Anatomy of a Struggle Session
On Drop Site's apalling ambush "interview" of Ro Khanna.
The exchange below is not an interview, but a struggle session. Interviews are about eliciting information. The interrogation of California congressman and likely presidential candidate Ro Khanna by Ryan Grim, Maysa Mustafa, and Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News was not. It was a histrionic, emotional political performance dressed up as an interview.
It was bad enough that former First Look Media colleague and lead “interviewer” Jeremy Scahill’s first question was just an assertion-laden speech with a little rouge of question added, but watch what happened when he got an answer:
Watching Khanna stay upright made me glad to no longer be talking to these people, but also brought memories of what it was like to be part of this community. The progressive press has developed remarkably poisonous tendencies. It makes its showiest displays of anger, and is at its most humorless and unyielding, with allies. Much of what it does is seek out people in its general circle and demand endorsements of movement verbiage amid threat of denunciation. Those who capitulate in the belief they’re doing the right thing, like California State Senator Scott Wiener or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez or (on four or five occasions) Bernie Sanders, generally regret it, finding themselves facing bigger mobs soon after.
Social media has accelerated a seeming love of group interrogation, but don’t be fooled. When you see three journalists of this type doing an interview and fifty more cheering online, it’s a pack of people afraid of one another making nervous shows of solidarity. Each knows how thin the ice is, how quickly a moment of hestitation will send friends racing to pull a Murder on the Orient Express routine with reputations, taking turns with the knife.
The dynamic is designed to move the group up a road of continually escalating rhetoric, and you won’t see a clearer example than this Drop Site dogpile, one of the most appalling things I’ve seen from this era’s reporters. Cue the madness:
