Anatomy of a mugging: Jesse Singal beats up David Roberts in front of his friends and steals his shoes

On effective invective

Photo by Matthew Ball on Unsplash

Chris, the cynical, cadaverous night manager of the diner at which I used to do my homework in college, used to say “There ain’t no six billion people in this world. Ain’t no more than sixteen hundred, and at least half of those fuckers are following me.”

I would rephrase that nugget of wisdom more simply as “people fall into types,” and it is reliably applicable to the overwhelming majority of journalists. Their opinions are carbon copies of one another, they write in the same style, and their performative moral outrage is inevitably framed in identical terms. I point this out because when I first read Jesse Singal’s article “I Would Like To Thank Not Only The David Roberts, But All The David Robertses Out There,” I literally had to double check to make sure the first article I wrote on Substack wasn’t about the exact same moralizing climate journalist.

I’ve quoted a good chunk of Singal’s article here, but you should read the whole thing. To summarize, David Roberts is an unscrupulous climate journalist who decided to white-knight trans people in order to boost his own brand, and in so doing took a swipe at Singal. Singal’s rebuttal of Roberts’ unprovoked personal attack on his character, which reads like Freddie deBoer declaring jihad on the unrighteous, is a master class in invective. I was so impressed by it that I am departing from my usual modus operandi of tearing bad takes to bits today in order to highlight how good invective is constructed. Let’s get to it.

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I gotta apologize.

I read Singal, Michael Tracy, and Freddie deBoer because they seem like they’re as close as a journalist vetted by the establishment is going to get to the way I see the world—they’re (mostly) clear-eyed pragmatists who are sympathetic to people who have had a raw deal, and while I disagree with some of their conclusions, I think their analysis is generally very good. It has to be; their brands are essentially variations on “The Last Reasonable Man,” so if that analysis departs from reality, their subscriptions evaporate.

Reading a TLRM journo begin a column with a dramatically mild apology is a bit like watching Bob Odenkirk’s character in Nobody walk into a biker bar, close the door behind him, and lock it. Studied mildness is so out of character for any of these guys, who write with the kind of pugnacious authority that comes from the knowledge that the only thing they have to sell is wordsmithing, experience, and integrity, that the contrast between this piece and Singal’s usual style, which I would describe as “well-researched pushback against institutional dishonesty,” is jarring. Deliberately subverting a reasonable expectation is a reliable way to make something funny and/or frightening; it’s the secret sauce in both comedy and horror.

Initially, I tweeted my praise of the article. I thought — it’s embarrassing to even admit this in retrospect — that Bazelon did a good job threading a very difficult needle. While reporting accurately on the controversy itself, she also discussed the exacerbating factors of the numerous ill-conceived Republican attempts to ban these treatments altogether. This sort of legislation only makes it harder to have a thoughtful, evidence-based conversation about this area of medicine.

Overall, I believed Bazelon’s piece to be a highly competent, well-executed treatment of an impossibly fraught subject.

Believed. 

Odenkirk strolls up to the bar, his hands in his pockets, and orders a Diet Sprite with a curly-wurly straw and a little cocktail umbrella. He is wearing a pastel polo shirt, khakis, and boat shoes. In a bar full of tattooed ex-convicts dressed like Arnold in Terminator 2, he is somehow the scariest man in the room. The only thing that could raise the intimidation factor would be if he took out his wallet to show the bartender the photos he and his family took on their vacation to the Grand Canyon.

The ingredients to a slow burn are as follows:

1. Be relentlessly reasonable in spite of the fact that circumstances are such that you would be entirely justified in being unreasonable. If you are not seen as reasonable, or cannot present yourself as such, you will not be able to make it work. The fact that your motivation is something everyone can sympathize with is the engine that drives this type of invective.

2. Be polite. Do not raise your voice. Do not use inflammatory language. In fact, the challenge in this situation is to keep your presentation as mild as you can. It’s a challenge because you’re genuinely irritated.

3. Do not, under any circumstances, break character. The juxtaposition between Singal’s inherent reasonableness and the social transgression committed by Roberts creates tension. That’s what’s scary. MMA analogy: Someone with their arm in a joint lock is in pain because the arm has not yet broken. They tap out because it hurts and they would like it not to break at all. But if they don’t, and the arm does break, regardless of how agonizing the resulting pain, the tension disappears. The implied threat of that broken arm is more frightening than the reality. If Singal broke character, the tension would be relieved.

Then I came across David Roberts’ tweets. Roberts is a journalist who usually focuses on energy and the environment — he’s worked for The Grist and Vox, and like apparently everyone else, he now has a newsletter. Forever ago I interviewed him about his decision to take a yearlong break from social media because he didn’t like what all that time online was doing to him (a subject that’s definitely not relevant to this piece, nope, not at all).

Odenkirk chuckles and shakes his head as he begins to tell the bartender about the strangest thing that happened to him this morning, completely out of the blue. You just wouldn’t believe it.

What sells this has a lot to do with the fact that Singal clearly knows what he’s talking about. In his case, he has a reputation for being able to present the receipts. His reputation juxtaposed with the “aw, shucks” way he presents the facts are crucial to the tension he’s creating.

I don’t believe Roberts has ever written anything about youth gender dysphoria, if Google is any indication — this doesn’t appear to be an area of particular interest for him. And yet he issued a searing public condemnation of Bazelon. “The wild thing about this is that @emilybazelon is a great journalist on other topics,” he tweeted in response to Michael Hobbes (who we shan’t be discussing today), making sure to tag her. “Something about this just absolutely breaks people’s brains.” (Note that right around when I was finishing up this piece, a bunch of the tweets I’m going to be referencing disappeared, apparently deleted by Roberts. They were all live earlier today. I tried to archive them beforehand using archiv.ph but ran into some technical difficulties. Either way, I have screenshots of them — apologies if the archived links don’t work. It doesn’t look like Roberts offered any explanation for why he deleted the tweets, which had been up for almost a week, but if he does say anything I’ll update the piece here.)

“One thing I’ve always found fascinating is when a pundit who is incredibly sharp/skeptical/insightful on most topics turns to a particular subject & then just completely abandons all those virtues, apparently without realizing it,” he continued. “I used to notice it more often around the subject of Israel, but lately the cancel culture/transphobia thing has provided more examples that make me think, ‘jesus, you would *never* accept evidence or reasoning this flimsy in your main subject area! Can’t you see that?’”

A tell that you’re dealing with a journo who works in the public interest as opposed to one who doesn’t is their reaction to hypocrisy. Journalists are, as I’ve said before, motivated by a combination of genuine moral outrage and gleeful, mean-spirited bloody-mindedness. But if the moral outrage isn’t genuine, they’re hypocrites themselves.

If I may make a religious analogy, the faithful object to heathens, but they loathe heretics. In the religion of journalists, hypocrisy is heresy, and heresy is a mortal sin. One reason journalists are by and large mistrusted in America is that their stated mission is to protect the public from institutional overreach, yet so many people who call themselves journalists so consistently use their powers in the service of institutional authority that it’s reasonable to start by assuming someone who presents himself or herself as a journalist is dishonest until proven otherwise.

Where people go wrong, though, is in assuming the MSNBC and CNN talking heads or members of the NYT Editorial Board are journalists. Journalism is by definition adversarial. If you’re using journalistic techniques to promote an establishment position or feather your own nest, you’re not doing journalism, you’re doing either propaganda or advertising. The friendliest a journo should ever be toward establishment positions is neutral, and putting your integrity and that of your guild up for sale is contemptibly tacky.

Singal is a journalist. Roberts is a propagandist who misrepresents himself as a journalist. To someone who actually does the job, misrepresenting yourself as doing the job qualifies as stolen valor. That on its own would be cause for Singal to be pissed, but misrepresentation of one’s position is so omnipresent in journalism today that he probably would have rolled his eyes if Roberts hadn’t made it personal.

Roberts was making a series of big public claims about a very well-regarded journalist: That she was suffering from a broken brain, that she had abandoned all of her journalistic virtues, and that she had accepted extremely flimsy evidence and reasoning. And it was frustrating, to Roberts, that Bazelon couldn’t see the errors of her ways, especially given how obvious it was to him.

Initially — initially — I was confused about this tirade. I’d read the same piece as Roberts but just didn’t think his claims matched the text. So I asked him what specific problem he had with Bazelon’s article. He replied: “She does what you do, a bunch of ‘raising questions’ that already have answers, talking to ideologues as though they’re just people off the street, exclusively centering parents hostile to transition, & citing not one single solitary case of a transition being ‘too fast.’”

Odenkirk smiles sadly and holds up the photograph of the bartender releasing the parking brake on the Odenkirk family sedan at the Grand Canyon that fateful day.

The best slow burns don’t reveal the motivation of the author until so much tension has been created that the reader is anxiously shifting in his or her seat. Roberts is a hypocrite and a disgrace to journalism. But this piece would never have been written if he hadn’t shot John Wick’s dog.

Motivation is always ultimately personal. It is always based on an event. Something has to happen for people to decide to act. This is as true in life as it is in literature. How much of a shit one gives and how that give-a-shit manifests is determined by how many removes the problem being solved is from the event that gave rise to that motivation. TLRM journalists have personal motivations for writing what they do. I don’t claim to know Singal’s, but TLRM journalist and cultural critic Freddie deBoer is candid about his, and what he writes tracks exactly with his stated motivation. Singal typically takes aim at the metastasized excesses of liberal cancel culture in general by illuminating the specifics and demonstrates that the issues the zealots of that movement insist are simple are actually nuanced and complicated. He’s very good at it, but his targets are almost always poorly-thought-out ideas rather than individuals—he shines his reportage on them like a spotlight. This piece is what it looks like when he focuses it on an individual like a laser.

In my weakest, lowest moment, my head started to fill with uncharitable thoughts about David Roberts. To be clear, I definitely don’t endorse any of these thoughts now — we’ll get to my awakening — but at the time, they were thoughts like: I don’t think this guy has any fucking idea what he’s talking about, and as far as I can tell he hasn’t devoted one minute to doing actual reporting on this subject. Thoughts like: Who the fuck is this asshole to barge into an area where he’s done no reporting and talk shit about a journalist who clearly did a good job on a difficult assignment? I’m ashamed to report there were even worse, less charitable thoughts, like: If this guy is such a giant, sanctimonious, veiny prick on this subject, shouldn’t that mean I should stop trusting him on other subjects closer to his own purported areas of expertise?

“Not that I’d ever consider using my particular set of skills to take everyone you’ve ever loved away from you and burn down everything you’ve worked your entire life to achieve before locking you in the trunk of your car and rolling it off a cliff like you did to my family at the Grand Canyon, you understand. I’m just discussing hypotheticals.”

Then, all at once, I got it.

Giving someone an out that isn’t actually an out is a time-honored journalistic twist of the knife, but a light at the end of the tunnel that’s actually an oncoming train can be subtle or it can be obvious. This one’s obvious.

The difference between subtle and obvious Kafka Traps is that only shitty people use subtle ones. Singal has painted a sign on this one that reads “THIS IS A KAFKA TRAP!” While it telegraphs the trap and thus disarms any potential criticism that he’s being manipulative by using intellectually dishonest rhetorical tricks, the trap is still there. You can wear an enormous cowboy hat ironically or you can wear an enormous cowboy hat sincerely, but at the end of the day, you’re wearing an enormous cowboy hat regardless of your reason for wearing it.

I realized I’d been thinking about this all wrong. My attitude had basically been that it was profoundly obnoxious for Roberts to claim that the questions surrounding youth gender transition “already have answers,” given what appears to be a massive number of people and institutions on multiple continents who think this is actually pretty complicated.

Singal is very good at putting himself in other people’s shoes. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a position of his own, but he can see what the world looks like from the perspective of someone who’s not him. His reputation for being able to do so makes the combination of reductio ad absurdum, justifiable irritation, and weaponized empathy especially nasty. To my autistic brethren, take note: There’s facts, and there’s the interpretation of facts, and getting good at seeing the other guy’s point of view allows you to spin his interpretation right back at him. Doing it gratuitously makes you either an asshole or a highly paid standup comic. Doing it effectively when the other guy is clearly in the wrong makes you look like...well, try to imagine being David Roberts reading Singal’s piece.

Anyway, all this would seem to call into question Roberts’ views on this issue, as well as his qualifications to chime in on it at all, let alone to so harshly attack a fellow journalist who appeared to have produced careful work that quoted just about everyone who should be quoted. That is, if he is so clueless as to think the questions have all been answered — an opinion that is impossible to hold if you have the remotest familiarity with this area or have ever read anything about it from a credible source —  maybe he should just sit down and shut the hell up until he does a little homework?

…Is what I thought at first, I’m ashamed to report.

I won’t make you wait any longer. I want to explain how I snapped out of this incredibly unhealthy mindset.

Odenkirk laughs and slaps the bar. “…but then I realized if my wife and kids hadn’t wanted to plummet four thousand feet to their deaths, they shouldn’t have been sitting in the car playing Mad Libs while I went to get us all ice cream, right?”

What I’d failed to account for in my old path toward understanding this issue, which had involved antique methods like “talking to people” and “reading research” and “accepting that not every question is going to have a clear, easily summarized answer,” is that the world isn’t nearly so complicated. I’d been seduced by the siren call of Nuance, that incorrigible bitch, and she had led me down a slimy rabbit hole to a very bad place, fraught with bigotry. How the hell had I become the sort of journalist who raises questions? It’s disgraceful behavior.

I decided to lash myself to the mast of Twitter certitude — a much firmer option, in these troubled times, than “curiosity” or “critical thinking” (you know who else was curious and “just asked questions”?). Once I did, I realized that I was completely wrong; I had misjudged David Roberts.

When it comes down to it, there are Good People and Bad People. David Roberts is, unlike me, a Good Person. Being a Good Person, he not only possesses moral clarity (which I sorely lack), but a moral clarity so clear it’s practically invisible. And if you have a gift like this — an ability to see the truth without doing any of the legwork usually required to get to that point — why on God’s green earth would you withhold it from others? Wouldn’t it be unethical to do so? Like not administering penicillin to a patient dying from an infection? So whereas I initially criticized Roberts for his harsh treatment of Bazelon — whereas I previously, but definitely no longer, considered his behavior to be what would happen if a mad scientist conducted a freak genetics experiment mating a gadfly with an asshole — I now have to thank him. 

I have to thank him for showing me how wrong I was to think that things can be complicated, and for teaching Emily Bazelon the same invaluable lesson.

You don’t do effective mockery by getting the facts wrong. You do it by interpreting them in a maximally uncharitable way. In this case, Singal is effectively using reductio ad absurdum, demonstrating the wrongness of his opponent’s premise by taking his argument to its logical conclusion, to point out what the world would look like if you applied Roberts’ worldview consistently. Hypocrisy is inconsistency in the way one applies moral rules. Singal is consistently moral in his public statements. That’s not to say he’s always right (or even that he’s always moral by the standards of others). But it is to say he always follows the same set of rules. That’s what it is to be ethical.

I don’t always agree with TLRM journalists/bloggers. I think, for example, that details of the methods by which Freddie deBoer has said he thinks we could get to a just society won’t work with regards to intergroup dynamics, because I think he’s misconceived aspects of the problem. But I have yet to see Freddie act immorally when he’s in his right mind (I’m talking about his public statements and actions here, because I don’t know him personally), or to see him not be a total fucking mensch about the times he’s acted immorally in public, and the same is true of other good journos, of whom there are a few. And while I’m less familiar with Singal’s work (I haven’t been reading him for as long as I have Freddie), the particular way in which he’s skewering Roberts is a method that no one with a track record AND a serious ethical deficiency could or would use, because it relies on the fact that he’s accountable for his ethical consistency.

As I wrap up, I want to say dayenu to David Roberts. It would have been enough for him to have snapped me out of my question-asking and nuance-mongering. But he went above and beyond. After correctly calling out Bazelon for her article — an article so terrible we don’t need specifics about why it’s terrible, because if it wasn’t terrible why would people on Twitter be saying it’s terrible? — he did something truly brave: He looked inward.

“I can’t imagine caring what gender other people decide they are,” he said. “Clearly tons & tons of people are bothered by this on a deep level & go out looking for justifications, but ... I just don’t understand being bothered in the first place. So many real things to be upset about.” 

He continued: “It makes me wonder what kind of subject might affect me in that way, such that I find myself obsessed with backfilling reasons for some impulsive disgust. I can’t really think of anything. Maybe I’m just hard to disgust?”

The bartender’s hands start to move for something under the bar. In a blur of motion, Odenkirk tosses his Diet Sprite in the bartender’s face, vaults the bar, and glasses the guy in the forehead. All of a sudden, the bartender is in a headlock with blood in his eyes and the muzzle of a pistol jammed into his ear.

Singal, having established his own bona fides, is now addressing Roberts’ character. If he’d done that without first doing the slow burn, it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective, both for reasons of pacing and because he not only established that he’s reasonable in the first part of the piece, but that background established the reasons he’s morally justified in being gratuitously nasty. Being a mean son of a bitch without cause might make people afraid of you. If you do it often enough, though, they will eventually realize it also gives them grounds to call the law on you, whatever that might mean situationally. But most people intuitively understand a justified ass-kicking.

Again, the bravery here is staggering. In full view of the entire internet, Roberts decided to publicly grapple with the possibility that he could write an article as harmful as Bazelon’s, that he could ever be driven — as he says she was — by mere base “impulsive disgust.” He did the work. He looked hard and determined… no, he couldn’t ever mess up as badly as she had. He’s a Good Person. 

This is what moral courage looks like: Standing up, accepting the possibility that you might have the same flaws as others, and publicly concluding that no, it turns out you don’t.

Odenkirk smashes the bartender’s face against the bar as punctuation with each word. He’s still speaking in the same reasonable tone, but now he’s raising his voice.

There’s only one actual David Roberts, of course, which is unfortunate given how much more he has to teach us, especially about other areas where he doesn’t appear to have any knowledge or experise in the traditional sense, like the war in Ukraine or the NBA’s advanced analytics revolution. Luckily, Twitter is, in a very real sense, full of David Robertses, or Davids Roberts (my grammar, like my level of moral clarity, leaves much to be desired). Even more luckily, a larger and larger proportion of journalism now consists of these types. As “traditional” reporters — the sorts of folks who don’t see it as their job to express strong, unwavering opinions, and who constantly “raise questions” if they can squeeze it in between all their visits to Klan rallies — have been laid off, their ranks have been filled in by think piece auteurs who don’t need to engage in reporting or research since they already, being Good People, know all the right answers. It’s a much more efficient system, to be honest.

I’m so grateful to be alive right now. So grateful to be a journalist.

The bartender desperately reaches for the shotgun under the bar. As he wheels around, Odenkirk blows his brains out. There’s a beat, the body of the bartender slumps to the floor, then Odenkirk puts his pistol on the bar and pours himself another Diet Sprite from the fountain. He sips it, smiles and nods politely to the patrons, and departs. No one’s dumb enough to follow him.

The most important lesson any journalist with any sense will take from Singal’s article is “One’s motivation to write is always personal, so taking a gratuitous swipe at the character of someone with a platform and a demonstrated gift for rhetoric is a bad career move.”

Social dynamics are essentially mathematical, and a useful way to figure out a seemingly complicated social math problem about journalists (and people in general) is to reduce it like you would a fraction. Ask yourself, “What would these people be like if the world were high school?” Using that heuristic, Roberts is one of the popular-ish kids on the school newspaper, and trashing kids who are both less popular and more talented than you are is a semi-reliable way to make yourself look good by comparison if you’re a high school kid. That leads me to believe this was literally a career move, because TLRM journalists are not popular on journalist Twitter.

It’s a commonplace that “Twitter isn’t the real world,” and I assume Roberts picked this fight because that’s something he believes. The dynamics of social media are a lot like high school, which has a lot to do with why it’s a free-fire zone for social bullying. But in the real world, no one is obliged to play by high school social rules, and this is what it looks like when someone who’s used to playing by high school rules tries to pick on someone who isn’t.