Podcaster Joe Rogan and NYT writer Bari Weiss talk about the Covington Catholic school boys.

Rogan wonders how "a hat with white letters" has become "so repulsive to half the country." His guest — Bari Weiss (a NYT columnist) — says "some people see it as the equivalent of a white hood." Rogan counters: "Kanye wears it."

Weiss: "It was this perfect encapsulation of our outrage culture." The little clip was "like a Rorschach test." On her first look, she saw the boys as bullying. But "The challenge of what it means as a journalist is to not see people as signifiers, as stand-ins, based on their identity." Weiss finds it "horrifying" that blue-check-mark Twitter adults were saying "This is the face of white patriarchy — the 16-year-old kid.... Reza Aslan said have you ever seen a more punchable face... Kathy Griffin was saying I need names, shame him, dox him. How do these people not see the implications of that?... The fact that adults who should know better are fomenting this and don't see how thin... the veneer of civilization is — like they're taking a pickax to it."

Rogan agrees with all that. He decries the "lack of nuance" and "people taking one side versus the other and sticking with it" and "not confronting their own personal biases" and "looking at these things through the eyes of This is the enemy/I'm on the good side/They're on the bad side/Let's get them."

Rogan shifts to the subject of his childhood. His parents were hippies and he grew up "living in the middle of the hippie world." And he thought of people on the left as "well-read, kind, compassionate people." And now, it seems to him — just in the last few years — "people on the left are calling for violence." He's missing something here, but it's nice to know that his parents were kind, and he's an interesting example of a person whose initial affiliation is with the left, so that he's inclined to think what the people on the left think of themselves, that they are the good people. So now he finds it "very confusing."

I had to pause to look up how old he is. He's 51. He's working on a theory that social media is making the difference, causing people to say "punch Nazis," etc., when they would not say that in person. Social media is having an effect, but I don't see why Rogan is ignoring/forgetting the left-wing violence that went on before Twitter arrived in our world. The hippie aura is powerful.

Rogan and Weiss talk about how the word "Nazi" has been expanded so that it covers a 16-year-old in a MAGA hat and irrationally justifies violence against him. Weiss says: "That's what a lot of people in very high positions of power in this country — at least in the culture — actually believe, and they don't understand the implications of hollowing out words like that." She works at The New York Times. "I know this personally, because I'm called alt-right, I'm called an apologist for rape culture, I've been called everything. I'm a centrist. I'm a Jewish, center-left-on-most-things-person who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and is super-socially-liberal on pretty much any issue you want to choose. If I'm alt-right, what words do we have left for people who actually are that?" And if you use "Nazi" for a kid in a MAGA hat, what word is there for a hard-core white nationalist?

Rogan says he gets called "alt-right adjacent," even though he goes left on everything ("except guns").

Weiss says that when she first saw the still of the smiling boy, she had a visceral reaction, calling up memories of her schoolgirl days when teenage boys said cruel things to her, but she knows, and other adults ought to know, that you don't stop there. And if you're calling yourself a journalist, "your job is to figure out the facts of the case, not to make this into a kind of identitarian morality play." But that's what so many journalists did, and when more evidence came out, they only dug in.