Olivia Nuzzi, Mormon Wives, and the Death of Democracy

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi. Great to be with you on this Monday. And want to do two things today. First, want to tell you how excited we are for our bonus live episode that we're going to be recording today, and so can't wait to see all of you subscribers at our monthly live recording. If you're not a subscriber yet, it's $3.65 a month. And if you don't want a subscription, you can support us through PayPal and Venmo at Straight White JC or an indie network, indie show, doing all of this work the best we can. Want to thank those of you who have supported us and just so thankful.

Today, I'm going to talk about the new foreign policy document released by the United States. It's a 33-page document, and I'm going to be sharing that in our bonus content for subscribers. Before I get to that, I'm going to welcome Alan Elrod to the program. Alan is the CEO and founder of the Pulaski Institution, and we're going to talk about Olivia Nuzzi and reality TV and the ways that it's very difficult to have a liberal democracy when the virtues of empathy and understanding are no longer prized in the public square, and we talk all about the ways that social media reality TV really develop our instincts for watching our fellow human beings destroy themselves and destroy others.

And this is something that Alan and I talked about before, but in light of what's going on with the Olivia Nuzzi affair, and also just the ways that I think we're all concerned about the atrophy of empathy in the United States, whether that's coming from Allie Beth Stuckey or Joe Rigney, Elon Musk, it doesn't matter where you turn these days, you have people telling you that empathy is a bad thing. Just this week, Joe Lonsdale, who's a billionaire and a key part of Palantir with Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, said that we need to bring back public hanging and he said this because we need masculine leadership in the United States.

One of the things though, that brought up for me again, was just this desire to see pain and hurt. Another thing that comes to mind here is Megyn Kelly saying that she wants to see people in what are supposedly narco boats in the Caribbean suffering like losing limbs and bleeding out in this kind of thing, like a real open sadism about watching people suffer. I think we need to dig into that and ask ourselves what that means for having something like a democracy where we all share power. We all have a vote, we all have a voice, and we live with one another in cooperation and understanding without violence or coercion, manipulation or simply an authoritarian government that tells us what to do and how to act.

Those seem like basic civil attributes, but they also seem like really lost right now, and so I want to dig into those today with Alan. So if you're subscribers, stick around. I'm going to be talking about what's going on with the United States and basically how our foreign policy is now aligned with the Kremlin but also how it represents what I've been talking about for weeks, which is civilizational populism and Western supremacy. It's not just ideology coming from tech billionaires and theocrats and others. It is now United States policy. So if you want to hear more about that, stick around if you're not a subscriber, today's a great way to check into that. All right. Without further ado, here is my discussion with Alan Elrod.

Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, and joined today for part of our episode with a return guest, somebody who I've gotten to know over the last couple of months and who continues to do amazing work, and that is Alan Elrod, who is the founder and CEO of the Pulaski Institution, and somebody who contributes regularly to Liberal Currents and other outlets. So Alan, thanks for coming back.

Alan Elrod: Thanks for having me.

Brad: I wanted to join today, because you wrote a piece last week that I think was just so insightful and called you up on short notice to say, hey, come talk about it. The piece is really about, you know, Olivia Nuzzi, there's some reality show in there, but to me, the kernel of it is, how does engaging with other human beings through the lens of reality TV and social media and just the kind of worst behavior of our fellow species—what does that do to liberal democracy? And I think that's the question we want to get at today.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to try to run down the Olivia Nuzzi affair. You can jump in with any tidbits that I get wrong. I have not been saturated in this. I am not somebody who is hate reading Olivia Nuzzi's book. I am not stuck to any social media feed in which people are discussing it. I know enough to know enough. And then I want to get to what you said in the piece. So jump in here and correct me.

So Olivia Nuzzi is a reporter. Has been a longtime, long-standing political reporter, has been on the inside of I think what you and I would consider this blue chip, DC beltway, Manhattan-linked media economy—New York Magazine, you know, linked with the New York Times, linked with the New Yorker, linked with these sort of elite northeast institutions, the Atlantic and others. Nuzzi has just found her way into that at a very early age as a reporter, ended up working at New York Magazine and was engaged to another high stakes, high profile reporter, Ryan Lizza.

Alan: Ryan Lizza, excuse me. See, this is why I need your help. Thank you so much.

Brad: Okay, and in the midst—and publicly, there was like cheating scandals already and betrayal, and then all of a sudden, in the 2024 election, we find out that Olivia Nuzzi, in the course of reporting on RFK Jr., got involved in a cyber romantic, cyber sexual relationship with RFK Jr. And this all came out, she was publicly shamed, and then just recently, came out with a book American Canto, that recounts how all this happened and talks about her behavior and how she was seduced into the RFK brainworm erotic sphere, something that I'm sure all of us can just imagine happening. Just why would I not want to be involved with RFK at this point?

But nonetheless, she did, and she was and she explains it. She's on a kind of like revenge recuperation media tour now. I don't know how to really explain that, but what is clear from her memoir is that her behavior has been beyond the pale of anything ethical according to journalistic standards, forever, like just forever. And she even did catch and kill stuff for RFK, which, in non-journalistic speak, means she took stories that would have hurt him, that would have really damaged his reputation as a presidential candidate, and then as a candidate for Trump's administration, and made sure they didn't come to light. And so as a journalist, she not only got involved with the person she was interviewing, but she then made sure that stories about that person didn't come to light and hurt his reputation. Do you need to add anything? Did I get it wrong? Did I get it right?

Alan: I think the only other thing to add is that some of what we've learned has come not from Nuzzi herself, but from Ryan Lizza, who's decided to divulge this information in a series of Substack posts, serialized Substack posts over the past few weeks. Again, a situation where, you know, he's not reporting this in a time where it would have been, you know, helpful, right, in any measurable way in terms of critiquing her reporting or during the campaign, right? This is so even that has a tinge more of gossip and sort of maybe even revenge on his part. He was actually right. He was the person that she was with at the point where she went on this affair, whatever it is, with RFK. He himself has some baggage when it comes to how he left the New Yorker in terms of his conduct there. So it's all very tawdry, right? The way we're learning about a lot of this. Some of it is directed from her own writing, but Lizza's participation in this is sort of lurid in its own part. Yeah, I think that's the gist.

Brad: So if I'm the person out there listening, I can imagine thinking, Well, I mean, I can imagine the tabloids of the '80s or the serialized exposés of like 19th century France, I can imagine that human beings have always been interested in the bad behavior of high profile people next to them, their sex lives, their romantic lives, their whatever is going on. And yet you say in the piece, we are fascinated and even wildly entertained by people's self-destruction, watching them be undone by greed, infidelity, narcissism and a litany of disordered behavior. I think that's been true forever or a long time for humans. It's different, though, in the reality show era and the social media era, and I'm wondering if you just want to expand on that generally before we just sort of dig into some of the more detailed insights from your article?

Alan: Yeah, I'm a big believer—anything I've written about social media or our media environment generally—I'm a big believer that human nature has not changed fundamentally since, you know, civilization started, basically. But we live in a moment right now where the particular tools and the particular media products that are available to us are, I think, one, overwhelming that nature and two, exacerbate some of the worst aspects of it in ways that were just not possible before, right? The sheer volume of content, the interactive nature of social media, the kind of marketplace, right, that it presents in terms of social behavior. None of these things are really possible for everyday people and living their lives, you know, 50 years ago. So I think it's not a question of, you know, have we changed fundamentally as a species? No, but how has the environment in which we're living changed? Yeah, I think radically.

Brad: You zero in on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which is an absolutely hit show in an era where there's so much media, as you just said, and it's hard to gain viewership. It's hard to gain audience. This show is really, really, really, really popular. It's threatening to take down the Kardashians popular, right? And you write that, you know, well, actually, you quote somebody who talks about the women in this show are stuck in seventh grade. They're terrible to each other, and it really is like watching middle school. They're in a drama loop, as it said. They fight, they gossip. They are put together in these situations of like retreats and vacations and social functions. They sob, they form alliances and what we witness there is the really, like the most toxic forms of human sociality, right? And I guess you know that leads to a conclusion that it seems as if our main lenses for viewing our fellow humans these days are through reality TV and social media. What does that do to us as people trying to live in a liberal democracy?

Alan: Well, my view is that it's fundamentally corrosive, right? Because liberal democracy rests on the idea of individuals living together, right? That's the whole theory, right? It's the two words coming together, right? It's individuals, right, who have autonomy and sovereignty and dignity and all the various rights we accord, sort of from the Enlightenment era on to individuals and they live in a democratically organized society. You have to have some baseline respect for one another. You don't have to like each other right to live together, but there has to be some baseline sense of each other's sort of dignity and the sort of general human obligations, mutual obligations, right, of respect. I think that these systems really tear at that.

I'll say for reality TV in general, reality TV has an exploitation problem, but there's a spectrum, right? There are reality TV shows where there's competition and some things that I think actually you can find edifying. You know, when someone on Survivor performs an incredible physical feat, or someone on Top Chef makes a great dish, there are elements of human excellence that can shine through. There are other shows where the product is just these people's lives and the source of drama is just their essentially their dysfunction. Yeah, and Mormon Wives is a great example of that. Now I'm not absolving other shows that have had, I think, frankly, their own problems when it comes to production and the treatment of their casts. But, you know, there are places, I think, where the issues shine through more prominently.

Similarly social media, right, like there are times where it can be an edifying thing. I think we've talked about this before, but at the same time, that potential, that lurking potential, right, for it just to become a mob type situation. And I think what I try to get at is that it's a bizarre thing, because we are both part of the mob and spectators of the mob at the same time. It pulls us into being both participant and audience. And it's also something I think reality TV does in some ways, and invites but I don't think that that's a very good thing. We'll talk about this as an era of democratized media, both because of social media, but also even because of how reality TV can turn anyone into a star. And what I would say is I don't think that the virtues that undergird democracy are actually being promoted or in any way enriched in these places.

Brad: You write, "Liberal democracy is built on the mutual recognition of individual human dignity. Researchers are finding evidence that empathy and curiosity can make us more democratic." I really love this sentence because it made me think of so many things that I've covered on the show and thought about recently. Empathy and curiosity make us more democratic. So if I'm more empathetic and more curious, it means that I probably assume about my fellow humans, the people who I live next to, the people in my city, the people in my community, the people in my state, the people in my country, that there is some way that I can put myself in their shoes and understand them, and that we might find a shared something, a shared sense of what it means to be a good citizen, what it means to be a good person, what it means just to help each other or coexist and curiosity.

And I really loved what you said about certain reality shows. So, Top Chef, somebody makes an excellent dish, we can see, we can think of the early days of American Idol, you know, I think a lot of us were tantalized. And I'm going to date myself, right? Like going back however many years, 15 or 20 years, the Ruben Studdard era of American Idol. And it's like, I think we were interested in seeing human excellence in the form of a performer, especially by someone like Kelly Clarkson, who may have never been discovered unless there was this competition, right? And that seems different when we learn on TV how to win and how to lose, how to not give up, but also to accept that it doesn't always happen for us. Those are things I can teach my four-year-old for sure.

When the ways we watch each other, whether it's Olivia Nuzzi or Mormon Wives, are just to become, as you say, a participant in the destruction of other people's social existence and to be part of the mob who is destroying, then I can see how when we go into the real world, it is really hard to have a liberal democracy, because our whole social education is based on mob mentality and voyeurism, rather than on a shared sense of a public square. Am I getting at the heart of your concern in this article at all?

Alan: And that mob mentality is rooted also, right, in a kind of warped sense of justice. Right? I'll hear people say that Nuzzi deserves this, and I'll go well, I mean, she deserves to be not hired to do journalism because she crossed serious ethical boundaries. But I'm not sure how a person deserves to sort of have their entire sort of interior life aired out. I don't know that that's true. And, you know, this is the thing I also kind of get is these institutions, Vanity Fair, who hired her, The New York Times, who did a sort of glowing profile. I mean, there should have been editors who said, now this isn't, not just this isn't right from a professional standpoint, because this woman abused ethical standards, but also, I mean, she seems not well. And I want to be clear, I'm not a psychologist, and I'm not actually saying that to pile on. What I'm saying is there should have been some guardrails that said, you know, we don't actually have to participate in this, right? We don't actually have to do this. To say to her, even, have you considered not doing this right now, not writing this book, right? The idea that an editor or a publisher or a profiler might actually say this is a bad idea, and I think you should take a beat and step away from it. Is, I think, incomprehensible to us, but I don't think it's incomprehensible to us because it's such a silly idea. I think it's just an indictment of the system we're in right now.

Brad: So I have three more thoughts for you, and I hope they make sense. Some of them are directly related to what you wrote, but some of them are places my mind and thoughts went after reading your piece. So I'm going to be completely transparent about the person who hosts this show every week. There is a rub in how we do this show, because I'm often interviewing really smart people like you, or people who have written really smart books that are kind of obscure. I'm often talking with, you know, Dan Miller is often doing It's in the Code about Josh Hawley's book, which is not in the news. Josh Hawley is not someone most Americans are thinking about—really good lessons. Yeah, yeah. And like, you know, but there's a temptation, I think, for me, as somebody who realizes what would get more listens and more views and more attention, would be like, Hey, let's look at the really stupid thing someone just said and react to it. Like, let's do the reaction videos where, like, can you believe someone just said that? And then make the eyes of shocked eyes, and then go, what an idiot, what a loser. Oh my god, you're canceled. You're a dummy. And people love that. People—and we would get more stuff. People would listen more. They would watch more. They would, and I don't have any interest in participating in that, because it doesn't help anyone and it corrodes our public square more. I don't know if we need more of that. I don't think we need more like can you believe that Kash Patel just said this, and I'm gonna spend an hour talking about how he's an absolute moron, imbecile.

But I, as a podcaster, as somebody who's making content all the time, I feel this—if I did this, Alan, we would get more out of the economy. You know what I'm saying? Because the people who do do it are, they're the ones who get way more of an audience. And anyway, I'm not sure if I'm making sense, and you may just be like, Brad, I'm not your therapist, so just, you know, let it go. But I hope that makes sense just in terms of my honesty about this very niche religion and politics thing that we do here. You know?

Alan: It makes sense to me. I was having this conversation in the Liberal Currents discord even, actually, because you hit on cancel culture, and you mentioned Kash Patel about this with a couple people in the Liberal Currents discord. And by the way, if you subscribe to Liberal Currents, you get to join the discord.

Brad: Which is fun. Liberal Currents is awesome. It is awesome.

Alan: There is a big push right now trying to raise money for Liberal Currents to do what it does. Adam would certainly want me to mention that. So consider giving to the GoFundMe if you can. But I was having this conversation with Catherine Cross, and we were saying, you know, part of the issue is who you're doing it to, right? If Kash Patel says something terrible, he's the director of the FBI. I don't think it's unreasonable to have a conversation about that. And frankly, to point out that he's a, you know, morally delinquent individual in the position that he is—part of the administration of justice in this country.

On the other hand, this goes back to the quote feature is one of those things that was introduced on social media, the ability to repost someone else's words with yours above it, right? So we do, we can share it now—we do on Facebook. It's structured totally differently on different platforms, but it's all there where you can take someone else's post, repost it with your own words attached. That feature is deadly, right? Because that's really the thing that enabled a lot of this, not all of it. But, I mean, because you don't just do it to Kash Patel, right? Some random person with like 100 followers can have it done to them, and suddenly something they said that may or may not actually be representative of who they are as a person, because, as we all know, the things we do online—gosh, I really hope they're not representative of me entirely as a person, because I hope I'm better than some of the ways I am online sometimes, you know, but then it gets blasted out and we all decide to participate in it. Yeah, you know, that's where we get to the whole denying cancel culture is—this is something as a liberal, and any liberal, more in the kind of philosophical than the American sense, but anyone who's kind of aligned to the left of center in the US—it's popular to dismiss cancel culture, to say it doesn't exist and it just does exist. It does exist, and that's part of what I'm talking about when I talk about mobbing and mob justice and people have been on the receiving end of it and had their lives ruined by it.

And people will say, oh, it doesn't really exist, because people don't face consequences. Or, you know, like, yeah, okay, like Donald Trump and Kash Patel don't. But like, the mid-level programmer at this place that got dogpiled and then lost his job, did. Or the random marketing person who had to move houses because they were getting death threats. Did. You know, that does happen, and that's insane. That is not a good way to live. And it kind of loops back to what I was talking about at the beginning, which is, you know, if we're just—this is sort of a Burkean, you know, concern, but if we're just roaming the streets looking for people to indict as enemies of whatever sort of society we think is good, that's really bad.

Brad: So I want to go right there. I want to say just real quick about Kash Patel. I think every time Kash Patel, Donald Trump, JD Vance, anyone in elected office does something that is harmful, moronic, etc., we should comment on it. I think what I'm getting at is our comments—for me, this is me—are about analysis and helping people understand why they're hurtful, why this is not good, why this will hurt our public square, hurt millions of Americans, right? Rather than just the Oh, look at—like, Donald Trump supposedly doesn't smell good. Look at all these reactions of people holding their noses. And we just did a 45-minute podcast about how Donald Trump is stinky. That's gonna get millions of more views than anything we ever do here and I guess I'm saying, like, I don't want to wake up in the morning and do that. That seems wholly uninteresting and unhelpful to anyone.

But what you just said is, I think my second thing—we shouldn't be roving the streets looking to indict people, and I think that is where we are. I really think that if you sign on to Reddit or Instagram, people are streaming. People are—people video everything. I'm gonna get really nerdy for a minute. I'm gonna throw something at you that we didn't prepare for. And you can either be like, Brad, I don't know. Man, I haven't even thought about it. I feel like we're just living in this weird panopticon. But instead of the panopticon being the Foucauldian, you know, prisoner kind of eye on each cell coming from a centralized place. I think we've been tricked into living in the panopticon, because we ourselves think, Oh, I have my video camera. I'm a democracy. I live in a democratized media environment. I get to just videotape everything. We're in reality, I am aware everywhere I go now Alan that someone's probably videotaping me. I could be giving a talk at a church with six people. And I'm like, this is gonna be on YouTube later. So just, you're talking to the entire world, bud, and if you do something wrong, or you get kind of loose, or you feel a little comfy, and you say something that's not right, you're gonna get canceled. And that is how I think, and I think that is what makes living—I live in a very small town in the Pacific Northwest now. And when we go out to the very small downtown there, I'm like, well, somebody could be talking to 80,000 streamers who are not with us and just videotaping right now, because that is the world we live in. Yeah, I think we live in a panopticon. And I think this is what it means to live in the panopticon. And it turns out, it's really hard to have a democracy when you live in a panopticon.

Alan: That we've all elected to help create ourselves, which is horrifying. I mean, yeah, I'll speak vaguely about this so as not to implicate the actual identity. But I have had people back out of events I've put on precisely because of this fear, right? They'll say, oh, I don't have tenure. And if someone decides to film and post something out of context, like, I don't know, I can lose my job. Yeah, all I can say is, you know, I'll have your back, but like, there's nothing I can do if it goes viral.

Brad: Yeah, yeah, there's one more thing I want to hit on, and then we can sign off. Here is the glaring, the glaring low hanging fruit. Here is that your whole piece just unpacks how hard it is to live in a liberal democracy when our entire way of engaging people is based on reality TV, salacious gossip and social media. And yet, the man who is now president for the second time really is president for the most part because he was a reality TV show star. Yes, he was an investor. Yes, he was somebody in real estate. Those were all very failed ventures. His most successful venture is being the star of The Apprentice. Any thoughts on how that plays into all of the kind of insights you provide in this particular article?

Alan: So, you know, I mentioned that early on, that's a thing that people have said about Trump from the beginning, right? Oh, you know, it's an indictment. It is, it is. It's bad that he was a reality TV star and that, I think that helped fashion his particular brand, right? People didn't see him quite the way that they began to see him after The Apprentice, right? Which is actually very successful. But we like to talk about that like it doesn't have anything to do with us exactly, and it just does exactly. Like, yeah, okay, well, that show was a hit for a reason, because we love it. We liked watching him fire people, which is kind of awful, right? You know, going back to American Idol, right? Like, the tension in American Idol is Kelly Clarkson, other amazing talents that were produced on that show. But a lot of people started watching it because they liked watching Simon Cowell be a terror. Yep, and that is the real thing I'm getting at about who we are, right? So, yeah, you know, yeah. Look, we're the country that elected Donald Trump. We're also the country that watched enough seasons of The Apprentice to make him what he was.

Brad: Yeah, yeah. And now, I mean, I guess for me, it leads to—a lot of us are horrified. I mean, I hope we're horrified when we see the DHS propaganda videos that are clearly made for content.

Alan: Yeah, it's humiliation kink.

Brad: But to me, there's the path from The Apprentice stardom to the humiliation kink of the DHS ICE raid content video where they are in the most militarized gear, and Kristi Noem is somehow tagging along. They're shooting in six camera angles, and it all looks like the best version of a spy movie you've ever seen. There's a direct line from we elected a reality TV show star—this is how he thinks we should do the kinds of work to promote DHS mass deportation crusade.

Alan: Well, the more discomforting thing is that there's a lot of us who watch those videos and find them repellent, and then turn around and watch something like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives or, you know, that may not be your show, right? I'm sure there are all of us have something right, or even just participating in social media dogpiling. It's like, okay? So you know when the political cues are there to make it clear that that's something we should not like, you know, we can turn that part of our brain on and say, this is really horrible, but the aspect of our nature that wants to watch people get degraded and humiliated is still there, or these other things wouldn't be popular. And it's like, it's not just conservatives consuming these things.

Brad: That's right. I really love how you're not letting us off the hook here, right? I mean, and by us, I mean me, and people who are listening to this show, watching this show, who ostensibly are not into the DHS raids and hate them and so on and so forth. All right, before we go, can I give you the one person from social media that I feel sorry—truly, I feel terrible for every time I see them pop up. It's the kid from three years ago who did a dance. He's English. It's like, this comes from England. He's like 12. He has floppy brown hair, and at the talent show, he did a dance to a Notorious B.I.G. song. And he's always on stage—you're looking at me like you don't know this clip, but he's on stage, he's doing it. And objectively speaking, Alan, he's not a good dancer, okay? He's back. But what has happened is that clip, I am confident, has been shared billions of times, and it's used now as a short, a short GIF to say, Oh, I'm so excited. It's Friday, and then there's this kid on stage doing what, objectively speaking, is not very good dancing, like a shuffle and a raise the roof. And I'm just thinking to myself, this is funny, I guess. This kid's 12. He tried something new. He went to a talent show. He did a dance, and now, for the rest of his life, I'm sure he has been traumatized by the fact that 7 billion times people have laughed at him dancing and that—I know I maybe sound like a killjoy here, but anytime I see that thing shared, I'm like, that poor guy is probably 17 now, and God knows what that's done to his life. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, that's my little—

Alan: We don't give like that a choice. They can either learn to take it on the chin and have a good attitude about it, in which case we will embrace them, but we don't have a lot of sympathy when they don't.

Brad: Yeah, it's—I don't know. It makes sense as to why kids, teenagers would walk around with their hoods on, not want to disclose anything about who they are, not want anyone to know what they're up to, because we're just going to do this to them. So all right, Alan, tell us where we can find you. Tell us about places your work is appearing, and make sure we can go find you.

Alan: Well, you can always find me weekly at Liberal Currents, where I have a column and I am a contributing editor. You can find me elsewhere on the internet, at places like The Bulwark, The Unpopulist, and other places. You can also obviously look at the work we're doing with the Pulaski Institution. We have some things that we're trying to cook up in terms of partnerships and more events. So I'm excited about things. And then I have other things that I can't officially disclose yet, but I'm excited to soon.

Brad: Yeah, yeah. Soon we will get that news, hopefully. But for now, go find folks. Go find Alan at Liberal Currents and read Liberal Currents. Jamelle Bouie says to read Liberal Currents. So I should probably say that too. All right, folks, as always, there's more to come this week. It's in the Code and the weekly roundup. All right, y'all subscribers, stick around. It's time to talk about the US foreign policy, Western supremacy, and how we are basically aligning our foreign policy with the Kremlin. There's some really alarming stuff in a new document. If you're not a subscriber, check it out now, or you can donate at Straight White JC on Venmo and PayPal, and I'll send you a link to all of our subscriber and participant stuff. You get invite to our Discord, ad-free listening, access to our entire archive, bonus content like this on Mondays and much more. So check it out. If you can, it is really the way that we can do this show. We can't do it without y'all.