Malice, Michael

anarchist author, journalist, podcaster; author of The Anarchist Handbook and The White Pill

Michael Malice: New Year's Special

Lex Fridman Podcast · Dec 31, 2021

• Michael Malice
• anarchism
• Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell
• Michael Alig
• The Anarchist Handbook
• The White Pill
• national divorce
• New York vs. Austin migration
• Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony debate
• Anthony Fauci criticism
• Trump and Biden character sketches
• friendship and political disagreement

Core ideas

The conversation opens on philosophical territory — Dostoevsky's "beauty will save the world" line and Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture on it — before Malice stakes out goodness, not beauty or truth, as his favorite of the classical triad, arguing goodness is the "easiest default state of being" precisely because it requires no special skill, unlike truth or beauty, and that "even bad people appreciate beauty." This sets up a recurring theme of the episode: how to morally judge people whose public and private selves diverge, or whose politics one might otherwise dismiss — illustrated via Michele Bachmann (a polarizing conservative figure who has adopted roughly twenty foster children) and a friend who fosters elderly, unadoptable dogs, both offered as cases complicating simple judgment by political persona alone.

This theme carries into an extended discussion of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, prompted by Maxwell's ongoing trial. Malice draws a contrast with Michael Alig, a 1990s New York "club kid" scene figure he knew personally (and whose prison paintings he owns) who murdered and dismembered an associate — Malice describes Alig as a legible, diagnosable sociopath, and contrasts this with Epstein's ability to evade scrutiny for decades specifically because of his wealth and social status, which Malice frames as the real danger: unaccountable people, not necessarily more evil people, do far worse things once they know they're untouchable. He extends this into a discussion of Rosemary Kennedy's lobotomy (ordered by her father Joseph Kennedy and concealed from the family and public for decades) as a historical example of the same dynamic, and speculates — while noting he is not fully informed on the case — that Epstein's unexplained wealth and lack of any visible trading record may support a hypothesis (which he attributes to a "major reputable" magazine investigation rather than his own reporting) that his business model involved compromising powerful people rather than legitimate asset management. On the specific question of Maxwell's culpability, Malice argues (via a "twitter poll" thought experiment about paid assassins) that being an enabler who normalizes wrongdoing to a victim can be worse than being a paid instrument of harm, since the direct actor can at least psychologically distance themselves as "just doing a job."

Malice discusses his own books at length: the surprise commercial success of The Anarchist Handbook (which reached the top of Amazon's nonfiction chart), which he frames as a chance to rescue overlooked anarchist thinkers and writers (Tolstoy among them) from obscurity, and his approach to producing its audiobook by recruiting different readers for each chapter's distinct author voice — including a story about instructing a reader to narrate a chapter advocating political violence "like a phone sex operator" to capture the seductive, rather than simply repellent, psychological pull of revolutionary violence. He also discusses the ongoing writing of The White Pill, describing his process as producing a rough, uncensored first draft (borrowing writing advice from Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan) before heavy editing, and recounts how the book evolved from an originally planned meditation on Camus (a project he abandoned after rereading The Myth of Sisyphus and finding it thinner than remembered) into a narrative, character-driven argument for historically-grounded optimism — the idea that "the good guys" tend to win over long, non-linear stretches of history, illustrated by the unsustainable costs of empire.

A significant portion of the episode is a personal, informal retrospective on 2021: Malice's move from New York City to Austin, Texas, which he frames as a decisive "leap" driven by a loss of hope and rising cynicism he associates with New York's pandemic-era restrictions (contrasted with what he sees as Austin's optimism, exemplified by Elon Musk and Joe Rogan), alongside reflections on friendship with Rogan and Musk, a wild 24-hour anecdote involving a wedding, Las Vegas, and meeting David Goggins, and general life advice for young people (seek mentorship rather than peer advice, take large risks early, avoid comparing yourself to others, set firm personal boundaries, and find small tangible markers of accomplishment). Discussing politics, Malice argues for "national divorce" (a voluntary cultural/political separation of parts of the U.S.), while candidly presenting the strongest counterarguments himself — that America's cultural fault lines don't separate geographically as cleanly as North/South did in the Civil War, that a weakened, divided America would embolden hostile foreign actors, and that the symbolic and historical value of "America" as a unifying idea might not be one worth discarding. He recounts attending a debate between Yaron Brook and Yoram Hazony on nationalism, expressing sympathy for Hazony's grounding in tradition while maintaining his own anarchist skepticism of centralized power generally.

On more contemporary political figures, Malice offers deliberately balanced characterizations he presents as a discipline (being able to name something genuine to admire in a political opponent): praising Trump's ability to maintain functional relationships among his children across three marriages and his instinctive "everyman" social register, and praising Biden's improvisational warmth and ability to connect across the aisle, while also criticizing what he sees as Trump's incuriosity about history and Biden's more "slippery," practiced political manner. He is critical of Anthony Fauci, saying he would want to directly question him about the initial public messaging discouraging mask use (which he characterizes as a deliberate falsehood told for what were possibly good intentions) and about Fauci's role in AIDS-era public health policy, while also acknowledging Fauci's substantial scientific career and stressing that a productive interview would need to "steal-man" — rather than simply attack — the reasoning of people who chose not to get vaccinated. He voices discomfort with the public, mutually critical breakdown in the friendships among Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, and Bret Weinstein over COVID-era disagreements, arguing that private, direct disagreement (a phone call) is more honest and humane than public callouts between friends, and that he tries to separate how much he likes someone from whether he agrees with their politics.

The episode closes on more personal reflections: Malice describes feeling the pull toward eventually marrying and having children, working through the decision earlier in the year with a partner who he says would have been, by his own account, a strong parenting match, ultimately deciding the lifestyle tradeoffs weren't yet right for him; on mortality, he says he thinks mainly about his legacy, expressed through his books, and states his hoped-for legacy is having "taught people to be free" and modeled that kindness and hope should not be treated as embarrassing or naive.

Excerpts