In June of last year, Desh says, he sent Gay an email laying out his vision and citing the famous Buckley-Vidal debate, itself the subject of a documentary, as his inspiration. Sommers was excited by the idea but didn’t think Gay would agree Gay’s management team was receptive but similarly skeptical. Though she has been an author and a public commentator for decades, Sommers is best known among younger audiences for “The Factual Feminist,” her YouTube video series, which leans heavily on “modern feminism has gone too far”–style arguments, racks up hundreds of thousands of views per video, and has spurred frequent criticism from left-of-center voices that she is less a genuine feminist than a conservative concern troll.ĭesh reached out to them both. of her own in philosophy and is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is a center-rightish “classical liberal” type with a Ph.D. in rhetoric, is the superstar author of books like Bad Feminist and Hunger and is an outspoken progressive on issues of gender and race. It all started about a year ago, Desh says, when he was involved in a casual group conversation in which “a lot of people got really touchy the moment I mentioned I’m a feminist - I didn’t realize the actual term had morphed into something some people use as an insult.” This made him realize that “feminism definitely has a branding issue and people don’t seem to really understand what it is.” Two of his favorite feminists were Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Sommers, and he wondered if it might be worthwhile to get the two onstage together in Australia. The saga shows that working through disagreement in this political era can be a bit more complicated and fraught than merely getting two disagreers onstage together. And it’s a rather telling, colorful story of what happens when the highest ideals of civil conversation collide with the realities of public-intellectual stardom and a thoroughly tribalized social media ecosystem.
Given his previous work covering subjects like Islamic extremism and atheism, Desh probably didn’t anticipate that a conversation between two American feminists, both frequent contributors to mainstream publications, would spark one of his career’s messiest episodes, complete with legal threats and prolonged negotiations over whether the event’s video footage would be released. The film originated from a tour of Australia that Desh put on with Harris, featuring Nawaz as a “special guest.” First as the head of Think, Inc., a company he has since sold, and now with the group This Is 42, Desh has organized events featuring top public intellectuals in Australia and elsewhere. He co-directed Islam and the Future of Tolerance, a documentary centered on a debate between Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamic extremist turned liberal reformer.
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This stems in part from his background: The Australian entrepreneur and event organizer was born in Sri Lanka in 1981, not long before a civil war broke out that, over the course of 26 years, would kill as many as 100,000 people.Īfter emigrating to Melbourne in 2000, he created a chapter of Sri Lanka Unites, an organization built around the sad fact that, as its website notes, “We grew up in a society where ethno-religious identities were emphasized over an inclusive, equal Sri Lankan identity, and as a nation, Sri Lanka has been trapped in a vicious cycle of violence.” He did some reconciliation work back home and learned that “70 percent of my countrymen have not had a meaningful conversation with, or did not have a friend from, the other side.” He believes the civil war was, in part, “a failure of conversation.”ĭesh (the surname he goes by his full name is Amila Deshantha) has built a career out of facilitating intellectually oriented public events, often between people with serious disagreements. The first thing you notice when you talk to Desh Amila, beyond the fact that he’s an outgoing and friendly guy, is that he has a lot of faith in the power of public debate to help improve the world. Photo: Paigge Warton/Courtesy of This Is 42