has happened to the arts. You had the rise of sensitivity readers, where, essentially, a kind of professional class of witchfinders, who were all one person designated to be the representative of an entire swath of a minority group, came in and ruled on what language was acceptable and what wasn\u2019t. You had the rise of this kind of \u201cOwn Voices\u201d in young-adult literature, which was the idea that nobody, really, should write stories about people who weren\u2019t like them. And so I do think there was a movement where lots of artists found that their creative freedom was being impinged upon. And now, maybe some of that, like you say, some of that was justified. It wasn\u2019t particularly great for American comedy when Saturday Night Live<\/em> was only written by white men who\u2019d been to three universities, right? It\u2019s actually benefited enormously from expanding the pool of its talent. But with that did [come] what people experience as a kind of finger-wagging censoriousness, undoubtedly so.<\/p>\n And one of the things, to go back to Riyadh, that really struck me was that a number of people who were there taking the Saudi money were kind of the canceled comedians\u2014so Dave Chappelle being a really obvious example, somebody who had literal protests outside Netflix because of his special; Kevin Hart, who was ditched from hosting the Oscars because of past homophobic comments; Aziz Ansari, who went on one very bad date and got MeToo\u2019ed in a way that I think almost everybody now acknowledges was a massive overreaction to what actually happened, as described by both people in that situation. So I think people felt that they\u2019d been exiled, and there was no way back. And actually, what was waiting for them was the warm embrace of a whole new ecosystem, particularly through YouTube, even Rumble, that was gonna make them very,<\/em> very, very good money, and they didn\u2019t need to ask Lorne Michaels or whoever it was for permission to be a comedian anymore.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Well, we all prefer applause to criticism; that\u2019s true. (Laughs<\/em>.) And we tend to feel more warmly toward people who applaud us than to people who don\u2019t, and that\u2019s understandable. And we can also, if we\u2019re not careful, become more like<\/em> the people who are applauding us. So if the people who are applauding us are very anti-vaccine, if they are \u201cjust asking questions\u201d about World War II, then we find ourselves being drawn, as some comedians have been, into the anti-vaccine crackpot world or, in some cases, outright Nazi apologetics or, worse, outright pro-Nazism, and that is something that you see too. There\u2019s this conveyor belt from anti-woke to outright demented, crazy.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Yeah, and I think it was a really good example of that. What you\u2019re describing is this feeling like if people are telling you not to do something, that that itself is a reason to do it. I think that became a really toxic and poisonous thing, as is the idea that if everybody\u2019s against you, and the establishment is against you, you are, by default, Galileo [Galilei]. And again, both of those are very intensely narcissistic things because they\u2019re all about putting you at the center of this.<\/p>\n So I think what happened during COVID\u2014again, that\u2019s kind of important to this story too because some of the things that Americans, and British people too, were being told actually didn\u2019t have a great deal of scientific reckoning behind them; they were the best guess at the time. But people experienced them as very illiberal. And that tipped over into sometimes just actual quack stuff. But it was this kind of valorization of, as you say, they call it \u201cJAQing off\u201d: \u201cjust asking questions.\u201d<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Well, lemme just say something about Galileo. So the reason Galileo is Galileo was he was the greatest astronomer of his time, and the repressive apparatus of the church, for its own reasons, said, We want you to recant some of your theories<\/em>. But what if Galileo were not the greatest astronomer of his time? What if he were just some guy, and all the astronomers were saying, You\u2019re out of your mind<\/em>. Then you\u2019re just a crank. It\u2019s one thing to say, I\u2019m gonna defy the government or the church on vaccines<\/em>, but when you say, I\u2019m going to defy everyone who knows anything about vaccines on vaccines<\/em>, you\u2019re not a brave truth teller. You\u2019re somewhere on the spectrum between an anti-social menace and just a crackpot crazy person. But you probably don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking\u2014you can\u2019t pass the exam in grade-10 biology and you\u2019re telling the head of the National Institutes of Health that he\u2019s wrong.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a whole chapter on this in The Genius Myth<\/em>\u2014which, you might have noticed, I\u2019m subtly advertising behind me\u2014<\/p>\n Frum: <\/strong>Good for you.<\/p>\n Lewis: <\/strong>\u2014in exactly this point, which is, there\u2019s a great quote from Hans Isaac about Isaac Newton, that people often fancy themselves the Isaac Newton of science, and they actually find themselves the Isaac Newton of alchemy. Even very smart people do make these catastrophic errors. And they have a saying in the social sciences: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras<\/em>. But that mythology\u2014that, like, I am John Proctor; I\u2019m Galileo<\/em>, saying, I am Ignaz Semmelweis<\/em>, the guy who believed in a germ theory of disease and got laughed at\u2014is so potent for a class of people who already had fairly large egos, have been through some kind of rejection or trauma by what they see as the liberal establishment. And then, if you\u2019re now presented with a chance to say, Maybe they\u2019re all wrong, and I\u2019m the only one who\u2019s right<\/em>, I think that is why so many of them went bananas during COVID.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Do you follow comedians under the age of 40\u2014the next generation? Can you make any comments about the future trends?<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> One of the things that\u2019s really interesting is, obviously, the move from, sadly\u2014well, you\u2019re embracing the brave new video world, but some of us are still very text-based, and the move from consuming text-based content on the internet to video is one of the most profound shifts of this kind of current decade we\u2019re living through. Comedy is very well placed to take care of that.<\/p>\n So I\u2019m gonna butcher both their names, but Vittorio Angelone, who\u2019s an Irish comedian, has become very popular through that short-form video. In the U.S., there\u2019s a guy called Gianmarco Soresi, who posts lots and lots of stuff online, is incredibly popular. And the thing that\u2019s interesting about them is that they\u2019re both under 40, I think\u2014I wouldn\u2019t classify them as either kind of woke or anti-woke comedians. They are people who are of the generation where this argument has sort of already happened for them, right? They know that Donald Trump is a menace, and that\u2019s kind of taken for granted. But they also know that the kind of people who make you sit in a pronoun circle are very annoying.<\/p>\n And one of the reasons I like comedy is that it is a way of testing where people actually are. I don\u2019t know if you do this when you write a long feature\u2014when I write a long feature, I always try and have one word in my mind that is the kind of uniting theme. And for Riyadh, that theme was complicity<\/em>. Because when you laugh at something, you\u2019re complicit with it. If someone tells a racist joke and you laugh at it, you have signaled that that\u2019s okay, right? An anti-Semitic joke, you\u2019ve laughed\u2014the comedian has brought you into a communion with them. And then I felt the same thing about taking money from Mohammed bin Salman to kind of whitewash the reputation of his country: It\u2019s complicity. And that\u2019s why comedy poses these quite big ethical questions.<\/p>\n And there\u2019s also a really good test of whether or not it\u2019s any good, in a way that there isn\u2019t\u2014 theater, maybe you can rate how many people have fallen asleep by the end, but a comedian is either funny or not. And so they\u2019re either in tune with the mood of their audience at that particular time\u2014and it dates so incredibly quickly that it\u2019s always kind of contemporary and energetic.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> You helped me understand why I don\u2019t love it so much. I don\u2019t like the idea of being in a big hall with people, and someone says something, and you say, That\u2019s the signal\u2014you\u2019re all to laugh. Everybody here, laugh<\/em>. And I was like, You\u2019re all laughing? <\/em>And maybe I\u2019m now guilty of the same thing [as] the anti-woke people: I need to take my time on this and think it over. I\u2019ll laugh at what I damn well please to laugh at and not what the crowd tells me to laugh at<\/em>. And so maybe I am my own narcissistic anti-woke monster all on my own.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> No, but I think that\u2019s probably why you\u2014not to, sorry, put you on the couch and psychoanalyze you here\u2014but I think that\u2019s why, unlike a lot of people in your intellectual milieu, you ended up being very early and very strongly anti-Trump in an uncompromising way, because you just didn\u2019t want to be one of the crowd and do things for the easy life, right? I know exactly that feeling you mean, because I feel it too. I always sit there like the guy in Life of Brian,<\/em> like, We\u2019re all individuals!<\/em>, and I\u2019m like, I\u2019m not!<\/em><\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> (Laughs<\/em>.)<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> That\u2019s often how I feel about comedy. I feel like I\u2019m sort of resistant; I\u2019m fighting it\u2014which is why, when it\u2019s good, I appreciate it more.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Yes. So were you able to talk to any of the people who\u2019d been at the Riyadh festival? Did they give you their thoughts on your one word, complicity<\/em>?<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> I talked to Andrew Maxwell, who I knew already; he and I have both appeared on BBC shows. One of the things that I always try and do for The Atlantic<\/em> is give you the best version of the opposing argument. Now, I wouldn\u2019t go to Saudi Arabia and take government money in order to perform there. I think, as a moral thing, I just wouldn\u2019t do it. But I wanted to hear, in good faith, from somebody who had done it what their rationale for doing it was. And clearly, for some of them, it was just like, I\u2019d like to redo my conservatory or get a new patio or pay off my fifth ex-wife<\/em>, or whatever it might be.<\/p>\n But Andrew did make a very sterling case, which was: Saudi Arabia\u2019s changing fast in a more socially liberal direction<\/em>\u2014it\u2019s becoming less overtly misogynistic, for example; it is becoming a more normal Gulf Arab country by that metric\u2014and I want to help that process. I want to be part of the enlightenment<\/em>, I guess, reaching there<\/em>, people hearing that, actually, you can keep pushing and pushing and pushing and push a tiny bit and push a tiny bit. And maybe, one day, they\u2019ll be making jokes about Mohammed bin Salman over there without getting locked up.<\/em> It\u2019s not gonna be immediately, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Well, that\u2019s so interesting because if they had had the Riyadh concert music festival, and you were interviewing a great concert musician, they could legitimately say, Look, I\u2019m an artist. I don\u2019t do politics. If people wanna hear music, I will go, and I obviously have to make a living, but I also wanna share the unspoken language of the arts, the nonpolitical message of the arts<\/em>. And you think, That\u2019s not a crazy thing to think<\/em>.<\/p>\n But the whole point to comedy is, because it\u2019s spoken, because it\u2019s a commentary on human life, it inevitably has social and political content. And so these so-called political podcasters, these so-called comedy podcasters whom you described at the beginning, they are some of the most important political voices. And they play a double game\u2014I think Jon Stewart invented this\u2014where, on the one hand, they\u2019re holding people to moral standards in a kind of irreverent way, but then, when anybody says, Well, what about your moral standard?<\/em>, [they say,] Oh, I\u2019m just telling jokes. None of the rules I\u2019m applying to others apply to me<\/em>. And so you get the Joe Rogans and others who are encouraging people not to take lifesaving vaccinations. And then when you say, You\u2019re doing a really <\/em>bad thing here. If people die of measles, you have an important part of the blame<\/em>, [they say], What are you talking about? I was just asking questions or making jokes<\/em>.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Yeah, that\u2019s the bit where I get up on my moral high horse, definitely. Red Scare<\/em>, which is one of these very popular podcasts, had Nick Fuentes\u2014the Groyper leader and anti-Semite in chief\u2014on, and they said, Oh, we\u2019re such big fans of you<\/em>, and there\u2019s this kind of nihilism, this kind of \u201cLOL, nothing matters,\u201d as if this is all happening purely at the realm of discourse. And someone asked me about it, and I got into a small rant about the fact that it is only two generations since young American boys were dying on the beaches of Normandy in order to stop Europe succumbing to Nazism. How unbelievably disrespectful is this to the incredibly comfortable life that you have that you can\u2019t even hold yourself back from criticizing some weird virgin on the internet. You\u2019re not being asked to storm Normandy; you\u2019re merely being asked to not to do podcasts with an avowed anti-Semite, and even that is too much to ask of you. I find it\u2014<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Well, we notice something else about Nick Fuentes. I saw that he did this clip with Piers Morgan where Piers Morgan asked him a bunch of questions about his sex life\u2014and so when you call him a virgin, it\u2019s based on that\u2014where I don\u2019t think what Piers Morgan understood when he was doing that grilling was Nick Fuentes was playing the part of a podcast comedian. That Nick Fuentes, every time he answered a Piers Morgan question\u2014Do you think women should vote? Do you think Black people should be property? Have you ever touched a woman?<\/em>\u2014that, if you watched it, you realized that Fuentes was doing an ironic double spin, as if to say, Maybe this is true; maybe this is not<\/em>. What is happening here is, I\u2019m in the comedic zone, where there are no moral implications to my words, and this old duffer doesn\u2019t understand the game that is being played on him. He\u2019s trying to take me as if text still mattered, as if words still mattered, when what we all know is that it\u2019s only affect that matters<\/em>.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Yeah, that\u2019s that [Jean-Paul] Sartre quote about how difficult it is to debate with anti-Semites, right, because they don\u2019t have to be sincere. Everything for them is a joke and a game, and you\u2019re the one who\u2019s left kind of trying to enforce standards and rules. And you do see that across that pod\u2014when we talk about podcast comedians, I guess the sphere that I\u2019m talking about is Joe Rogan; Lex Fridman, who was a researcher at MIT, is now a very popular podcaster; Theo Von. (Laughs<\/em>.)<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Yeah, Theo Von. But aren\u2019t Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes basically doing comedy too? When Candace Owens comes before the courts of law to say, You owe the Macron family so much money for your outrageous lies<\/em>,. isn\u2019t that going to be, ultimately, her fallback, to [say,] I was engaging in satire<\/em>?<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Yeah. I spent the first 10 years of my career writing about feminism, and a there was a lot of Oh, can\u2019t you take a joke?<\/em> from people who were playing that exact double game. There was a whole, like, Oh, get me a sandwich<\/em>. And it was always kind of like, No, no, the joke\u2019s on you if you take it too seriously that we mean this seriously\u2014but we do mean this seriously, and we are trying to intimidate you out of public life<\/em>. There\u2019s a huge amount of that that goes on.<\/p>\n And you\u2019re right, there\u2019s another thing that happens\u2014I call it wounded baby bird syndrome\u2014where someone like a Joe Rogan or a Lex Fridman will interview Trump, right; both of them interviewed him in the run-up to the election. So they are performing the role of a journalist interviewing a politician\u2014and on some of the most popular platforms in the world, more popular than the platform that you or I have. But they will still act like they\u2019re just in their little shed, like they\u2019re a kind of mom-and-pop store, right? This kind of, Oh, little old me, I can\u2019t be expected to do any research or prep. I\u2019m just a podcaster. I\u2019m just a little birthday boy<\/em>. And I find that so despicable as well. Take this job seriously. Take your audience seriously, and be respectful to them. And don\u2019t kind of constantly say, Why is everybody attacking me? I\u2019m just doing my best<\/em>.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Yes, yes. So that\u2019s back to your one word, complicity<\/em>, because you first make the audience complicit\u2014<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Well, also, there was something that was embarrassing about all that Trump podcast tour, right, which was, it was just sort of celebrity mutual masturbation in the sense they were just excited to have Donald Trump on the show, like, I get to sit next to Donald Trump<\/em>, which is, as a journalist, is just\u2014I think we should really bring back that being very uncool, right, just being overawed by your subjects. You\u2019re there to do a job. If you\u2019re going to be a plumber, you don\u2019t get to kind of act like this.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> There\u2019s an audience failure here too because, in the end, the audience doesn\u2019t demand more\u2014what we all thought was the check, what one would\u2019ve thought in, if you were a host on 60 Minutes <\/em>in 1985, and you were interviewing a candidate for president or vice president, and you didn\u2019t do any research, didn\u2019t do any preparation. But now, the politician comes on, the host doesn\u2019t know anything, hasn\u2019t read anything, doesn\u2019t ask any serious questions, and the audience says, We love this. We love this a lot more than we ever did having the hard question asked<\/em>.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Yeah, I think being amateurish is taken as being more authentic, and that is just a kind of cultural reaction against very high-production, very choppy news\u2014the intense artificiality, I think, of a lot of TV journalism\u2014that this is seen as being more authentic.<\/p>\n And you know what? There are things to be said for it. I will defend the Theo Von interview of Trump because he didn\u2019t try and massively press him on his potential tariff policy; he talked to him about his overbearing, violent father and his alcoholic brother, who seemed to be quite sensitive, and what an effect it had on a young boy to watch his sensitive older brother get bullied by a father and then die of alcoholism. And I, actually, from that, I understood a little bit more about the psychology of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> But look, I agree with you about the artificiality. In the olden days, there was a lot of: Politician comes in and says something, and then the interviewer, using a host of recent college graduates, produces the video montage that says, But you said something completely different 16 years ago in Schenectady<\/em>. And you think, So what you\u2019re punishing the politician for is not saying exactly the same thing at exactly all times, at exactly all places, for not being even more of a robot than they already are?<\/em> That\u2019s kind of a dumb gotcha and not a helpful gotcha. Because, in the olden days, the host would never admit to having any standards, never believing that free trade is better than protectionism, the only way you could hold a politician to account was by discovering some inconsistency with the politician\u2019s own views, and then the response to that was to become a super-robot.<\/p>\n So that was bad. And there was a point where you needed the host, actually, to be willing to at least implicitly say, Protectionism is bad, and free trade is good, and that\u2019s why we\u2019re going to ask you these questions about tariffs<\/em>. And if they won\u2019t do that, then it\u2019s useless. But we\u2019ve now drifted into a world in which most people who get most of their information are getting it in these ways, from these sort of found experiences with people who pridefully don\u2019t know anything and are often intoxicated while not knowing anything.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> I was really surprised, actually\u2014I was looking at Joe Rogan\u2019s daughter\u2019s Instagram feed, for various reasons. (Laughs<\/em>.) And there\u2019s a photo of her and her sister and her mom and Joe Rogan in the Oval Office, and they\u2019re all grinning \u2019cause they\u2019ve been invited in by Trump. And I find this kind of fascinating, and I guess it\u2019s something that, as journalists, we have to reflect on: what of our failures led us to this moment. But I constantly hear, Journalists are far too cozy with power, so cozy with power<\/em>. And so we\u2019ve been usurped, or replaced, by people who are literal friends<\/em> with the people that they\u2019re reporting on\u2014the new Pentagon briefing room that\u2019s full of MAGA influencers, whose only qualification for that job is access, right, is groveling that leads to access, or the mad, influencer-only briefing that Karoline Leavitt had where she got asked kind of questions that were sort of like, By how many percentage [points is] tractor production up this year, Great Leader?<\/em><\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Or that incident with, speaking of complicity, where MAGA influencers came to the, I think, the White House to receive binders about the Epstein files and to pretend that there had been some release, when what was in the binders was old information, and everybody knew it was old information, and they agreed to be props in a fake show of fake transparency by a White House that was actively engaged in covering up President Trump\u2019s connections to [Jeffrey] Epstein, about which we continue to learn more and more all the time.<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> Yeah, I think that was quite a sobering experience for some of them because they were publicly humiliated\u2014an experience that happens to many people who come into the Trump orbit, right, which is that you think other people are the marks, and then you discover that you\u2019re a mark as well. And sure enough, most of them just pivoted straight back to doing the con job themselves.<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Well, I\u2019ve been stressing this point about audience responsibility, so for people who enjoy comedy more than I do and who enjoy these podcasts, if you\u2019re going to keep watching them, how do you become a better consumer of them? Is it just a matter of smoking less, or is there a filter you can put on the end of the cigarette to make it less harmful?<\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> I always try and consume both content and the opposition to that content. I think that\u2019s a quite good habit, right? You wanna consume the popular content and the best criticisms of it. And what\u2019s kind of a fascinating dynamic that\u2019s happened is, if you go on Reddit, quite a lot of the Subreddits, the forums that discuss these particular shows, have really turned on their hosts in a way that\u2019s really quite lively and energizing. The Lex Fridman Subreddit, someone\u2014who can say who\u2014moderates that in an incredibly North Korean style, so any criticism of him is removed. But the Joe Rogan Subreddit is just full of people going, Why are you such a sellout?<\/em> We came to you because you were anti-establishment, and now you\u2019re sucking up to this guy? What\u2019s happening?<\/em> So I find, that\u2019s\u2014<\/p>\n Frum:<\/strong> Is that opposition, or is that just intensification? Like: Joe Rogan, the problem is, you\u2019re doing too much homework\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n Lewis:<\/strong> (Laughs<\/em>.) No, the great challenge for all of them was that they presented themselves as anti-establishment, and they\u2019ve become the new establishment, right? That\u2019s\u2014<\/p>\n