The Reporter Who Lost and Gained Everything By Telling the Truth About People Who Aren't Supposed to Exist

Transcript: Conversation in Year Zero with Katie Herzog

Katie Herzog reported a piece about a category of person that isn’t supposed to exist, a group of people who by virtue of their mere existence spoil a narrative in which many powerful entities are committed whose existence must therefore be rigorously suppressed. These people must be denied a voice and their suffering unrecognized so that agendas of powerful entities can move forward unhindered by inconvenient realities. Anyone that aids and abets them in telling their story must be made to pay an enormous price. By writing about detransitioners, Herzog instantly became a pariah and lost nearly everyone she loved. She also became a strange new kind of mini-celebrity who flourishes by telling a truth that is at once, instantly recognized as true by an overwhelming super-majority of all people while being grounds for paraiahdom among the moral vanguard who’ve obtained disciplinary power within media and other white collar spaces. In this Callin interview I talk with Katie about her pariahdom and mini-celebrity and the sea change in journalistic norms which both engulfed and elevated her.

One of the interesting aspects of having a personal platform is allowing my paid subscribers to accompany on every stage of the writing journey. Here I’ve posted the full transcript; later I’ll be turning this into a short feature story that will be more widely distributed; if you prefer listening, you can hear it on the Callin app, where it has been preserved as a podcast. This one in particular is a fun listen. We spend the first half-hour just ripping on NPR. In your role as micro-patrons, you get to see the process in all its stages and to compare the finished result to the raw material out of which it is assembled — and to feel yourself possessing an ownership stake in the thing produced. It is a new way of situating oneself to a writer and the discursive world he inaugurates. Expect more such features to emerge in the year to come. Both the raw and the cooked documents will be compelling in different ways.

The original episode aired on January 7, 2022. Listen to the full discussion and other Conversations in Year Zero on Callin, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple | Spotify | Google.

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