Malice, Michael

self-described anarchist author and political commentator; author of Dear Reader, The New Right, The Anarchist Handbook, and, discussed at length here, The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

Michael Malice: Christmas Special

Lex Fridman Podcast · Dec 15, 2022

• Michael Malice
• The White Pill
• Soviet Union
• Stalinism
• Holodomor
• Bolshevik Revolution
• Gorbachev and the fall of communism
• propaganda and journalism
• anarchism
• Ukraine

Core ideas

Billed as a costumed "Christmas special" built around the release of his book The White Pill, the conversation alternates between comic banter (rival Santa/holiday outfits, running jokes) and an extended, serious walkthrough of Malice's book, which traces the history of 20th-century communism as a case study in how ordinary-seeming ideas can produce mass atrocity — and in how, in his telling, that trajectory was not historically inevitable. Malice opens by describing the late-19th and early-20th-century socialist, anarchist, and communist movements as a broad, genuinely contested intellectual ferment rather than a monolith: Marxists favored eventual state control as a transitional stage toward a stateless "full communism," Bakuninist anarchists rejected the state as inherently corrupting, and Fabian-style gradualists sought change through electoral politics rather than revolution. He argues it is easy, in hindsight, to treat communism's authoritarian outcome as obvious, but contends that from within the world of 1900 the case for it — ending exploitation, illiteracy, and destitution by having society "scientifically" run for the common good — was a genuinely compelling, idealistic vision, not an obviously doomed one.

Much of the conversation is Malice's account of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin's rise to power: Lenin as an ideological zealot who nonetheless proved tactically flexible (the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, the later New Economic Policy retreat that hardline communists saw as a betrayal); Trotsky as the more brilliant strategist undone, in Malice's telling, by both his own arrogance and his Jewish background making him politically unviable as Lenin's successor in an still-antisemitic Russia; and Stalin as the less ideologically gifted but far more effective political operator who out-maneuvered Trotsky through patronage and party control. Malice describes recurring dynamics he sees across authoritarian systems: the need for external and internal scapegoats when reality fails to match the promised ideology (he traces this through Trotsky's demonization, Stalinist "wrecker" purges, and Lysenkoism's rejection of Mendelian genetics as ideologically unacceptable), and a climate in which even private doubt, not just dissent, becomes dangerous — he argues citizens of totalitarian states lacked not just freedom of speech but "freedom of silence," since visible neutrality itself invited suspicion.

The most extended and grave section of the conversation concerns the Holodomor — the early-1930s Soviet-engineered famine in Ukraine, which Malice, citing historians Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder, describes as a deliberate campaign of forced grain requisition, targeted "kulak" persecution, and internal-passport confinement that produced mass starvation, including documented cases of cannibalism, and which he characterizes (citing prevailing historical assessment, while noting the question is debated) as intended in significant part to break Ukrainian national identity and political resistance rather than as an unintended side effect of collectivization policy. He discusses at length how most Western journalists in Moscow — most prominently Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who had previously interviewed Stalin — either denied or downplayed the famine under pressure from Soviet censors and their own ideological sympathies, contrasting this with the small number, like Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, who reported it and suffered professionally (Jones was later killed) for doing so; he offers this as a case study in how access, institutional pressure, and motivated reasoning can corrupt journalism regardless of individual journalists' intentions. He extends this into a broader argument, developed at length with Lex, about why atrocities a government commits against its own citizens (the Holodomor, Mao's Great Leap Forward, North Korea) receive far less sustained cultural attention than atrocities occurring in the context of interstate war (the Holocaust), which he attributes partly to the "narrative" logic of news media requiring an external villain and a call to action.

Malice describes the Great Terror and NKVD purges — mass arrests, forced confessions extracted through torture and threats against family members, the persecution of anyone with a "bond" (ethnic ties, foreign contacts, friendships) that could constitute an alternative power base — as evidence that Stalinist totalitarianism sought to atomize society and eliminate all loyalties competing with loyalty to the state. He discusses Beria's brutality (including the use of a signed death warrant Malice states he owns) and reflects, when pressed by Lex, on whether Stalin and his subordinates knowingly did evil or gradually rationalized it through constant flattery and ideological self-justification, concluding that surrounding oneself with people whose job is to explain away one's failures likely erodes self-awareness over time regardless of underlying character. He then narrates the more hopeful second half of his book's arc: Gorbachev's rise as a leader shaped by his own family's suffering under Stalin, his explicit refusal to send in tanks as Warsaw Pact states (Poland's Solidarity movement, Czechoslovakia, East Germany) peacefully broke from Soviet control in 1989, and Boris Yeltsin's famous emotional reaction to the abundance of an American supermarket as a symbol of the gap between Soviet propaganda and lived reality. Malice frames this as the book's central "white pill" thesis: that even after periods of immense, systemic evil, meaningful and often largely peaceful moral progress is historically possible and was, in this case, achieved against near-universal expert prediction that it could not be.

The conversation ranges into adjacent, more contemporary and contestable territory where Malice is offering personal opinion rather than historical reconstruction: he is critical of what he sees as excessive cynicism in modern culture and media (arguing sincerity and joy are treated as artistically less legitimate than despair), supportive of Elon Musk's early Twitter transparency moves and the "Twitter Files" disclosures as a check on institutional bias he sees as a cross-partisan problem rather than a left-or-right one, skeptical of both "wokeness" and reflexive dismissal of institutional critics as conspiracy theorists, and measured but sympathetic toward Ukrainian civilians in discussing the 2022 Russian invasion, which he discusses as a continuation of much older Russo-Ukrainian tension he traces partly to the Holodomor itself. He also touches more briefly and speculatively on Iran (arguing Americans underestimate how liberal Iranian society once was and that authoritarian crackdowns are sustained partly by fear of losing legitimacy if protests succeed) and self-publishing (which he prefers for speed, creative control, and revenue share, while conceding it carries a stigma and vetting-quality tradeoff relative to traditional publishers). The episode closes, in keeping with its holiday framing, on personal reflections about childhood belief in Santa Claus and a direct appeal for listeners to buy the book.

Excerpts