Malice, Michael

author, most recently of The New Right; ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs; author of Dear Reader, a book on North Korea

Michael Malice: Anarchy, Democracy, Libertarianism, Love, and Trolling

Lex Fridman Podcast · Oct 2, 2020

• Michael Malice
• anarchism
• libertarianism
• trolling
• cancel culture
• Ayn Rand
• Objectivism
• academia
• 2020 election
• conspiracy theories

Core ideas

Malice, a self-described anarchist, opens by arguing anarchism is not chaos but the absence of a coercive monopoly on rule-making — order that emerges the way language, markets, or ant/bee colonies self-organize without central command. He contrasts this with democracy, which he considers merely a "nicer" form of the same underlying coercion (majority-imposed rule), and repeatedly invokes COVID-19 lockdowns as a live example of state overreach he finds illegitimate. Discussing trolling — his signature public persona — he distinguishes what he considers "good" trolling (Andy-Kaufman-style provocation that ultimately conveys affection, in-group familiarity, or "taking down the eye-rollers" who perform cynicism) from cruel or merely nihilistic mockery, while conceding his style is easy to misread and doesn't scale well to nuanced conversation; he argues nuanced discourse on hard topics like race and policing largely only survives in long-form podcasting, not on social media. A recurring, sharply stated claim is his outright rejection of the idea that ordinary people are "deep down" capable of rigorous, independent thought — a view Fridman repeatedly challenges and refuses to accept without data.

A long section covers conspiracy-adjacent and contested political material: skepticism toward mainstream media's historical objectivity (citing Yellow Journalism-era precedents), sympathy for social media's decentralized, personally-verified information over institutional gatekeepers, and mistrust of the CDC/WHO as COVID information sources. Malice recounts the Iraq War as costly and unaccountable, discusses the Holodomor as a comparatively neglected atrocity next to the Holocaust, and argues Hitler would be judged less harshly by history absent the Holocaust specifically. He offers extended commentary on the 2020 candidates (regarding Biden as more centrist by voting record than rhetoric would suggest, and Trump as rhetorically anti-establishment but often moderate in governance), dismisses the Unity 2020 third-party effort as historically naive, and — prompted by Fridman — speculates about the risk of Trump invoking martial law, while noting George W. Bush's restraint after 9/11 as a comparison point. On libertarianism, he argues it functions less as an electable party and more as an idea-generator that gets absorbed into the mainstream (citing the "last resort" framing of war, drug decriminalization, and skepticism of civil-asset forfeiture as libertarian ideas that later spread), and gives a sympathetic account of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, defending Rand against critics who he says disown her more idiosyncratic positions (a woman-president essay, absolutist claims about "no metaphysical significance") as "not really Objectivism," which he calls intellectually dishonest.

The conversation's most contentious stretch concerns cancel culture and academia. Malice calls cancel culture a systemic, "Maoist" phenomenon rather than a diffuse mob, and argues elite universities function as ideological indoctrination machines regardless of department, proposing (provocatively) seizing university endowments as a punitive measure. Fridman pushes back at length from his own experience at MIT, distinguishing engineering/hard sciences (which he says remain largely apolitical and are unfairly tarred by critiques aimed at humanities departments) from the humanities, while agreeing academic bureaucracy and some ideological currents are real problems; the two explicitly agree to disagree about whether the solution is dismantling versus reforming universities. Malice recounts the Richard Stallman/MIT controversy (Stallman was pushed out after correcting the use of the word "rape" in a thread about Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein) as an example of cancel-culture dynamics, prompting a broader discussion — with visible discomfort and hedging on both sides — about the risks of false accusations versus the importance of taking sexual-assault survivors seriously. Malice also discusses Curtis Yarvin ("Mencius Moldbug") as an intellectually serious but politically radical figure he partly agrees with (on approaching politics unsentimentally) and partly rejects (on Yarvin's openness to a military coup), and distinguishes the "alt-right" (which he defines as centering race as the primary political issue, originating mostly in blogs rather than 4chan) from 4chan/8chan meme culture, which he describes as cruder but not identical.

Later, more personal sections cover Malice's own approach to online criticism (he advises Fridman, who describes being hurt by being called a "fraud," to treat hostile strangers as one would an erratic person on the street rather than a good-faith interlocutor, and to lean on time and blocking rather than reasoned rebuttal), his book recommendations (James Burnham's The Machiavellians, Rand's The Fountainhead, Thaddeus Russell's A Renegade History of the United States), and closing reflections on mortality and meaning — Malice says he doesn't fear death, framing his life's purpose (echoed in his North Korea book Dear Reader) as leaving the world "a little bit better" where the marginal impact is highest, and closes with a canvas metaphor for treating life as open possibility rather than a fixed track to control.

Excerpts