Safe Spaces for Snowflakes
Do you require a safe space? The conclusion of Being a Professional Adult, and what are the rules for new cousins? Our Big Get is Professor Tom Nichols. And, as usual, On The Bottom Shelf.
Happy Veteran’s Day
America has always been great because so many men and women put country before self and don a uniform to protect us. Thank you to all the men and women who have put on that uniform.
Safe Spaces for Snowflakes
'“What you read and think is what you will create” — Nate Bargatze
There was a time in America where you could demonstrate your bravery by joining the military or becoming a first responder. Bravery was an admired virtue by most Americans and it’s one reason that our nation has been on the forefront of global democracy.
Today, angry Americans, i.e. those who are angry and fall for fake posts about Hunter Biden’s mythical laptop or one discussing thousands (or is it millions?) of dead individuals casting votes for Joe Biden, are being blocked on their once-favorite social media platform. Instead of engaging in basic critical thinking, these individuals are signing up in droves for new platforms such as Parler.
For those not otherwise aware, Parler is a knockoff of Twitter but instead of the ability to engage with a variety of views and opinions from an endless array of sources, you get to wall yourself off and spend your days engaging with white supremacists and people who think JFK, Jr. is about to make a miraculous appearance to free every child currently held in sexual bondage. Like you, I cannot imagine a better way to spend my free time.
Free speech is a great thing. It’s what allows us to criticize our leaders and it’s one of our cherished American values for a good reason. A company policing its own platform for content that is deliberately false and purely designed to enrage and inflame isn’t censoring your speech so much as it is being a responsible corporate citizen. The larger question that should be asked here is why people are so threatened by having their assertions challenged that they require a limited echo chamber of their own creation in order to protect themselves from anything which they might possibly disagree. After all, the Right has spent the last four years telling us that people who are afraid of opposing viewpoints are little more than fragile snowflakes. It’s rather pathetic that such people feel the need to create their own private safe spaces.
Being a Professional Adult, Part Two
This is continued from last week’s edition.
5) It’s Not About You
In fact, it’s NEVER about you. Amateurs are self-centered and always trying to find ways to get themselves noticed. A true professional understands that receiving credit is far less important than accomplishing the task at hand. Be the one who cares about getting the job done and you will be amazed at the opportunities you will be presented with. As C.S. Lewis once said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”
6) Never Be the Smartest Person in the Room
If you look around and find that you are the smartest person, get up and walk out, or invite some smarter people in with you. In your working life we often call that networking or team-building.
In fact, one of the hallmarks of a great leader is someone who isn’t afraid to be surrounded by people who are more qualified than he is. You will be challenged more and learn more and will ultimately become a better person for it.
7) Be a Character Ninja
Ninja’s were legendary warriors who devoted their entire lives to the craft of war. A professional is also a character ninja; someone who is dedicated to building and developing their own character. The person you are becoming is far more important than whatever job you might have at the moment. Keep a journal and jot down your own thoughts about how you view yourself, about your honesty or how you interact with others. Then obsessively train yourself on those areas on a never ending quest for personal growth.
Character is who you are when no one is around, or it is how you treat others who can do nothing for you. Are you always polite and understanding with the server in the restaurant? An amateur is too focused on what others can do for them to worry about personal growth.
Investing in your character is playing the long game. It’s a long-term investment that will pay back a thousand fold. You can definitely get ahead by stepping on other people. But if you want to be successful long-term, make your character count. Your daily interactions with ordinary people will define the kind of person you are and will be.
8) Never, ever, ever allow formal schooling to interfere with your education.
As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.”
An education is something that you acquire over a lifetime of study and reflection, which is not the same thing as sitting inside of a classroom and reading from a textbook. Don’t misunderstand me: a formal education can be crucial to your future career plans. You cannot be a mechanic or work in the field of veterinary medicine without acquiring the necessary formal education to do the job properly. But do not confuse this process of formal schooling with an actual education, which can only be acquired through a curious approach to your life. Seek opportunities to challenge yourself, to challenge your ideas and worldview and see how they stack up with what others think.
When pursuing career opportunities try to factor in how your skills will improve by doing this job and worry less about the financial aspects. People who are financially successful tend to be people who have truly mastered a talent or skill, and you can only do that through education.
Being an adult is both exciting and challenging, but it’s also mandatory. Everyone must take the job; there can be no refusals. But what you can decide for yourself is how you will approach your new job. Will you be a respected professional who everyone wants to associate with, or will you be the amateur who people eventually ignore?
Rules for New Cousins
So, I have a fairly complicated family history. You may have caught on to that when we talked to my cousin Curtis a few weeks back but he isn’t the only “new cousin” that I have. Or, maybe had.
Several years ago I was connected to the son of my father’s cousin. I’m not an expert in this area but Google says that makes him my cousin as well. “Tim” is about my age, married with kids roughly the same age as my son and living just a few hours away. We had the chance to hang out a few times and seemed to make a real connection. Very smart, funny with an engaging personality, “Tim” and I seemed to form a real connection. Which, if I’m being honest, isn’t what I have historically experienced with my extended family.
All was well until I posted on social media for whom I cast my vote. I knew that doing so would cause some problems but my feeling was that anyone who would be upset with my vote was already not very fond of me to begin with. Well, apparently “Tim” wasn’t too pleased and proceeded to block me on all social media platforms.
I’m not here to mourn a relationship that barely lasted longer than Britney Spears’ first marriage. I’m just trying to figure out what the new rules are. Do we still have to invite he and his family to Thanksgiving? Do we sit him at the kids table or next to a drunken Uncle? Can I recycle last year’s Christmas card instead of sending him a new one and does this mean I can ignore his phone calls when the time comes that he may need a kidney transplant? It’s so complicated.
The New York Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud
PHILADELPHIA — Election officials in dozens of states representing both political parties said that there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the presidential race, amounting to a forceful rebuke of President Trump’s portrait of a fraudulent election.
Over the last several days, the president, members of his administration, congressional Republicans and right wing allies have put forth the false claim that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump and have refused to accept results that showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner.
But top election officials across the country said in interviews and statements that the process had been a remarkable success despite record turnout and the complications of a dangerous pandemic.
“There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections,” said Frank LaRose, a Republican who serves as Ohio’s secretary of state. “The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.”
Steve Simon, a Democrat who is Minnesota’s secretary of state, said: “I don’t know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it shouldn’t have or didn’t count when it should. There was no fraud.”
That Was Fun!
Appreciate everyone who tuned in to Monticello Live last Friday evening. Sadly, Jessica was under the weather and we decided to give her the night off. But thanks to MaryAnna Mancuso for joining me for a fun chat.
We plan to do this each Friday night at 8pm. Right now it’s through Periscope but we are exploring other options to livestream across multiple channels.
The Big Get
Tom Nichols
Our big get is author and professor Tom Nichols. From his biography at The Naval War College: Tom Nichols is a U.S. Naval War College University Professor, and an adjunct at the U.S. Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies and the Harvard Extension School. He is a specialist on Russian affairs, nuclear strategy, NATO issues, and a nationally-known commentator on U.S. politics and national security. He was a staff member in the United States Senate, a fellow at CSIS and the Harvard Kennedy School, and previously taught at Dartmouth, La Salle, and Georgetown. He is also a five-time undefeated 'Jeopardy!' champion, and was noted in the 'Jeopardy!' Hall of Fame after his 1994 appearances as one of the all-time best players of the game.
Tom is also the author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.
1. You have described your upbringing as blue collar and that neither of your parents as having attended college. How important was education in your household?
It was everything. My mother dropped out of school after 9th grade and my father in 10th grade, although my dad got a GED in his 40s. So they understood that education - really, even just finishing high school - was important. They didn't want me to make the mistakes that they did. But they also didn't denigrate anything else; my mother used to tell me that if I wanted to be a ditchdigger - this was before anyone had ever heard the line from Caddyshack, and people used "ditchdigger" unironically because we knew actual ditchdiggers - she told me that she expected me to be the best ditchdigger I could be. I should add that none of this was because I was a great student, which frustrated the hell out of them. I tested really well on standardized exams, but like a lot of bright kids in working class high schools, my grades were a mishmash of As and Cs and even a flunk here and there. I think I graduated 45th out of 400 or something like that. After I got my PhD fellowship, my father admitted to me: "Honestly, when you were a kid, I was just hoping you might go to college.
2. Boston University is universally known as one of America's more liberal universities. What happened to you?
I went to BU in 1979, when it was a regional school run by John Silber. It was too big and atomized to have any real political personality. I mean, sure, I was a young Reagan voter in 1980 and kids would call me a fascist and a Nazi and all that happy horseshit, but the school was just too sprawling (including a giant off-campus contingent, which I joined after my second year) to have a coherent identity. The fights between Silber and Howard Zinn got all the press, but that was a sideshow. BU in those days was mostly a working and middle-class haven that served as anything from a safety school for super-bright kids to a kind of reach school for burnouts and under-achievers. I say all this with affection, because the BU of the late 70s and early 80s was a really weird, funky place, and it gave me a great start in life. I had some wonderful professors, including my undergrad adviser, who is still a close personal friend to this day. But because BU was woven into the neighborhood there, I also knew people that were drug dealers and hoods who hovered around the old BU. I saw at least two guys get stabbed, once in Brighton, and another time in front of The Rat in Kenmore Square. In those days, because we didn't have a real "campus" to speak of, it was the kind of place where you had to grow up fast and keep your wits about you. Today, it's a world-class university and a far more contained environment. Say what you want about Silber, but you have to give him that. When I was acting in plays in the BU stage troupe, our rehearsal space at BU was an abandoned garage in an alley near the dorms where you could get mugged while buying drugs. (Uh, or so I've heard.) Today, that entire street is gone, and it's a pedestrian mall in front of the Photonics Lab. So whatever BU is today, it was a different place 40 years ago. I know it's a better place today, and I don't regret one minute of the experience, but the BU that produced me and the BU that graduated someone like AOC are now two different places.
3. Because his life and career were cut tragically short, I don't think many people really know who John Heinz was. Tell us about him.
Senator John Heinz died at 52 years old in a plane crash. He was a moderate Republican back in the day when moderate Republicans still existed, especially in the northeast. He was the heir to the Heinz food fortune, and had the kind of no-nonsense business approach to government that people like Trump claimed to have but couldn't really grasp. He didn't get mired in hot-button movement conservatism; his main legacy was the work he did as ranking on committees about the elderly. (When he died, one of the Pittsburgh papers paid him a great honor by calling him a "work horse.") Remember, Pennsylvania at the time was the second-oldest population after Florida, and Heinz was determined to look after those folks. He was the heir to a giant food fortune, but that never really seemed to be a part of who he was, at least from my view as a staffer. (The only time it really struck me how truly wealthy he was happened one day in his Senate hideaway office and he gave me a kind of art-history lecture about the paintings he had there. Suddenly, I was aware that this was a man who collected art.) I had no connection to Pennsylvania; I think he was looking to take a more active role in foreign policy, and he called Jeane Kirkpatrick at Georgetown for advice. She gave him two names of bright young guys who would be good staffers, me and one of my classmates, as we had both known her at Georgetown. (The other fellow became an ambassador.) I left my teaching job for a year to go work for him. He was a solid, sensible man; like every senator, he could lose his temper, and then he would cool down and it was back to work. All of us who worked for him often think of the "what if" had he lived. I always assumed, as a major state GOP senator, that he was headed for a VP slot and then the White House, but that was cut short by tragedy.
4. What is an expert. Who defines expertise and why does it matter?
I won't replay too much of my book here, since people have had to listen to me endlessly, but an "expert" is anyone with authoritative knowledge. Think of the expert as the person in a group you go to in order to resolve something or get something done. The lights go out: You don't send the dentist down to the basement, you send an electrician. You want to know who the best king of England was, you ask a historian. It matters, because otherwise we're all a bunch of know-it-alls jabbering at each other and using Grandma's mustard poultice to cure our diabetes instead of taking insulin. "Expertise" is just a fancy name for "the division of labor" and we can't function as a society without it.
5. Where is the current nuclear threat?
The biggest danger is miscalculation. Former SECDEF Bill Perry worries that global nuclear war is unlikely but the use of one or a small number of nukes is actually more likely; I worry about both. I am less concerned about nuclear terrorism than I used to be, because it's hard to build a nuke. (The theory is simple, the engineering is a bitch.) But it could happen. I lose more sleep over a 1914 scenario, however, where the major powers blunder into each other in some corner of the world no one cares that much about, or over an issue they don't realize is more important than it seems, and suddenly we're in a crisis that no one wanted. The Cold War seemed easy and predictable next to the many ways things could go wrong now, but I should also be reassuring here: I would much rather live in a world with each country having 1500 nukes and a lot of open communication than go back to 1975 or 1980 and have tens of thousands of the damn things on a hair-trigger waiting for the balloon to go up on the West German border. We're better off today.
6. Did you become and academic on purpose or was it always the plan?
I started college as a chemistry major. I wasn't great at chemistry, but I was competent, and it bored me. I don't have that kind of super-methodical mind that scientists have; my attention span is too short. I looked at what professional chemists do, and I didn't want to do that. But I also came of age in a miserable economic time - the 1970s - and I wasn't going to just get a degree in political science and then cross my fingers. It turned out that I was pretty good at Russian, I was fascinated by the Cold War, and I could write well, which was a skill then and now that is always in demand. So I talked with an academic adviser who helped me lay out a plan: Learn Russian, get a degree, shoot for an extra year to get an MA - I couldn't afford to think about anything more than a year, and I did my Columbia MA in a year taking overloads - and then either go into government service or snag a PhD fellowship. I did one more year to get a Soviet certification from Columbia, but I found a loophole that let me take my courses at Harvard, where I could live far more cheaply and drive a taxi and work odd jobs to get by. We knew that a PhD was a reach, so speaking Russian and joining the intelligence or defense community was always the backup plan. And that's exactly how it happened: I ran out of money, and the Army hired me as a GS-11 to work in the Psychological Operations shop at Fr. Bragg as a civilian analyst. Just before I was going to move to North Carolina, Georgetown called. I had taken a course at Harvard with Samuel Huntington, who'd written me a nice letter, and that piqued their interest, and instead of going to Fayetteville I went to DC. But either way, I was determined to be in a recession-proof environment; I saw the 1970s and high-risk entrepreneurialism did not interest me. I was hoping to trade income gains for time, autonomy, and job security - and yikes, that blew up in my face the first time I was denied tenure - but in the end it worked out. So, academia was the reach plan, government service was the fallback, and ironically, as a government-employed academic, I ended up doing both. Life is weird sometimes.
7. How did you get involved with The Lincoln Project?
The whole thing was, at least for us outside advisers, like a pick-up game of basketball or something. A bunch of guys with the same interest who all sort of knew each other, and six of them said: "We're forming a team. Want to join us?" It was that simple. I am not on a payroll or one of the founders, so it was easy to say that I'd be glad to hand them my opinions about what might work and which approaches are good and bad. It really was that informal.
8. Best Yacht Rock song ever?
"Georgia," by Boz Scaggs. Uptempo, sing-along, but smooth and cool and when that Tom Scott sax kicks in in the second verse, it's pure 1976 yachty goodness.
9. How enjoyable was Election Day?
I didn't enjoy it at all. The margins were too close. I was hoping for a giant, 50 state repudiation of Trump, and 71 million voted for a sociopath. Mostly, I was relieved, but as Max Boot said recently, I will never have the same naive faith in America I once had. I'm just glad it's over, although I won't relax until Joe Biden shakes the hand of the Chief Justice on the steps of the Capitol.
10. Besides me, who is your favorite person to follow on Twitter?
I follow about 1500 people and if you think I am going to tell you which of my children I love more than the others, you're outta your mind. I'd have to create categories: Funniest, Most Informative, Best Slagging of Trump, Nicest Tweets about Me... who could decide, really.
11. Best pizza in Rhode Island?
The best pizza in Rhode Island is when I get in my car and drive my car to Massachusetts to go see my boyhood friend who owns a pizza shop. Rhode Island pizza is...okay. But it's neither New York pizza or the loaded-up Massachusetts style pizza.
12. It's 10pm on a Friday evening. Where is Tom Nichols and what is he doing?
I am watching the news and saying goodnight to my wife, and taking the cat in a handoff. Then it's upstairs to my office to see who's mad at me on Twitter.
13. Your favorite whiskey?
I gave up the hard stuff years ago, and in those days I was an expert on vodka. I know the right answer here is to pick a single-malt scotch, and back in the day I would take a nice Glenmorangie Cellar 13 home from the UK duty free now and then. (You could only get there, so apologies if I have that wrong. It was like Macallan, aged in a sherry cask.) But I am a middlebrow guy and I admit that I am a sucker for a high-end blend like Johnnie Walker Gold that's made for someone with a palate like mine. I don't like the dark, peaty stuff and a more complex scotch is wasted on me; just like I prefer a mild cigar over a maduro, I'm kind of a weenie about full-bodied whiskeys. (Great, now I want a scotch. Mmm, scotchy scotch scotch.)
On The Bottom Shelf
George Dickel #8
The best known Tennessee Whiskey in the world is Jack Daniels, made hip by it’s most famous aficionado, Frank Sinatra. But there’s a reason why most people choose to mix it with Coke. If you like your whiskey overpriced and overhyped Jack is the best choice.
On the other end of the spectrum is George Dickel, the Tennessee whiskey you may not have heard of before. Now, for the uninitiated, Tennessee whiskey is basically bourbon with two key differences: Its made in tennessee (this is the sort of information you are paying for with this newsletter) and it is filtered through charcoal — using what is known as “The Lincoln County Process.” I’m not going to nerd out and go into any great detail about how this works but just know that when they say that it is “charcoal filtered” that is meant literally. The problem with this process is that in removing “impurities” in the whiskey they tend to also strip out the character and taste. Hence, Jack Daniels.
Dickel chills the whiskey before filtration, which definitely seems to give it a more smoother taste than Jack. The nose on #8 must be as straightforward a nose as a whiskey can get. I got lots of grain (this has a very high corn mash bill) and a little oak. For me there was some light vanilla, and possibly a hint of freshly ground pepper.
The flavor profile is a straightforward grain and oak flavor with maybe some cinnamon The finish is clean, with a little cinnamon and a small amount of alcohol burn. You also get a heavy char finish, which probably comes from the fact that Dickel uses a heavier char in its barrales than Jack Daniels does.
I genuinely liked this and was pleasantly surprised. If you are into Tennessee whiskey but are only familiar with Jack Daniels then you owe it to yourself to try it’s less expensive and more flavorful cousin.
The Best Things I Saw This Week
My son making his high school basketball team. There’s a story about this that I will tell one day.
“Hell on Wheels” which is currently running on Netflix.
With his new novel coming out last week I’ve been re-reading Phil Klay’s “Deployment,” which is a collection of short stories based on the war in Iraq. It’s raw and deeply moving at times, and provides a far deeper perspective on the conflict than you probably have seen elsewhere. This is what good fiction can do.
“Scott Kelly — Lessons Learned from 500+ Days in Space, Life-Changing Books, and The Art of Making Hard Choices (#478)” This episode of Tim Ferriss’s podcast featuring Senator-elect Scott Kelly was as thought-provoking as I had hoped.
“The elites who think MAGA voters are rubes: Republicans”
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Monticello was created by and published by Jacob Perry. Our editor and contributor is Jessica Redding. On social media: