Michael Malice, a Brooklyn native known for his contrarian streak, has settled in Austin, Texas, lured by the intellectual scene he once cherished in New York.

“Rogan”—Joe, of course—“set up basically a homing beacon for everyone in America who were, like, my type of people. And what I like about Austin is the minds here are like what New York used to be, which is a Venn diagram. There’s a lot of cross-pollination here. And that makes it kind of exciting.”

He’s pointing at the kind of willful, HR-compliant inefficiency that has bloated not only corporate America but the federal government, giving rise to what he calls a “petty tyranny,” the one that drove him out of New York to Texas.

Austin’s famously “weird” reputation has shifted. The city has become a magnet for tech giants, tourists, and brutalist condos. But Malice isn’t complaining. He left New York because it felt stifling, part of the “institutional scam” he’s been wary of ever since childhood.

“Why am I working hard at school to impress a teacher? Who I don’t respect? I don’t like this idea—and I’ve fought against it ever since I was a kid.”

This, he says, is how he was radicalized: early; first grade.

“This is kind of what they call the Protestant work ethic, which I am completely opposed to.”

As a child of Ukrainian immigrants from the Soviet Union, Michael Malice is equally suspicious of the institutionalized scam, whether communist or capitalist.

“You see it a lot where it’s, ‘Well, he’s working really hard.’ I don’t care. If I’m going to hire someone to work with, I’d rather they be competent and efficient than incompetent and diligent. What use is your hard work if that plumber is taking two hours, and he’s giving everything he’s got, and someone can come in and just twist the screw? I think hard work is very, very overrated. It’s a kind of corporate propaganda that the only way to succeed is to work really hard. Because that encourages people working at these companies to milk you for everything you have, and have a moralistic angle to it, as opposed to, this is just extremely self-serving for you guys.”

He’s pointing at the kind of willful, HR-compliant inefficiency that has bloated not only corporate America but the federal government, giving rise to what he calls a “petty tyranny,” the one that drove him out of New York to Texas. He also sees that “miseducated class” holding sway elsewhere, especially as the second Trump era begins.

The miseducated class he loathes is now more at risk of losing their perches than ever before. But it’s been a long wait and it’s a lot to shake off.

“We all absorb it by osmosis. I remember— because I remember first grade—I resented having to do work for other people for no payoff. We had a vocabulary list. And you had to go home and write each word in a sentence. Like, how much skill does this take? ‘Use the word “pen” in a sentence.’ Who can’t do this? So it would be, ‘pen,’ ‘tiger,’ ‘store.’ So I just wrote three times ‘the tiger bought a pen at the store,’ and just underlined a different word in each sentence, just to do the absolute minimum amount of work. Now, I didn’t have a sophisticated understanding of what I was doing then. But I did have this inherent contempt. And if you really think I don’t know how to use the word ‘pen’ in a sentence like that, I mean, I can play wheelchair kid.”

Malice finally experienced some freedom at New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School.

“It was awesome. Absolutely terrific. It just pulls the smartest kids, so when you’ve selected a population of young people for intelligence, it’s, you know, very nerdy. I did have friends who were taking part in night life. But, you know, we were still kind of young. You have to understand, I graduated high school in ‘94. Giuliani came in in ‘93. So it wasn’t that fun, because it was very unsafe, especially when we were young— dirty. There was this kind of sense of, you know, we’re screwed. And it was known that they could fix this. So it was fun, in that there was definitely an energy in the air. It’s exciting being in New York. But there certainly was a cost.”

It’s a cost all too familiar to latter-day New Yorkers.

“On the subway, there’d be groups of kids, teenagers who’d just go through, train by train. If you had your Walkman you’d have to kind of hide your headphones because if they saw you had a Walkman, they’d shake you down and take it. And there was no recourse, obviously.”

Michael Malice makes a point in Austin, TX. Peter Gietl

Austin’s energy feels liberating. We’re headed to an Airbnb, and, when we arrive, we’re greeted in the yard by a 180-pound pot-bellied pig, snuffling around a prim bamboo enclosure labeled “the Pig Parlor.” Without skipping a beat, Malice crouches at the gate to let the pig shuffle toward him. Soon, she has wiggled around onto her back, Malice scratching her belly, pinching dead skin from the bristles along her spine. He digs right in, liberating her from the scabs, shifting to soft pets when the work is done, whispering in her willing ear.

“Pigs wag their tails to express happiness, like dogs."

He combs his hands again through the long quills jutting from her tubby neck.

“See the way her hair, her bristles, are mohawked?” Malice himself is sporting a half-grown-out mohawk but he does not seem self-conscious about the comparison. He’s focused on pig facts: the high intelligence, the unique personalities. They need socialization, affection; they need lots of play. They’re prone to boredom, which, if unchecked, can lead to destructive behavior. Pigs are highly expressive, able to employ a vocabulary of grunts and whines. Sometimes, they sing.

Perhaps the implicit comparison is more than skin—or hair—deep. Malice’s tour through his childhood matters to him as an origin story (his newest project is a comic book) about the ways in which he is serially misunderstood at present. He skips over college (Bucknell, where he clashed with multiple profs) to his Wall Street years (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs) to land on the latest crop of miscreants. Al though his tenure at Goldman lasted “like six months, until the end of Thanksgiving,” back in the year 2000, “the fact that I did this is still somehow taken as proof that I have a sponsor for the Ukrainian War. In fact, I just saw recently that I must be CIA. Look at what my parents did. It was in my Wikipedia edits—the source was the transcript of the Joe Rogan interview where I said I’d never heard of my dad; it was like literally no source. Then it became something people talk about and bring up all the time. That’s the logic of the internet if you don’t like someone or think their success, or whatever, is illegitimate: There must be some nefarious backstory, as opposed to ‘they’re just a prick.’ Yeah, I feel like I always tell people: ‘I’m an SOB.’”

He recalls a memorable stand-off at one of those big banks, “Once, on Wall Street, my female boss told me that the laptop lab was understaffed. ‘So, when you have a moment, go help them out.’ And I just said ‘no.’ And my boss looked at me like I was insane. And I go, ‘I wasn’t hired to do laptops. I’m not interested in running laptops, I’m not helping the laptop lab.’ And again, in these companies, it’s a complete bait-and switch, they bring you in, this is what you’re getting paid; these are the responsibilities. And very quickly, you have mission creep. And the responsibilities pile up. And if you have a problem with it, you’re the problem. It’s this kind of sense of, like, your time is ours to take as much as we want. And it’s just like, well . . . you can go fuck yourself! I don’t care. And I’m completely right. I still don’t know how to work laptops in the tech sense that they would want. And I don’t regret it at all. I still just don’t want to do several things. I wanted to not have an alarm clock. I wanted to not ever have to talk to someone I didn’t want to.”

“Why am I working hard at school to impress a teacher? Who I don’t respect? I don’t like this idea—and I’ve fought against it ever since I was a kid.”

For Malice, corporations and governments alike can threaten individual autonomy. Conservatives and libertarians, he says, have this strict distinction between government and corporations. “And there is, in one sense, a very strict distinction, which is, governments can send cops to your house to kill you, right? And corporations can’t. But this sense that corporate culture isn’t heavily intertwined with the government at all is false. This sense that corporate America doesn’t have many nefarious techniques at their disposal just because it’s business. It’s just ridiculous to me, in the same sense that if you have a friend who’s always talking shit behind your back—that’s perfectly legal, but like, what? ‘Well, it’s legal. So it’s fine.’ Like, what are we talking about here?”

What indeed, ideology by any name?

Pressed to pin down the worst of the -isms, Malice lands on cynicism.

“First of all, because I think life is wonderful. Yeah, we all have this amazing gift. There’s so much out there. So to just kind of throw that in the trash is just so contemptible, and also allows the worst people to win without having to do anything.” There it is—another system that encourages people to game it out, to everyone’s detriment. “It makes you give up. Like, I don’t have to lift a finger. It appeals to often the best kind of people, people who could really accomplish something. They’re frustrated, especially when they’re young. And there’s that temptation to be like, ‘fuck it.’ Like, ‘no, no, no, just sit tight.’ I’m telling you. I hate it. I think it’s kind of this soft suicide. It’s cheap, and it’s easy. And it’s also kind of self-validating.” For such a hardass, Malice can pivot in a blink to something almost approaching . . . idealism. But then, asked why so few people are heroic, he says, without pause, “Most people are like animals.”

His surname isn’t actually “Malice,” of course—this is a nod to Sid Vicious, the bass player of the anarchist Sex Pistols. Lore has it that “vicious” is actually a reference to a hamster named after Syd Barrett, the forgotten loon of Pink Floyd.

But it’s fair to say that the pseudonyms stuck for a reason. Malicious or vicious people clog up the drains of society; those are Malice’s antagonists, not the man himself. But what does “Malice” mean if he isn’t malicious? Cue Sid: The middle finger; “Don’t speak for me”; anarchism. But unlike Sid Vicious’s, Malice’s anarchic streak isn’t a black mark. After all, his most recent book is titled "The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil".

Yet between the white and the black is a murky gray where Malice enjoys frustrating categories and expectations. When asked about the geopolitics of post-Soviet Europe, he invokes Vladimir Putin’s sense of humor. In college, Malice hosted a radio show called "Retarded People Having Sex". In Harvey Pekar's graphic novel about him, "Ego and Hubris: The Michael Malice Story" (2006), Malice boasts about convincing an Irish Catholic girlfriend to renounce Christ.

This brings us back to grade school, by way of the latest wave of idiocy online. “I was on the Hodge Twins,” he says, “so like the Nazis thought it was their house, and I came in to kind of fumigate it a little.” One thing led to another. “‘Michael Mal ice is an anti-Christian bigot. For almost the entirety of his early adulthood, he was railing against Christianity. He only stopped when he started ingratiating himself with conservatives. His mission is to subvert, not advance, our values.’ I’ve given up on trying to reverse engineer what the cretins are misinterpreting. I mean, I get it, but it’s just like, they’re much stupider than I even thought.”

And the truth about his views on religion? “Well, when I was in elementary school we were reading the Old Testament, with, like, Noah and all these kinds of fabulous stories. And at home when I was reading—they still have the books, the series on, like, mythology, right, these big colorful coffee table books—I had the Greek one, and I think the Egyptian, which is my favorite, and I was scared to bring it to school, because I thought they would think I was like worshipping Zeus. And my dad’s like, ‘No, no, they’ll understand.’ And I’m like, ‘What’s the difference between, the Zeus story and Noah’s Ark?’ I mean, I think there’s very few Christians who would take, like, Noah’s Ark literally. And if you do, more power to you. But you’re not going to tell me that’s different from Zeus becoming emboldened and raping Europa. You know?”

In the end, Malice stays just outside any neat label. He’s skeptical of corporate diktats and government mandates alike, dis missive of anything he views as a manipulative scam. If there’s one place he might let his guard down, it’s alongside a pot-bellied pig whose bristles need scratching—a creature that, like Malice, bristles back at confinement and remains stubbornly on its own path.

Kevin Ryan is a staff writer for Blaze News. He is an award-winning writer focusing on long-form literary nonfiction and investigative reporting.