In December, Marshall announced he was marrying Melissa Chen, a journalist at a conservative magazine—The Spectator—that his father was, as of June 2023, thinking of buying. “One day,” she tweeted this year, “I hope [Marshall] will no longer be defined by or asked about his cancelation from his band; and that the experience of leaving something he loved so much in order to be free, would be the least interesting thing about him.” The most interesting thing his “cancelation” has yielded so far is Dissident Dialogues: 18 hours of talks, panel discussions, historical raps, and standup comedy by speakers such as Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Kathleen Stock, on such confused and disparate topics as, “Why Civilised People Undermine Civilisation,” “The Uyghur Story,” “What is the Future of Feminism?,” “Lucretius,” “Are We Past Peak Woke?,” “The End of ‘Gender Medicine,’” and “Debate: Israel’s War on Hamas is a Just War.” Several of the attendees, most of whom had paid between $299 and $2,999 to be there, told me they wished there had been more of the “debate, discussion, disagreement and discovery” the organizers had promised. Others enjoyed it for what it was: an opportunity to meet their favorite “anti-woke” podcasters, YouTubers, and social media influencers in person. It was, a young woman named Vita told me, “Twitter come to life.”
It was an apt description. The very first talk, “Why Civilised People Undermine Civilisation,” was delivered by Michael Shellenberger, the author of San Fran-sicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, who has racked up a million followers on X by relentlessly owning the libs. His presentation—which featured a bizarre series of slides documenting the opioid crisis, the proportion of college students who are “disciplined or threatened with discipline” for “expression,” the frequency with which the establishment press writes about “racists” and “racism,” the “Seven Pillars of Civilization,” and how “police are almost exclusively presented as the bad guys in Hollywood films” (they are?)—was meandering, disjointed, and mercifully brief. Shellenberger’s comment that “it’s, ‘We Shall Overcome,’ not ‘We Shall Remain Victims Forever’” drew scattered laughs.
The debate over whether or not Israel’s “War on Hamas” is “just” was one of only two discussions I attended where there was substantive disagreement among the panelists. An online poll revealed that 71 percent of the audience saw Israel’s war as just before the debate began. As the only participant clearly aligned with the contemporary U.S. left, commentator and lawyer Briahna Joy Gray, who served as Bernie Sanders’s national press secretary in 2020, was jeered by the audience throughout. Having unwittingly chosen a seat near a vocally pro-war group of women, I heard them mock Gray’s voice, manner, and appearance (“She’s a clown with clown makeup!”) and shout at her while she was speaking. At one point, podcaster and journalist Michael Moynihan sneered at Gray’s suggestion that Palestinians be granted the right of return: “It’s not as if seven million Danes would be coming in,” he said. When Gray suggested the comment was racist and asked what he meant by it, he said that Danes had never vowed to destroy Israel.
