UNLOCK 28.1 Adam Johnson Exposes the Sophistry of Fart Sniffers

Antifascist Dad Podcast Episode 28.1 Adam Johnson Exposes the Sophistry of Fart Sniffers Solo episode with clips featuring Adam Johnson, Matt Lee, Matthew Miller, and Mark Carney --- Matthew Remski: Welcome patreons, to episode 28.1 of Antifascist Dad podcast. This is called Adam Johnson Exposes the Sophistry of Fart Sniffers. Now I've got two cold open clips for you from Adam Johnson. Adam Johnson: Palestinian violence necessarily and axiomatically must be gratuitous and pointless and purely based on. It's for the lulz, right? It's terror for its own sake. And Israeli violence by definition cannot be. So you can kill 20,000 children, 20,000 children with lives and universes and mothers and fathers, create tens of thousands of more amputees with no arms and no legs, right? Gaza has the largest population of child amputees in recorded history. And you can do that. And every one of those bombings and every one of those murders and every one of those snipers and every one of those drone snipes and every one of those mowing people down as they waited for food at these so called aid sites, that every single one of those was just a bumbling, unfortunate collateral damage of an otherwise justified military campaign. Now this does not pass the most basic sniff test. It doesn't make sense, it doesn't add up, okay? Matthew Remski: And then there's this one. Adam Johnson: And you had this sophistry just play out in liberal discourse over and over and over again. Meanwhile, just death after murder after murder, after starvation, after dying of diabetes and being dying and taken off dialysis and hospitals being bombed and medical workers being bombed and ambulance workers being bombed. And meanwhile this totally non good faith, you know, not good faith, fart sniffing argument about what Biden could and couldn't do. And then later it's revealed after Biden leaves office, Israeli officials outright say he never asked for a ceasefire. Obviously he didn't. He asked for like better PR and they couldn't deliver it because they're run by a bunch of, you know, fanatics. And that was it. So it was a completely made up narrative that all it did is take pressure off Biden. Matthew Remski: So this coda to my interview with Johnson is not just about impactful criticism, about knowing your stuff and being meticulous with your facts. It's also about how you do it and how it can cut through the fuzz and spaciness of political apathy and liberal entitlement. So I'm going to take a microscope to that second clip a little bit later on in this episode to try to unpack why is so effective as a communicator and an advocate for the oppressed. And as always, you can find me on bluesky and instagram under my name. I'm at YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad and the Patreon for this show, which if you're listening to it on the day that it's released, you already know where you are. But if you're not, if you're listening to it a couple of weeks later, you can get early access or, you know, same day access to these Part 2 episodes by going to NTIFascistadpodcast at Patreon, because that's the deal for subscribers who support the show for $5 a month. Also, you can now order my book. It's called Antifascist Urgent Conversations for Young People in Chaotic Times. The link is in the show notes. So this episode is the coda and denouement, I guess, to episode 28, how to Sell a Genocide with Adam Johnson. The interview and the surrounding context for that episode put the book's actual content on blast. But today I want to turn to the affect that Johnson brings, or I should say embodies, because he's not putting it on. Like I've studied performativity and influence and charisma for more than a decade. I did a lot of theater when I was younger. And with Johnson, I can just tell you that what you hear and see is what you get. He's doing the thing that he sounds like he's doing. And what is he doing? Well, let me start by quoting the great Rosa Luxemburg, who in her 1916 Junius pamphlet wrote the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening. But the question is, how do you do it? Like, who are you speaking to? What are you speaking into and through? Are you persuading an opponent? Are you rallying your allies? How many layers of gauze and dissociation are wrapped around the heads of your listeners? How is it possible that the utterly obvious reality of exploded and vaporized bodies of children in Gaza does not stop people's scrolling, let alone the machinery of hell? Now, I'll start by connecting these reflections with something that I'm developing for next week, which is a show based on an interview with friend of the Pod, Richard Gilman Opalsky. And we'll be talking about a new book by Gabriel Rockhill, which is very complicated, so I'll leave that for that. But Richard opens with a description of the media and culture environment that pervaded the Weimar Republic. This is 1920s Germany, and which Rosa Luxemburg warned us was turning toward fascism after the failure of the 1919 German Revolution. So Richard is talking about that, you know. By 1923, Marxists in Germany started to wonder aloud why the revolution had failed, why Luxemburg had been murdered. Some of these thinkers formed what became known as the Frankfurt School. And their primary challenge was to understand how a liberal capitalist society could provide a short runway into fascist totality. Now, this school developed an interdisciplinary critique to deal with this complexity. And to do that, they incorporated psychoanalysis and sociology to examine phenomena that Marx just couldn't have predicted. And a central focus that they had was the impact of new mass media, radio and film, which people like Theodore Adorno feared would create short attention spans that served totalitarian propaganda. So maybe that sounds familiar. Furthermore, they theorized about the culture industry, analyzing how modern culture intervenes to prevent the development of class consciousness by channeling discontent into consumption and entertainment. And ultimately, Gilman Opalsky characterizes their project as a necessary but also melancholic, sometimes demoralized attempt to explain and to mourn in real time how an organic rage at the material conditions of life can be hijacked by the forces of repression. And I'm starting here because the basic challenge of any Marxist, communist, pro Palestinian activist, trans right activist, environmental protection activist is to assess and deal with the overwhelming numbness and distractibility of late capitalist culture, qualities that the neoliberal status quo rely on for social management. Adorno and Horkheimer and others like Herbert Marcuse were all very worried about radio and television, and if you told any of them about the future of online streaming, they would have been incredulous and horrified. Now, the Frankfurt School was casting a larger net than Johnson's beat of news media analysis. But I think their core observations are crucial to Johnson's project because they set that the culture industry prevents class consciousness by transforming discontent into entertainment and consumption, as I mentioned. So nobody is encouraged to develop a kind of awareness through the pursuit of clear information, study and dialogue. Workers attention is fragmented, their emotions are seized upon to channel frustration into consumptive habits rather than organization. And ultimately, mass culture and capitalism acts as a moat that isolates individuals from each other and from their interests and ensures suffering leads to, you know, commodity excitement instead of the antagonism that characterizes social struggle. Now, if we narrow this down to the scope of how to Sell a Genocide, we see the endless cultural production of American exceptionalism, Israeli innocence, the evil of Hamas, the impossible complexity of the occupation, hundreds of obscuring data and pseudo data points that interrupt the basic flow of empathy that should motivate us when we see children wounded or dead. The moat of culture described by the Frankfurt School includes Johnson's moats of rationalization. Beyond the deadening function of mass culture, we also see the affectation of what I'm going to call liberal tolerance for the status quo. But I think tolerance is kind of too passive a word for something wielded as a weapon. And so I'll give two weapons of this to ground it in which the content of genocide is buried by status quo affect. The first moment is this famous moment in the White House press room where State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller is taking a question from veteran AP reporter Matt Lee, who has done a lot of Global south reporting. Like in Cambodia, he covered the death of Pol Pot, the collapse of the Khmer Rouge. He was actually shot and wounded during the 1997 coup, and he covered the final days of Jean Bertrand Aristide's administration in Haiti. Now, I don't know what Lee's politics are. He seems like an old school, just the facts, ma'am kind of guy, but he obviously knows BS when he hears it. And so this exchange takes place on November 4, 2024, almost a month into the Israeli genocidal response to the Hamas attack. Lee is asking Miller about the October 13 letter sent by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant. And in that letter, they underscored, quote, the U.S. government's deep concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza and seek urgent and sustained actions by your government this month to reverse this trajectory. So Lee is pointing out the conditions have only worsened. And so he's asking for Miller's explanation. Matthew Miller: What we ultimately judge on, which is the results on the ground. The results are not good enough today. Right. Matthew Remski: So that's a fail. Matthew Miller: They certainly, they certainly do not have a passing grade. They have failed. I said they have failed to implement all the things that, that we recommend in that letter. Now, that said we are not at the end of the 30 day period and we are, we are in convert. It's not the end. It's not the end of the semester. You don't give out. You don't hand out grades in the middle. In the middle. Matthew Remski: I suspect that levity is a little bit inappropriate. Matthew Miller: No, you're. Well, you're. I mean, it's. Matt Lee: But look, you guys say they haven't done enough, so it's a fail at this point. Matthew Miller: We are not at the end of where we are able to make an assessment. But I can tell you the situation has not been good enough for some time. And the situation has not improved sufficiently in the 21, 22 days, whatever it is, since we sent that letter. There is still a week or so to go until we reach the end of the period. But there is much more that we need to see them do. Matthew Remski: So the instinct to chuckle there is to make a joke, to adopt a metaphor in which Israel is like some unruly schoolboy who can be brought back into line soon enough. The proceduralism, the obvious show of consternation, that nudge, nudge we all know is for show. That's what I'm talking about. And it wouldn't be complete unless I also talked about the aesthetics. And I kind of hate to do this, but I have to include grooming. Okay, Matt Lee is probably close to 70 and he looks it. He looks like a war reporter who's now finishing out his days as the press pool curmudgeon. He's ruddy, he looks way under slapped. He looks like he smokes. You get the picture? Not quite Columbo, but almost there. And certainly he just exudes this world weary vibe. Matthew Miller, on the other hand, looks like he's made out of silicon that just got freshly peeled out of a mold. Perfect suit skin with a like a cold sushi sheen to it, not a hair out of place. A radiant presentation of the meticulous curation of normalcy. He would transfer almost one to one into a Lego movie and he's got the dialogue to match. Now all press secretaries and spokespeople are going to have a sheen like this if they are also the bearers of the most despicable messaging on earth. We see this in Caroline Leavitt currently and many others. And Matt Lee confronts the facade gently. But when I asked Adam Johnson about whether these in person manners help dig the moat of rationalization, I was getting to exactly this, that these are moments in which the gravitas of the world is abandoned for some form of dismissal, whether it's a shrug or an attempt at humor. And it leaves the person wanting the actual truth of things just kind of stalled out in the cold. Now here's another recent moment that my Canadian listeners might recognize. On March 31, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford held a joint press conference in Etobicoke, which is where I grew up actually, to announce $8.8 billion in federal provincial funding aimed at cutting development charges and accelerating housing construction. Standing outside of where that presser was happening, a woman named Chrissy Isaacs, who is a 45 year old grandmother from Grassy Narrows First Nation is part of a protest. Now, the people at Grassy Narrows First Nation, including Isaacs, have lived with mercury poisoning for decades. And this is a huge political and human rights issue. And so they're protesting and she's shouting into a microphone, demanding compensation for her community and demanding that the Dryden Paper Mill be shut down, because this is a paper mill in the region which discharged about 9,000 kg of mercury into the English Wabagoon river system beginning back in the 1960s. And this contamination is still going on, according to a 2024 study out of Western University. And it has poisoned generations across Grassy Narrows and neighboring Wabasimung independent nations. And so Isaacs's voice is breaking through the event as you'll hear, and then you're going to hear Carney's response. Mark Carney: Ren here in Etobicoke for a two bedroom is down 8.4% compared to last. I can outlast her. I can outlast her. Matthew Remski: What you can't see is Carney's impish but relaxed smile. But I hope you can hear that the entire cohort and most of the press pool, it seems, are chuckling. And this included Doug Ford, the premier who gives actually a big belly laugh, and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow. And the chiefs of both nations who sponsored this protest immediately demanded an apology. And of course, they didn't get it. Now, you can chalk some of this moment up to social awkwardness, like the instinct to deflate and deflect when confronted in public. But if you understood what the interruption was about and your instinct was to laugh and smooth the moment away, that's called power. Now, did Carney know what was being shouted at him and who was shouting it? Well, a spokesperson claimed Carney couldn't hear what Isaacs was saying, but the community rejected this. Isaacs was audible through a megaphone and Carney had passed by the protesters who were carrying large signs and banners as he entered the building. Now, Carney himself didn't acknowledge the comment, dispute the account, or apologize. Now, the further context here is that Carney's government is cutting funding to the department responsible for delivering federal services to Grassy Narrows. And he's cutting that funding by billions of dollars. But also pointing to that department's existing commitments as evidence of the good faith of the government, even though its decade old promises have not yet been met, the Dryden Mill continues to operate. The urban programming that serves Grassy Narrows members living in cities is being eliminated. And the department bearing the cuts is the one that the community needs most. So I can outlast her. Indeed, what didn't happen is that we didn't hear any of the press corps stand up and break the spell of that normalized dismissal. Now, last thing to note here, it was out of character, in my opinion, for Olivia Chow to chuckle along with a crowd. She's a mainstay in Toronto and, you know, even national central left politics. She's the widow of the late federal NDP leader Jack Layton. But she's also the mayor of a city sealing a federal provincial investment deal in that moment. And even if she was clear on the basics of who Isaacs was or the nature of the protest, she still might not have had the gumption to stand on principle in that moment. And so I want to talk about why. What is this spell that so many are under that allows for the world to just roll on as it rolls? There is a useful idea from Pierre Bourdieu, who lived from 1930 to 2002. So he was a French sociologist rooted in Marxist theory, who innovated ideas about what he called habitus, field, and cultural capital. And together, these analyze how social inequality is reproduced through our bodies unconsciously in ways that discipline our interactions before they even have the chance to unfold. If you think about the last time you felt awkward in a social gathering or a workplace event, you know, and not in that particular sense connected with your psychology or your unique neurotype, but in the more generalized sense of, I don't get how I'm meant to be and feel in this room. I feel like there are rules I don't understand. And so, out of a sense of caution, you make yourself inconspicuous until you learn what the rules are. You are feeling what Bourdieu calls the habitus of the space. So let's take a simple, like, benign example, a kind of funny example. You go to a cocktail party for the members of the Canadian National Ballet. The dancers are not only standing with exquisite posture, but they're also kind of neurotically stretching as they chat away. One has a foot up on the tabletop and they're leaning over and they're stretching out. You know that this is happening around you and you're not a dancer. But what will you feel in your body? Or more to the point, what will you start to do unconsciously? My bet is that you'll start standing up straighter. You might not plop your foot up on a windowsill to stretch out your hamstring, but you probably will feel a self conscious pressure that radiates from the habitus of this demographic, the physical habits that kind of express who they are and what they do together. Bourdieu's habitus is a set of durable, transposable bodily habits that people acquire through their social position and their field experience. And these are habits that manifest not in conscious strategy, but in posture, tone, timing, comfort, the management of the body in institutional space. It's what you do with your body before you decide what to do with your body, because your body has been shaped by power. Bourdieu says that this happens in a field or a social space with palpable rules, and that it enacts a form of social capital. Another simple example, this is not benign, but I think it's very recognizable, would be manspreading, where men take up, for instance, two subway seats, where women will take up one and they have no instinct to take up a second one. The standard feminist account of manspreading is that it's a conscious or semi conscious assertion of spatial entitlement. Men taking up room because they feel entitled to it, women contracting because they've been trained to make themselves small. Bourdieu focuses on the training part that becomes unconscious. And he even wrote a book called Masculine Domination that came out the year before he died, in which he talks about posture, gait, gesture, the use of physical space. Women are socialized, he says, into a relationship with their own bodies, governed by self surveillance, a constant monitoring of how much space the body occupies, how it presents, whether it's contained and appropriate. Men grow up in a space that invites expansion and ease, a body that assumes it belongs wherever it is. Therefore, men and women are exercising different amounts of social capital. And in the broadest terms, social capital is the collection of actual or potential resources linked to membership in networks of mutual acquaintance and recognition. So it's not just who you know, but the institutional relationships that you can use. Which brings us back to the White House press room, where behaviors of confrontation are limited by the field and various networks of social capital. So while Matthew Miller can affect the habitus of the institutional spokesman, which is, I'm in a body and I'm trained to perform normalcy under pressure, to produce calm as a display of dominance, to meet grave situations with a kind of frictionless sheen, all of his body signals are saying nothing happening here is outside normal parameters. And you can see it just in the way he stands now. Matt Lee is in a different run down allotment of embodied social capital. Enough to cause friction between him and the podium, but not enough to break the spell of the room, which actually triumphs with the Carney incident. The habitus is calibrated to the norms of the institutional press conference, and Isaacs's voice breaks norms. And I just want to emphasize how hard it is for that to happen. Anybody who protests is trying to break into a thick pall of habitus. The laughter in the press conference, in the press pool amongst the officials there, is the field reasserting its rules, the group re establishing its coordinates, the collective body flinching maybe for a moment and then smoothing over the intrusion. No one decided to laugh. It happened organically as an expression of pre existing power conditions. Carney is traveling, but he's always on his home field. Isaacs, a First Nations woman, is a visitor, an interrupter, ironically. And the habitus of the press conference will quickly restore itself. Now I'll just finish this part up by noting the pathos of where Bourdieu developed his ideas, because I think it's very pertinent to a discussion of how anyone wants to intervene on the subject of Gaza or how a First Nations person speaks to the degradation of the land. Bourdieu was a conscripted French soldier sent to Algeria in 1955 at the age of 25. He didn't see frontline action. He was assigned to teams defending airfields and munition dumps. And in 1956 he was transferred to a desk job where his sort of natural observational skills turned toward noticing the sycophancy of his fellow soldiers compared with the demoralization of the occupied persons. He watched weary displaced Algerian peasants uprooted by the French counterinsurgency into camps, forced from subsistence agriculture into a cash economy they had no tools to navigate. And he saw how deeply embodied habits are formed by material conditions and outlast those conditions, because the peasants carried pre capitalist temporal habits, emotional orientations and practical knowledge into this colonized setting that rendered those habits dysfunctional. So former signs of bodily ease and relaxation and sort of community pleasure were now evidence of laziness and melancholy. And meanwhile he watched his fellow Frenchmen strut about as if they owned the place in a form of, I don't know, like colonial manspreading. So I want to finish up with a real juice. What affect, what skill, what technique punches through the habitus of journalistic hierarchy. Let's listen to Johnson again. Adam Johnson: And you had this sophistry just play out in liberal discourse over and over and over again. Meanwhile, just death after murder after murder, after starvation, after dying of diabetes and being dying and taken off dialysis and hospitals being bombed and medical workers being bombed and ambulance workers being bombed. And meanwhile this totally non good faith, not good faith, fart sniffing argument about what Biden could and couldn't do. And then later it's revealed after Biden leaves office, Israeli officials outright say he never asked for a cease fire. Obviously he didn't. He asked for better PR and they couldn't deliver it because they're run by a bunch of fanatics. And that was it. So it was a completely made up narrative that all it did is take pressure off Biden. Matthew Remski: So the difference between listening to this versus listening to Matthew Miller or Mark Carney at those press conferences is like the difference between listening to elevator Muzak and listening to that nutty New Quebec band on Jean de Patrin. Johnson starts with the term sophistry and then he winds up with fart sniffing. He executes these juxtapositions over and over again in his riffs over hundreds of hours in his podcast. Again, I'll recommend Citations Needed emphatically. And what it does is he's grinding this sociological analysis against visceral low register colloquialisms. And the effect is to delegitimize hoity toity narratives like I kind of did it right there. And the juxtaposition is called bathos. A sudden shift from serious or high minded tone to one that is absurd or vulgar to suggest that elite political discourse is inherently ridiculous. It is sophistry wrapped around a fart. Now, just a side note, the older medieval term for fart sniffer was fart catcher, which was used to degrade a servant who carried the train of an aristocratic lady, because they were right in the line of fire, as it were. And I have to say, it's taken me several takes to get through this recording without cracking up about fart sniffing, because there's something so perfect and disgusting about it. The fart sniffer is so self satisfied that he finds his own intellectual output pleasurable. We're talking about a self enclosed elite marinating in his own output. The press conference as a Dutch oven. Adam is physicalizing and degrading what the target class experiences as intellectual or essential to their self image. He's taking the habitus of the press conference and revealing its stench. And then Adam has this amazing capacity for lists, which is an old rhetorical technique called polysyndeton. So he says: death after murder after murder after starvation, after dying of diabetes, medical workers being bombed, ambulance workers being bombed. He goes on, and it rhetorically mimics the overwhelming flurry of evidence that drives the book. So he's using a kind of affect and aesthetic technique that mirrors the data while also making the sophistry of the political deflections and journalistic minimizations appear small and cruel by comparison. Now, if you heard the interview, you also know that Adam is full of sick, ironic burns, as describing the slaughter of civilians as, quote, a bumbling, unfortunate collateral damage of an otherwise justified military campaign. And then, as we heard, he frames the relationship between Biden and Netanyahu as comedic, as a sketch where nothing ever changes and the same gag is repeated for 15 months where the lessons are baby bird fed to the public by a smug and domineering journalistic class. Long story short, I think many of us are aware of the spaces and the fields of emotional control within which the dominant narratives of empire are told. And I think it's worth paying close attention to what happens when these spells are broken, even if it's not for everyone, even if it's just for us. I think that really good political communication depends on these disruptions. They let our hearts be known, but they are not a mystery. They emerge out of practice and technique. So that's all for today. I'm sure I'll be following up on this theme in the future. For instance, the socialist political candidate, former political candidate for the NDP leadership, and an excellent analyst and political agitator, Eve Engler here in Canada, recently attended the Liberal Party convention and played citizen journalist trying to ask pointed questions of MPs and their support for the illegal war in Iran and Carney's double talk and things like that. And so I want to do a little piece on that. There's also an amazing troupe of activists called Climate Defense who stage these sort of propaganda scenes at political gatherings and fundraisers in New York City. Maybe, you know, Walter Masterson or Davison Boswell. But I'm going to do some more pieces in the near future on how disruptive communication works and what it plays on, what the tools are, because I think this stuff is just so interesting and so important. So I'm always happy to hear your feedback. Take care of each other in the meantime and be well.