The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan (private feed for kbockus@gmail.com)

Michael O'Loughlin On AIDS And The Church

Many of you will recall the horrendous way in which the Catholic Church hierarchy responded to the AIDS crisis. Many blamed homosexual sex and refused to endorse condoms for heterosexuals. It was extremely hard for me to hang in there in this period, and I had to take months away from Mass after various appalling statements. It was a time when I first experienced the love of God and the intimacy of Jesus in contrast to the church that claimed to represent Him on earth. But it was not the only story. On the ground, many lay Catholics, priests and nuns defied the hierarchy and came to the aid of the young and sick and dying. Michael O’Loughlin, another gay Catholic, has written a history book, “Hidden Mercy,” about this other story. We talked faith, sex, disease, and redemption. You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of our conversation — on the nuns and priests who fought AIDS in spite of the Catholic leadership, and on how gay Catholics have wrestled with their faith — head over to our YouTube page. Pope Francis recently replied to a letter from O’Loughlin, posted in a NYT op-ed, that “Gives Me Hope as a Gay Catholic.”A reader looks back to last week’s episode with Dominic Cummings:I listened to Cummings despite having little interest in Boris, Brexit, or the UK. Although I heard little I agreed with, I found it interesting how much more thoughtful and intelligent the overeducated elite from Oxford are compared to Ivy Leaguers such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Elise Stefanik, or Tom Cotton. It is hard to find intelligent commentary coming from US conservatives today, guaranteeing that they will once again fail to capitalize on the disarray of the Democratic Party. Republicans seem intent on meeting Democratic incompetence with outright insanity. Meanwhile, as Cummings pointed out, many people want and would respond positively to cogent policy from either party.Another fan of the episode: Kudos to you for getting an interview with Dominic Cummings, who is in my opinion the most interesting man in UK politics today, indeed perhaps anywhere. He’s a very refreshing transformational thinker. It’s a shame that Boris Johnson decided not to keep him on, although I think the latter’s temperamental weaknesses (especially his incessant need to be loved) made that all but inevitable. Thatcher, by contrast, really didn’t care what the media or Whitehall thought, and she ultimately ended up being far more consequential than Johnson is likely to be, even though, as Cummings observed, Covid gave him an enormous opportunity to be similarly transformational.Many (especially those who don’t really follow the UK closely) liken Cummings to Steve Bannon, which is an exceptionally lazy narrative. Cummings doesn’t have an ounce of racism in him or demagoguery, but is interested in policy and really doesn’t care what people think (which is extremely courageous). His diagnosis of American politics is spot on as well. I occasionally wonder whether the rhythms of politics, the need for the occasional cajoling, especially the retail aspects, make him unsuited to being a long-term player in the political process. I also kept pondering during the interview whether there was an American equivalent to Dominic Cummings out there right now? If so, who is it? It was a great discussion and I’m glad you gave him a wide berth in expressing his views. He’s a fascinating thinker.This next reader wasn’t impressed:The Cummings interview was a collection of softball pitches allowing him to say whatever he wanted to say with no challenges at all. You gave him a platform to preen for an hour and some. You said at the end that you are a huge fan. That much was obvious all along. If I wanted to pay to hear a fawning groupie gush I would have got everything I wanted.He is a smart man, yes, but that’s not the only requirement for good politics. There were reasonable questions to be asked, like whatever happened to the “£350 million per week to the NHS”? That was a cruel joke coming just before COVID hit. And if he is so concerned about average British people, why did he think himself above the law when it came to the lockdown? What about the no-bid COVID contracts to buddies who had no idea how to do what they contracted for? The amount of money wasted was incredible. I could go on, but it’s not worth my time. It was a terrible interview. You have serious blinders on and you need to think more about that. Maybe I went too easy on him. But many of the issues that Brits have with him — his complicated flouting of Covid rules, for example, or the pledge that Brexit would help fund the NHS — might have been too opaque and insidery to a largely American audience. So I didn’t do the equivalent of a BBC interview. An old college friend in England was also pissed off:As a great admirer of what you have been doing at the Dish, I just wanted to let off some steam about your interview — or should I call it on-air ego massage — of Dominic Cummings. I acknowledge that you extracted some great cameos of Johnsonaro in full flight, but even so, this was a whitewash of epic proportions. Only in front of a US audience could you have hoped to get away with avoiding a single question about Barnard Castle. But leaving that revealing but intrinsically unimportant episode aside, the analysis of Brexit was, as they might say on Match of the Day, woeful. Why is it that Cummings’ self-serving construct of ordinary people (his phrase for the 37% of the electorate who voted Leave rather than the 36% who voted Remain) was, in truth, a cohort heavily weighted towards the less educated and the elderly? What does that tell us about the quality of reasons for the vote to leave? And whatever potential post-Brexit strategies there might have been, none was actually in place, still less put before the people. So we have had a seismic shock but no clear way forward. The obvious risk, now materialising in spades, is years if not decades of muddle, chaos, lost wealth, and attrition and damage to the economy and society all around. Wasn’t this fantastically reckless? Now we have the worst of both worlds, no plan, and no safety blanket of the single market. The shortages of personnel and services are becoming very visible on a daily basis and the absence of a workforce to make them good, or of markets to replace the losses in the EU, all too apparent.It could have been interesting to hear Cummings defend himself against these charges but instead, we had 90 minutes of “tell me why you were so right and everyone else so wrong.”I’m not going to rehash all the arguments for and against Brexit again here. But this is a view of many in Britain and I’m happy to air their views. I think it’s too soon to see Brexit in full perspective, and I don’t think workforce shortages, which are occurring across the West, are solely due to Brexit.Another reader is itching for more:Wonderful interview. Andrew. Now you have to extend a (pro forma) invitation to “your friend,” Boris Johnson, to refute Dominic Cummings’ interpretation of events. I’d be interested if there was a response.I can’t imagine Boris would come on. But maybe I’ll ask. Can’t hurt, I suppose. But what’s in it for him? Maybe I should ask Keir instead? Or ask Dom back in a year, now we’ve been introduced to him, to ask more specific questions. I just didn’t want to rehash Brexit with him, and think his broader ideas were worth more airing. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Dominic Cummings On Boris, Brexit, Immigration

How to introduce Dominic Cummings? I’d say he has a decent claim to be one of the most influential figures in modern European history, whatever you think of him. He innovated Brexit, led the Leave campaign, then guided Boris Johnson into a stinking election victory in 2019. The two allies then fell out, Cummings quit — and he is now “having a think.” He almost never gives interviews — let alone chat for an hour and a half. So this is a bit of a Dish coup. You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). Read the full transcript here. For two clips of my conversation with Dominic — on the reasons he resigned as top aide at Number 10, and on what US politicians can learn from Brexit on immigration — head over to our YouTube page.And be sure to sign up for the Dominic Cummings Substack.Halfway down this page are five reader dissents over my criticism of the MSM, continued from our main page, but first, some reader commentary on British politics. Here’s a disgruntled Dish subscriber responding to my passing reference to how I “like” Boris Johnson to some degree:I find I’m more and more uncomfortable, as a paying subscriber, to underwrite, even in the smallest way, your acceptance of Mr. Johnson’s con of us, the British people. Granted, he’s not a grifter in the same league as Mr. Trump, but nevertheless the thought of supporting him in any way — albeit indirectly through your journalism — has become something I can no longer tolerate. Perhaps you weren’t around in the days when the BBC (unwittingly I think) gave him for all those years a platform on “Have I Got News for You,” when naive middle-of-the-roaders like myself were mildly charmed by this apparently harmless but funny, over entitled Tory buffoon. Little did we realise he was lining himself up to kill off our warm and productive relationship with Europe and all its benefits for ordinary citizens. He did it partly by getting us to know him as “Boris” — like he’s our friend, which he isn’t. It’s a mechanism that draws in people who are even more naive, and it means he gets forgiven for his absolute incompetence. He isn’t fit to be prime minister, and there is so much evidence out there that confirms it that I can’t really understand how you buy it. Ok, so you “like” him, whatever that means. Another dissent comes from a UK reader over my recent column, “The Boldness of Biden and Boris”:It seems I only ever email to complain about your coverage of Boris Johnson. You write that it’s “the image that mattered” in Boris’s dealings with the French over nuclear subs and on the vaccine. The problem with much of what Boris is doing is that it’s all image. EU countries have overtaken the UK in vaccination rates and we have soaring infection rates compared to our neighbours. Boris’s latest “Global Britain” is announcing bringing back pounds and ounces. Imperial measurements are only used by two countries (the US and Myanmar), and anyone under 50 was taught metric at school. Armando Iannucci wouldn’t write this stuff; it would look too bonkers. This steady stream of jingoistic nonsense is just the usual background noise under Prime Minister Johnson — but it’s not the main reason I’m writing. The rise in National Insurance isn’t the bold “Red Tory” move you hail it as. It isn’t an injection of desperately needed new money into social care. For readers outside the UK, I’ll explain. At the moment, if someone goes into long-term care because they are unable to look after themselves, the cost of that is recouped from their assets (over a certain threshold) when they die. This often means selling their home. (We had to do that when my Nan died in 2010.) What Johnson is doing is capping that limit (which wouldn’t have mattered in my case) and trying to recoup it with a raise in National Insurance — a tax that almost all workers pay. This means that care staff, who earn minimum wage or thereabouts, will be losing money to pay for the care of the people they’re looking after. If Johnson really had “the balls” you give him props for, he would have introduced a tax on assets. Others have been quick to point out that those paying rent are losing money while their landlords have avoided any new tax. Anyone over retirement age is also exempt from National Insurance. I consider myself a centrist, I don’t belong to a political party, as I prefer to advocate ideas from the political left or right if they have merit. We have the worst of all worlds in Johnson — someone willing to raise taxes from those who can least afford it to fritter away on meaningless gestures and dodgy contracts to his friends. If that’s Red Toryism, you can keep it.Another reader who doesn’t like Boris:I’ve been a Dish supporter for many years and have loved the recent content and podcasts. I’m generally pretty aligned with your views, but there is one area where we diverge sharply: Boris Johnson. Everyone knows he’s a liar and a cheat, but maybe what’s flying under the radar is how consistently the Tory government is undermining democracy in the UK. You rightly call out the Republicans for their assaults on democratic institutions, but you turn a blind eye when Boris does something comparable.In the podcast with Cummings, I raise the issue of pro-roguing parliament in 2019, which worried a lot of constitutionalists. You can hear his response. A pro-Brexit reader thinks I overplayed the impact of mass migration on the Brexit decision:I have to disagree with you about this sentence: “Elsewhere in the West, mass migration has empowered the far right, and taken the UK out of the EU.” It seems to me that you should agree with the decision to leave the EU, if for no reason but that the nation-state seems the best way for people to balance freedom and community. Perhaps I don’t know enough, but my understanding was not that the far right prevailed, but rather normal people revolted against their elite’s attempts to tell them that lowered wages and swift, important cultural changes due to immigration were to their benefit, when clearly they were not. Certainly, elites benefit from mass migration — why pay more for an English house cleaner when you can pay less for a Romanian? — but the non-elite English had had enough of being told that Englishness was a racist construct and they had to bow to their diminished circumstances while the people asserting their moral superiority grew richer and more powerful. London is a world city, but it was also a haven for sketchy Third World actors with apartments they never used and whose values did not coincide with that of the average Brit. I don’t know if “The Great British Bake Off” is anything but an imaginary England, but it seems to honor racial and cultural diversity while also exporting a uniquely British grit, common sense, and attention to reality — someone does get kicked off every week — in a way I love to watch.For more Dishcast on UK politics, check out our episode with Tim Shipman, the best political reporter in Britain. Below is his take on how Boris the Etonian won over the working class:Here’s another clip on the vindication of Brexit when it comes to the Covid vaccine, and here’s another on whether the monarchy could will the death of Her Majesty. As always, please send us your thoughts on the Dishcast and potential guests: dish@andrewsullivan.com.Because we ran out of space to include these on the main page, here’s the first of many readers to criticize my criticism of the mainstream media:So wait, let me get this straight: you’re railing on the MSM for appearing to have a narrative and an agenda, you — a guy who has a very clear narrative and agenda, who joined Substack so you could be free to present your narrative and agenda without the constraints of fact-checking and editorial oversight that the MSM provides, constraints which, by the way, allow them to adhere to some semblance of journalistic standards and ethics, which also includes correcting mistakes when they happen, as they do, although apparently not corrected to your liking, often because the reporting didn’t conform to your narrative and agenda in the first place.Tell me: what is your method for immediately owning up to and correcting the mistakes you make? The misinterpretations you make? The times when your narrative is way off? The times when the “tsunami” of CRT evidence you refer to amounts to some hand-picked anecdotes on your Twitter feed that your audience is supposed to find and then be suitably in awe of? What kind of standards or ethics does Substack expect you to follow?Then again, maybe you don’t think of yourself as part of the media, and therefore somehow above it all. And by the way, your cheap line trying to indict the MSM on Trump’s terms is low, and I think you know this. You know exactly who Trump is and what he does (lie). You know what journalism stands for and what it tries to do, however imperfectly. And you already know the cycles of examination and re-examination the press does to itself as a dynamic field in a dynamic society, which it is constantly doing, and which makes your rant entirely unproductive.Oh please. There is a distinction between opinion and news, and my objection is not that the NYT, say, has leftist opinion columnists, but that it skews reality, and now does so to conform not to factual objectivity, but to “moral clarity” defined by the far left. Here, we always publish factual corrections immediately (but they are extremely rare), and we constantly air dissent over the opinions. We fact-check ourselves and Bodenner is gimlet-eyed.Another dissenter looks at something specific:Your conflations regarding the MSM have a heavy dose of hyperventilation. One example: “But notice how the narrative — embedded in a deeper one that the Blake shooting was just as clear-cut as the Floyd murder, that thousands of black men were being gunned down by cops every year, and that ‘white supremacy’ was rampant in every cranny of America … ”Give me one example in the mainstream media where anyone ever hinted, much less said, thousands were being gunned down every year? Please try. It’s a ridiculous exaggeration, not really worthy of argument. Also, let’s look at a comparison: Lynching was a huge tool in white people suppressing African Americans. If you look at websites that document lynching, there were about 3,500 documented lynchings of black people over maybe 60 years, an average of about 60 per year. The point I’m making is that an act, such as police shootings of unarmed black men, can be a statistically rare event in a country of 330,000,000 people but still have an outsized impact on people’s perception of fairness and of their safety in the hands of those who are supposed to protect us all.The MSM rarely include context in their stories about police violence, but the impression they gave was that such killings were ubiquitous. A recent public survey asked Americans to guess how many unarmed black men were killed by cops in 2019. The stats say 27. A recent study suggests that’s an undercount, so let’s posit 50 max. Money quote:Overall, nearly half of surveyed liberals (44 percent) estimated roughly between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black men were killed whereas 20 percent of conservatives estimated the same. Most notably, the majority of respondents in each political category believed that police killed unarmed black men at an exponentially higher rate than in reality. This next reader has quite the opener:Andrew, I love you more than I love my own dick, but your essay on the MSM and its misdeeds left me cold. It was all to do with your last line: “And someone has got to stop it.” How can you write an essay like that and end with no actual input about WHO is supposed to stop it? “Someone” has got to stop it! OK. How does the stopping happen? More fact-checkers at NYT? Fewer partisan hacks at Fox? I come from a family that owned and published a daily newspaper. Breakfast and dinner was a conversation about news, what is it, and what are its ethics. My dad and grandfather railed against something I’m now convinced was a saviour for this sort of BS: the Fairness Doctrine. After it was abolished, discourse and fact-gathering and news all went downhill.First off, congratulations on your dick. Second, the Fairness Doctrine only applies to broadcasting, and was abused. But I definitely think we should have a debate about bringing it back. As for who stops this crap, the answer is editors, who should not pushed around by woke Leninists, and should want their papers to be treated as reliable sources of information, rather than as a way to “teach” readers how to absorb the lessons of critical race theory (which is literally how the NYT executive editor explained his support for the 1619 Project and every story in the paper). This next reader is hoping for help:I work at a major news broadcast network, so please do not use my name or share my affiliation. Do you have any advice for producers and reporters in house to speak up and push back when you see these narratives go awry — to ensure our reporting is accurate and doesn’t make these baseless claims? I fear losing credibility among my peers and superiors or worse: facing an office awokening/contrived cancellation. I could elaborate at length and provide examples, but I know you must be so inundated, so I’ll keep it brief and hope you have a few minutes to share any advice on how to improve things on the inside.Here’s my advice: take a risk in defending objectivity. Someone has to. All the energy is with the woke bullies. Find allies; make respectful factual arguments; lobby editors; talk about the credibility of the enterprise; argue for actual diversity of opinion in the newsroom. Another reader has a mixed dissent:Andrew, I get it. The MSM does tilt left and, indeed, can be faulted in many instances for jumping on the bandwagon before the band even arrives. And I understand that this week’s Dish was primarily aimed at the MSM — with justification. But two points: #1. All you have to say about Rittenhouse is “He had no business being there with an AR-15”? For me, this is the essential story. We’ve simply come to accept that anyone can sling an automatic weapon over their shoulder and the best you can say is that he had no business being there? Your outrage should be far more targeted at our crazed gun culture, and that a juvenile like this one openly carried this weapon, than about how the MSM got it wrong.  Which, of course, is Point #2: I’m assuming your rant on the MSM doesn’t include Fox News, because you don’t mention it in your essay. But distorting facts and intentionally putting out blatant mistruths (as opposed to “tilting” right) is a more appropriate target for outrage about the media.Well, the thing is, Rittenhouse was reacting to widespread rioting, arson, looting and mayhem that the authorities seems unwilling to handle and many in the national press actually cheered on. Ultimate responsibility lies with those who started the rioting and the authorities that didn’t stamp it out. But Rittenhouse was a fool for taking the law into his own hands.Another reader, another dissent:You state, incredibly, that the Steele Dossier “dominated the headlines” for three years, insinuating that it was the primary basis for the Trump/Russia scandal. This take is false. The Steele Dossier was always a fringy bit of wishful sensationalism that had nothing to do with the mountain of verifiable connective tissue between Trump, Wikileaks, Putin, and his intelligence services that led to dozens of indictments, convictions, and guilty pleas from top Trump officials. Saying it “dominated the headlines” is a carbon copy of the Trump government-in-exile’s weak propaganda effort in light of the dossier’s plunge into disrepute. You tend to be totalistic in your criticism, and your hatred of the New York Times (which I largely share) has led you to embrace a completely false and revisionist history about the former president’s collusive relationship with Russia.I have never disputed and do not dispute that Trump’s dealings with Russia were as corrupt as his dealings with everyone else. I do not dispute that Russia tried to tilt the election to Trump, and that Trump had no problem with that. What I never bought was the tale of an elaborate conspiracy theory about Russia’s Kompromat on Trump, or that his love affair with Putin could only be explained that way. I was open to it — but Mueller showed how thin that case was, and Trump’s substantive policy decisions on Russia simply cannot be regarded as pro-Putin. The obsession with the Steele Dossier, as a kind of talisman for the entire conspiracy theory, was not minor. Simply the term “Steele Dossier” has 134,000 hits on Google News. I think the MSM lost perspective on this, fueled by their intense shock that Trump won.Like the previous reader, this one shares a hatred of the NYT:Not sure if you heard about this heinous crime last week, but a young woman (jogger) was attacked and sexually assaulted in Central Park last week. At around 7:20 am, a perp put the woman in a chokehold and then raped her. The NY Post and NY Daily News, along with other local stations, were on the story and released photos of the suspect to assist with the NYPD manhunt. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), the NY Times didn’t cover the story at all — not initially, and they still haven’t reported the rape. On their website, if you search the suspect’s name “Paulie Velez,” you’ll get zero results. In contrast, search “Amy Cooper” and you’ll get almost 30 different articles and opinions of what was apparently a more notable and newsworthy “aggression” in the park. How’s this even possible? Fortunately the suspect was caught with the help of the tip line, but I just can’t fathom how the NY Times is actively ignoring one of the most heinous crimes I’ve heard about in NYC in the past decade. It’s a major stain on the integrity of the paper. One was a rape; the other a micro-aggression. We all know where the MSM emphasis now is. Another reader looks back at a much older story than made national headlines:As for when all this slippage between the facts on the ground and the MSM narrative really began to get bad: I’ve thought a lot about this. I remember the Duke lacrosse “rape” case in 2007 as the first moment when I realized that I’d bought into a false narrative. I had been teaching on a university campus in the South for five years, had been married to my African-American wife for three years, knew and liked two of the Duke professors publicly raging against the “rapists,” and was primed in every way to hate those white lacrosse players for what they’d done to the as-yet unnamed black dancer, Crystal Mangum.Then Lucy, as it were, pulled the football away. The facts came out; the white DA’s perfidy was revealed; Mangum’s own black female associate said she was lying about rape because she got pissed off at the callow frat boys … and I realized that I’d been played, badly. That stung.That was the watershed moment for me. From then on, whenever racial melodrama reared its head, and especially with Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in 2012 and 2014, respectively, I held off making any judgment in the heat of the moment. It killed me to do this, frankly. I WANTED to believe the continuing narrative about the machinations of Evil Whiteness. But the facts, when they came out, always embarrassed that narrative in one way or another, or in many ways.Here, I’d like to offer a well-earned nod to one particular MSM commentator who actually manifested ethical bravery in the face of all this: Jonathan Capehart, whose 2015 column, “‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ was Based on a Lie,” dared to say out loud what none of his peers would acknowledge. It shows that occasionally the truth breaks through the narrative in a powerful way, even within the tainted purview of the MSM. The Michael Brown / Darren Wilson affair strikes me as the Left’s equivalent of January 6 denialism on the Right: thanks to the DOJ’s long and exhaustive investigation and report, we pretty much know what happened between those two men, but public memory on the Left insists on misremembering.Capehart gets a retroactive Yglesias Award for that. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Sam Quinones On Addiction And Bouncing Back

Sam, the author of Dreamland, is out with another book about the explosion of hard and dangerous drugs, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. His reporting was an indispensable part of my big magazine piece on the opioid crisis, and we go into great detail on the pod. You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of my conversation with Sam — on the rise of a new sinister meth, and on the media silence over gays and meth  — head over to our YouTube page.Meanwhile, many readers keep the debate going on critical race theory in the wake of the Virginia elections. The first:I agree with you on a lot on CRT, and I agree that the Arlington County materials one of your readers linked to is deeply problematic. We’ve got a little blond 12-year-old girl in school right now who was recently singled out by a really terrible teacher who basically demonized her as representative of the wrongs perpetrated by white people throughout history. We’re planning to talk to the teacher and maybe the school and will be having some out-of-school discussions with our kids.So suffice it to say on this issue, I’m with Youngkin. However, I was surprised to see you say you’d vote for him if you were in Virginia. Do you consider yourself a one-issue voter? Youngkin certainly talked a more moderate talk, which I’d love to see become fashionable in the GOP, and I’d say he has the better of the education argument. But then there’s his waffling on Jan 6 and voter integrity — and commitment to a democratic society is pretty foundational. There’s Covid — I don’t want to get rid of mask mandates in schools. Do I even need to say this: Covid is NOT a fringe issue. Then there’s climate change, which is kind of a big deal too. Youngkin isn’t sure if humans play any role in global warming, and he warned that a transition to renewables will result in “blackouts and brownouts and an unreliable grid.” As for local issues, historically it’s been really hard to get Republican candidates to support desperately needed money for roads in northern Virginia.The response to each of those can’t be “but CRT!” I don’t see how you weigh all that and come out for Youngkin.Sometimes, you vote as a protest to make sure your voice is heard on a particular topic. I do see CRT as a foundational issue for a liberal democracy — and in a governor’s race, it would be my core issue. CRT’s premises and arguments are so designed to dismantle our entire constitution and way of life, it becomes a litmus test in my mind. Another reader prods me further:Unexplored in your column “The Woke Meet Their Match: Parents” is what role parents should actually play in public school education. Let’s look at it this way: public schools are going to continue to assign reading that troubles one constituency or another. Hardcore CRT is going to tick off many parents, and sexually explicit content (like in “Beloved”) will cause at least some parents to shield their children. On the other end of the spectrum, some parents believe history textbooks whitewash the most painful parts of our history.My point is a mundane one: you can’t please everyone. What, then, is the solution?  Should parents be able to opt a 12th grader out of certain books? Should school boards simply water down curriculum so that no student reads any material that challenges their sensibilities? Should schools send parents mailers warning them of troubling content? Who decides what content is troubling?In short: you implied that you think parents should have some sort of involvement. But what does that mean?I think parents should be able to express their concerns, and teachers should reasonably accommodate them in egregious cases. If they don’t, parents need to elect better school boards, or recall members, as is happening in San Francisco of all places. But no, I don’t want to give parents a veto over anything their kid studies. A sharp dissent from a public school administrator in NYC:I agree with you about the far left’s overreach on matters of race, and that it dashed the Dems’ chance at winning the gubernatorial race, but, when it comes to what’s being taught in schools, with respect, you don’t know what you’re talking about (and even sound — dear Lord forgive me — a little like Tucker Carlson). You wrote that students are “being taught in a school system now thoroughly committed to the ideology and worldview of CRT, by teachers who have been marinated in it, and whose unions have championed it” — and then cherry pick examples to support these overgeneralized claims. First, unions have no say in what gets taught in schools. None. Whom they invite to their conferences (that no one goes to or cares about) has zero bearing on what students learn in their 2nd period Geometry class. Randi Weingarten and the AFT could invite Lucifer himself to give a keynote and it wouldn’t matter one jot. Two, there are 3.5 million public school teachers in the U.S. and 270,000 administrators. Where, and when, did all of us become indoctrinated into the “worldview of CRT”? Ed schools? Our famously ineffective “professional development” sessions? The staff lounge?? While there are, of course, exceptions, American public schools are not exactly known for their innovation, and teachers are notorious for their reluctance to adopt new ideas. That explains why so many elementary schools, after decades, still teach reading using methods wholly unsupported by the latest evidence-based science in reading instruction. It’s why every state mostly teaches a curriculum that has not changed since electricity was invented and which has not scaled or aged well to serve many students’ needs (or society’s). And it’s also why it only takes teachers about three years on the job before they start recycling units and lesson plans from the year before. Schools and classrooms are such indescribably dynamic ecosystems with so many factors beyond our control that when we find a system that works for most students most of the time, we dig our heels in deep and use it (until a global pandemic shakes things up, and even then). Add to that the vested interests of the myriad stakeholders — teachers, unions, parents, politicians, education schools, policy makers, students — and the staggering amount of tax dollars we funnel into our districts, and you’ve got a slow, lumbering machine that makes an aircraft carrier look like a cigarette boat. And lastly, even if it were true that most teachers were CRT acolytes, as you fear, where, exactly, would this odious instruction be taking place? Gym? Band? AP Bio? Please. Schools — and school districts — are food courts, not Michelin-starred restaurants. They’re not nearly as coherent as you fear. So calm down, dude.This next reader had a much difference experience:A high school in San Francisco called me in to fill a one-year gig teaching geometry. I entered what I thought would be an interview like many I’d had in the past. Instead, it was a whole ambush. The three individuals sat facing me and slid a piece of paper over with about 12 questions on it. They circled four and took turns reading them aloud. No questions about me, my education, my previous experience. What they really wanted to know was how I would make sure that students of all races succeeded, how I would implement CRT into the curriculum, and how I could make the instruction of math anti-racist.From another teacher:I recently graduated with my Masters in Teaching, and I got two years of an exclusively CRT-based curriculum where learning great teaching strategies was prioritized far behind mastering the principles of anti-racism. Although some on the Left rightly claim that the idea of middle-school students reading Robin diAngelo is ridiculous, this is a motte-and-bailey fallacy. In my MAT program, we learned about how the racial education gap is due exclusively to white racism, and we did have to read DiAngelo, with no opposing perspectives. We learned about the evils of cutting government spending without addressing the mind-boggling amount of money that is absolutely wasted by administrative bloat and stupid, briefly-lived fad technologies.I was on the left before starting graduate school, but my experience there pushed me way into the center because I could see how wasteful, baseless, and hypocritical so many of the left’s policies on education were and how entrenched CRT is in all things education. I saw a lot of bright, reasonable minds turn to anti-racist fanaticism because of the sheer social pressure against speaking up against the predominant perspective. As you say, there is simply no way that this kind of thing doesn’t trickle-down to students. We were told not to grade with red pens, to ignore certain grammar errors in favor of allowing room for cultural language expression, pressured to raise grades, and shamed for having too many failing students when the students themselves couldn’t even be bothered to show up to class, in part because they knew there would be no consequences. Kids may not be learning CRT explicitly, but they absolutely suffer the consequences of its pervasiveness in the school system. Looking back at last week’s episode with Ann Coulter, we predictably pissed off a lot of listeners. But not all:I was surprised, pleasantly, to listen to Ann Coulter speaking out of her onscreen character. I was prepared to be forced to end the podcast early amidst anger and frustration listening to her, but instead I found it an entirely satisfying experience. From another listener who “enjoyed this interview”:You challenged Ann Coulter in an engaging and — dare I say it — gentle way, which made for a real conversation and brought out some likable qualities in Ann. Not easy to do. Although it seems a bit quixotic, and isn’t enough to allow anyone to let their guard down, I think Ann’s prediction about Trump fading away, like Sarah Palin, has some merit. Reminds me that sometimes things aren’t resolved or transformed in sharp, definitive battles but in a slow crumbling, and turning of attention.Another listener thinks I should have been less gentle:Dude. Dude. DUDE! I’ve been with you since the early early days of the Dish. That interview with Ann Coulter was the most impotent one you’ve had since launching the podcast. There are too many examples of how you just let her spew unchecked nonsense: on parental leave, the transactions costs of diversity, the size of the federal work force, etc. Come on. Frustrating. I wanted more. She didn’t defend any of her positions. None. And you didn’t push her. At all. You didn’t even try.Maybe I was too soft. But I was not trying to have a showdown, but a conversation. Another listener isn’t a fan of Coulter but liked the episode:Thank you for a great interview with Ann Coulter. As someone who shares most of her views, I followed her work closely for years. However, she has two intolerable flaws that led me to largely tune her out. The first is her increasingly tiresome shtick. Her tight dresses, coquettish laugh, hair toss, and outrageously offensive statements perfectly timed to coincide with the release of her books all served to increase her publicity and make her extremely wealthy. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone their wealth and fame, but one would think that at some point, she would start to prioritize the issues she is passionate about and try to make the progress on them that she is capable of, in light of her undeniable brilliance. For example, I recall that in the run-up to the 2008 election, it seemed clear that the nominees would be McCain and Clinton. Ann announced to anyone who would listen that she would not only vote for Hillary, but even campaign for her. Among many other issues, there were certain to be several Supreme Court appointments in the coming years that could affect abortion jurisprudence. The late Mike Adams wrote at the time that Ann cared more about selling books than saving babies. Harsh, but it is hard to argue with that.Ann’s second major flaw is that she has a long-standing habit of falling head-over-heels for political figures who (by her own subsequent admission) end up being frauds, charlatans, or plain morons. Among others, this includes W Bush, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, and Trump. On the latter, she attempted to explain away the fact that he hoodwinked her by saying she never could have imagined he would fail to follow through on his immigration promises. I supported Trump’s campaign positions even more than Ann did. Yet I can honestly say it never even occurred to me that a lifelong cosmopolitan liberal Democrat, who couldn’t speak intelligently for ten seconds about the issues he professed to care about, never went more than two sentences without telling a bald-faced lie, and began his political career with the Birther lie, had even the slightest intention of following through on those promises. The fact that Ann fell for it, and often falls for it, makes it impossible for those of us who are kindred spirits to look to her for guidance on whom to support and whom to vote for during the primaries.All that said, your interview with Ann was the most substantive commentary I ever heard from her, which made it extra enjoyable.This next listener digs into some of the substance:I think your and Ms. Coulter’s characterization of the past assimilation of immigrants paints a too idealistic picture, and is not completely accurate. I grew up in New York City, where immigrant groups had their own neighborhoods. While my experience is from the 1950s and after, I know that the earlier clustering was even more prominent.  My experience of Chinatown exemplifies the long period of assimilation, probably driven both by choice and also by prejudice. Walking through Chinatown in the ‘50s and ‘60s was like entering a different country. On the streets the language spoken was Chinese, signs on the stores were also in that language, many, if not most, restaurants only had menus in Chinese. On the fringes of Chinatown were establishments that catered to a wider audience, and English signs and menus were available.Other enclaves — Little Italy, German Town, the Polish enclave near where I lived, and other clusters — existed for many years. Certainly the little shtetls of the Lower East Side were rife with lots of folks who spoke only Yiddish, people who were excluded from employment, from certain businesses and from education (your alma mater, Harvard, among them). The immigrants from Central and Southern Europe, and other Catholic countries, like Ireland, were treated with suspicion, and also discriminated against. Their assimilation did not follow the petal-covered path you and Ms. Coulter implied.One more listener:Coulter’s vision of everyone sticking to their own homogeneous countries is a recipe for stagnation. There is a reason that every significant technological breakthrough of the last 70 years came from America! I have yet to see a laboratory — mine included — that does not thrive on the heterogeneous thought, creativity and insight that effortlessly flows from the human diversity that arises when selecting for intelligence and curiosity. You cited the bland homogeneity of 1970s England. I lived in Western Europe through the entirety of the 2010s and not much has changed. People like Coulter — and the Bernie Bros — should try living in one of the countries they hold up as examples for America before they open their mouths. American culture is appropriation and it is a unique and beautiful thing.All good points. Thanks as ever for expanding these conversations with your own critiques and feedback. The in-tray is always open: dish@andrewsullivan.com. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Ann Coulter On Trump And Immigration

She’s the author of 13 NYT bestselling books, including Adios, America. I know, I know. A lot of you are going to get mad at me for this one. If you’re a longtime Dishhead, you may even remember that we once had a Malkin Award every year, and this is how we described it:The Malkin Award, named after blogger Michelle Malkin, is for shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric. Ann Coulter is ineligible — to give others a chance.I once described Coulter as a “drag queen posing as a fascist.” But, I’ll be honest, I’ve come to admire her the last couple of years for taking on Trump — for breaking his promises on immigration. Agree or disagree, that took a certain amount of courage, given her audience. I also met her, and found her much more intriguing than you’d expect from the public image. I’m not sure I grilled her hard enough in this podcast, but I did try to flush out some inconsistencies. You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of my conversation with Ann — on our differing views on diversity, and how she underestimated Trump’s intelligence — head over to our YouTube page.A reader writes:I just finished your episode with Briahna Joy Gray on race and class in America, and I wanted to take a moment to thank you for bringing on guests you don't necessarily agree with. Too many podcasters use the platform to simply promote their ideas and bring on guests who don’t challenge them. Even though I could sense frustration and struggle on your side from time to time, I enjoyed the dialogue.The dialogue continues this week on Briahna’s pod — teaser below. God I look tired.Meanwhile, many readers continue to respond to our episode with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. One writes, “Intended or not, you and the Bobs managed to scare the living shit out of me just in time for Halloween”:As a perennial supporter of outsiders — Howard Dean, local libertarians, Tulsi Gabbard, et al — I was embarrassed to vote for Joe Biden in 2020. And on January 6, I merely rolled my eyes at the wannabe cast of Idiocracy that stormed the Capitol, thinking I was witnessing a ridiculous but somewhat understandable temper tantrum within a heated historical moment. But thanks to the book Peril, I realize I was gravely in error. We were instead, on January 6, watching people cheer on an aspiring demagogue who was planning a case through the rule of law that we could and should overturn a free and fair election — and we are about to watch him do it again. There is absolutely nothing more plausibly dangerous to our country in our near future.During your closing minutes with the Bobs, you more or less label Trump as the one exceptional danger that ought to command our attention more than Wokeism. I agree — and surely far more dangerous than Biden. Even if we were to grant that the riots and crime sprees that took place alongside BLM protests were more dangerous than a mob attempting to capture or kill a vice president and/or members of our legislature, there’s little evidence Biden would further such riots beyond, perhaps, a misguided speech on race. Whereas we now know that President Trump would have done anything he could, including tactics bearing the weight of law, to further enable January 6.We have to ask what likely coming transgressions to laws and norms are most likely to damage us irreparably: Biden and the Wokesters castigating us on Twitter for watching Dave Chappelle, or Trump’s lawyers aiming to discard popular votes? Indeed, the Woke may want to shame us, coerce us, and tell us what to think, but should what the Bobs report come to pass, the Right will have functionally stripped the right to vote. To me, that sounds as though the American experiment will have ended.Another reader “watched this clip of your interview with the Bobs”:I wondered why you changed from saying at the beginning that Trump was crazy but rational to saying he was crazy and irrational at the end. Could you parse this please?I tried to explain above: you can be out of your mind, yet brutally rational in assessing your own narcissistic interests. From a reader in Portland, Oregon:I’m a long-time reader — all the way back to your days at TNR. Judging from your newsletters at the current Dish, however, I just can’t follow. While on the one hand I don’t want to unsubscribe from your freebie version, I often find it hard to read. Not because I agree or disagree with your take on current issues — that’s mixed, as one would expect in a sane world — but more about your apparent understanding, or lack thereof, about the hierarchy of cultural threats surrounding us, and where the dangers in these threats really lie.If you haven’t read this story from the WaPo about a Texas principal suspended for supposedly embracing CRT, I suggest you do. Cancel culture has been a feature of conservative America from the beginning. Right-wing cancel culture is the social force that chases millions of young people out of flyover country into the big coastal cities. I fought cancel culture when I was a teenager in Tulsa in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It was made clear to me then that someone with my views — atheist, left of center — would be happier somewhere else. And I’m a white guy from the middle class. Bellyaching by conservatives in Trump country about being condescended to by coastal elites is a hilarious irony. It was their condescension to their own kids, their own refusal to be respectful human beings to their kids and neighbors, that chased so many of their children into the ranks of this “elite.” They act the way they do because they’re comfortable treating people who aren’t like them like crap. And now, finally, we’ve reached a cultural reckoning. The revolution is here, and no, it isn’t pretty.I’m against the mentality of cancel culture, whether from the right or left. But I think your analysis of the gap between the cities and the rest is, shall we say, a little crude. The contempt goes both ways. Next up, a reader pushes back on the “Email Of The Week” written by the Virginia mother, whom the reader assumes “has totally not read or understood the ADL materials”:I took a close look at the provided links and saw nothing wrong or indoctrinating about them. The Reparations section is for 11th and 12th graders, for Pete’s sake.  Don’t you think such students are capable of having an informed discussion on this issue? I read the original piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates and thought it interesting and worthy of debate. Ultimately, I come down against reparations and in favor of making sure schools have enough resources to lift up everyone. My wife spent six years working on anti-bullying educational materials for middle schools as part of a long-term consulting job. They came up with syllabi that were similar to the ADL materials your reader links to and this was 14 years ago, before CRT and wokeness were even on the radar screen. I think that people are being fed “CRT cookies” as if this is an evil so big that we need to do everything in our power to destroy it. Don’t forget that it was not that long ago that the gay community was being savaged in a similar way.You can go ahead and support Youngkin, who is a “Trump lite” candidate, but he won’t do anything to set this country or even the state of Virginia on the track it needs to be. With the emerging takeover of elections and school boards, we are on the road to a very dystopian future. Yes, we will ban Toni Morrison; yes, we will ban Margaret Atwood; yes, we will ban Mark Twain; and so it goes. Let’s enshrine the rule of the white male in perpetuity because that is the end game here.Secession is beginning to look better and better to me!I was with you until you degenerated into a rant against “the rule of the white male.” That racially essentialist generalization is exactly why the ADL has lost its way on this.On a very different note, this last reader has an epic dissent against the Dish linking to a Substack piece entitled, “Anthony Fauci Has Been Abusing Animals for 40 Years”: In reading your newsletter for some time now, I have come to see you as the epitome of rationality (validated by last week’s discussion with Steven Pinker). I am thus dismayed to see you jumping in with the lynch mob going after Anthony Fauci for the unfortunately named “beagle-gate” by linking to that Substack piece by Leighton Woodhouse. Perhaps you can be forgiven for an emotional reaction to this, given your devotion to animals and this breed of dog in particular. But the only thing ghastly about the article by Woodhouse is the lack of any kind of objective journalistic standard contained within it.Let me start by providing some bona fides. I am a veterinarian who entered my career because of, fundamentally, a love of animals. I am also a research scientist that works for a pharmaceutical company. I work with hundreds of other such people that are lovers of animal and human life and devoted to making the world a better place — just like Anthony Fauci. Nobody I know in this field loves the animal aspect of animal research. In fact, I work with scores of colleagues whose main job is to ensure that our animal heroes are treated with kindness, compassion and respect — and provided as much comfort and freedom from pain as humanly possible, contrary to the implications of the Woodhouse piece. The use of animals is an unfortunate but wholly necessary part of the advancement of scientific knowledge and, by extension, human health and welfare. Despite what Woodhouse claims, and while the entire field works tirelessly to improve methods that do not rely on animals, there is simply no truth to the notion that we can do without animal research and hope to continue the pace of remarkable innovation in medicine that we as a society expect and demand.Woodhouse cherrypicks quotes from animal rights advocates and anecdotes that serve his argument while leaving aside the fact that nearly every single industrial and academic biomedical research laboratory or institution uses animals in their research. Animals are expensive, difficult to house and maintain and, as I mentioned previously, the objects of sympathy and respect. There is no rational scientist who would use an animal in her work if it were not absolutely the best way forward. Woodhouse’s “evidence” that animal research is optional is akin to the climate deniers who cite the single climate scientist out of a hundred that still thinks anthropomorphic influence on climate is still “unsettled.” It is very easy to sit back from a distance, while enjoying a quality and length of life and an understanding of biology unheard of even 50 years ago, and sling arrows at the entire endeavor.In another stroke of fallacy, Woodhouse claims animal research is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned because it often fails. This is a “false cause” fallacy, misapplying the difficulty of the scientific endeavor to the methods that are being used. On the contrary, it is the difficulty of the scientific questions that we as a community are trying to answer that is responsible for the failure rate. Science is hard! Most experiments — and this would, by definition, include those employing animals — fail. The failure rate would be extraordinarily higher if we were to abandon our use of animal models which, although far from perfect, allow us to mimic and test complex biological phenomena far more accurately than any in vitro or in silico approach available today.It is a baseless claim, unsupported by data, that there is a cabal of incestuous animal testers that only fund research that employs animals. In fact, most grant submissions require strong justification for the use of animal models and a thorough examination of alternative methods. Woodhouse states that FDA does not mandate that human drugs be studied in dogs. While this statement is technically true, it is grossly misleading in that it hides a small but important nuance: the FDA mandates that human drugs be studied in dogs OR MONKEYS. But why let inconvenient facts detract from a point you are trying to make? And the propaganda about organs on a chip and AI is the same fodder fed to legions of PETA activists for the last 25 years. Yes, we are working very hard on these technologies. In fact, my lab is on the cutting edge of this research and we are incredibly excited about the advances that we are making. But make no mistake, these are still very rudimentary models that are flawed in modeling the unbelievable intricacy of a complex, multicellular organism. They are useful in answering certain very well-defined research problems but utterly fail in addressing other, more complex questions. It is easy to convince a lay person that this is trivial stuff that we can just answer with computers and parlor tricks, but I think few biologists would agree. I’d like to point out that the weather is predicted by only three key variables and yet, with the most powerful supercomputers, we can reliably predict it only three days in advance, maybe five if I’m being generous. In contrast, a human being has 20,000-25,000 genes and many times more epigenetic and environmental variables influencing how it responds to an event, be it an injury, a mutation or an infectious organism. Yes, there are differences between animal and human physiology. However, no organ on a chip or computer simulation will come close to approaching the modeling power that another closely-related multicellular organism provides.Woodhouse relies on shameful appeals to emotion to make his case. This manipulation is the last resort of a flawed argument. He takes a page from the pro-life crowd, screaming the equivalent of pictures of D&C’d 12-week old fetuses. His article is full of heartrending imagery of the most awful, gruesome things that one could imagine. I am sure that he did not sensationalize anything, such as “FORCE-fed…PUPPIES,” dogs being “CUT OPEN,” “brains DESTROYED,” “AGONIZING pain,” etc. But guess what? Animal research involves death. Just like eating bacon. There is no way to sugarcoat this, and while I am sure there are plenty of people who will be ready to sign a petition to ban animal research after reading these accounts, I wonder what their perspective will be if their loved one dies after taking an experimental drug that had never been tested in animals and was thought to be safe. If you think this is only a theoretical scenario, I would encourage you to spend some time learning about the lives of the thousands of babies born without normal limbs to mothers that took thalidomide while pregnant. This is a birth defect that was later shown to be predicted by testing in rabbits (and is the reason that these FDA testing requirements exist today). And this is still, in 2021, not an effect that we can predict in anything other than a whole, living animal (I know this, as this is a subject of the research in my lab).Finally, and most offensively, the article makes an ad hominem attack on Anthony Fauci as somehow an evil leader of this heinous cabal of animal torturers. Even the title of the article (“Anthony Fauci Has Been Abusing Animals for 40 Years”) conjures an evil, cruel Fauci laughing as he personally administers the torture to his subjects, like a crazed Torquemada. These are shameful tactics being employed by anti-vaxxer, mask-resenting Trumpers who see Fauci as the meddling, come-to-take-away-all-my-rights government, personified. The vile that is spewed at this honorable, intelligent servant of our country is disgusting. Unlike most of the talking heads in the public arena, he is someone who is not seeking power or prestige, has been honest and forthright and, by all evidence, is a caring individual who wants to do the right thing. No matter what one’s views are on animal research, to paint Fauci in this way is disgusting. Argue against animal testing if you wish (it is a debate I think you will lose), but make no mistake, this type of research is, for the time being, broadly accepted in our society. Anthony Fauci is no more responsible for the culture of animal testing than the surgeon general is responsible for abortions.Sorry for the long diatribe, but this one touched a nerve. I hope you can place your very admirable love and affection for your beagle aside and recognize both the complexity of this subject as well as the gaping flaws in that awful op-ed in Substack.Well, we’re very happy to air your arguments. I completely agree with you about Fauci, and I didn’t write the piece — just linked to it. But there are trade-offs with respect to the use of animals in scientific research. I find the whole concept of ripping out their vocal chords to silence their screams and howls as they are experimented upon to be, well, evil. I hope you do too.Bodenner and I are currently brainstorming guest ideas to discuss animal rights on the pod, so if anyone has a good suggestion, hit us up: dish@andrewsullivan.com. Meanwhile, a reader sees a beaglegänger:The reader writes:I am very curious to know where your rescue beagle came from. I’ve attached some small photos of Charlie, who is now almost 8 and so greyer, but they capture him well enough. He looks to be if not a sibling, then a pretty close cousin, to your Bowie. I adopted Charlie in March 2014, when he was judged to be between 1 and 2 years old (I picked December as his birthday for insurance purposes, but that’s been backed up by his vet looking at his teeth). His paperwork, such as it is, starts in the dog pound in Newport, TN, which is in Appalachia, just north of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He came patched up with some scars, one much the length of his leg, and is in blind in his left eye from some trauma. I speculate that he was abandoned and then hit by a car and found by some Good Samaritan. He is terrified of bangs — over and above fireworks phobia. I wonder if he was a failed hunter and abandoned for that reason, or if there was a hunting accident. Anyway, he now lives in some style in New York, and you can perhaps see that two photos are from a cross-country road trip, in the Petrified Forest en route to Malibu, so, while it must have been a horrible experience, he landed on his paws. He is also my second beagle and I relate to everything you have ever written on the subject. But I know so little about Bowie, and based on this photo you posted of her, she has the same blue tick colouring as Charlie’s, and same patterns, and I note her hair is also a little longer. The tummy and tail look identical. It would be fascinating to hear of any history he knows.I don’t think they’re related, since Bowie arrived via a Dish reader who was fostering her, and we were told she was originally from New York State. The thing about rescue dogs is that there is always a mystery about their origins. But they sure do look alike! Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Steven Pinker On Rationality In Our Tribal Times

Pinker’s new book is Rationality. It’s like taking a Harvard course on the tricks our minds play on us. We had a blast — and I pressed him on several points.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of my conversation with Pinker — on what he believes is the biggest delusion in society today, and what we should do about truths that hurt people — head over to our YouTube page. If you’d rather watch the whole episode in living color — and see the most famous hair in academia — we videotaped the remote convo in the Dishcast studio. It even has the view from Pinker’s window in the background:Responding to my latest column on “our gay inheritance,” a reader actually hits on some themes discussed by Pinker and me:I find your argument regarding the new censoriousness of the LGBTQ community to miss some important context. Namely, the Puritans were once the rebels and the outcasts. I understand that from your perspective, as a gay man, the defining Puritan ethos is one of vicious repression, but I think there are larger truths we can learn once we understand the genesis of the Puritans as a “marginalized community.” How many powerful groups got their “start” in marginalization? The Catholic Church and Christians in general? Other groups that are so powerful that one might be called a bigot just for stating that they are powerful?A story of persecution is useful for attracting empathy and support, even after a group has recovered from its marginalization. At that point, is there ever any incentive to abandon the story? No, because as a group rises in status, there is power to be had in advocacy for the group. And the higher the status of the group, the more power can be gained by the advocates. And at some point, the preservation and gain of power becomes the point, and so every marginalized group has a tendency to become “The Puritans” over time.At this point in history, the larger danger, I believe, is that marginalized groups are being used to advance an agenda — the agenda of low-trust authoritarians. “Believe women” undercuts the presumption of innocence that we used to hold as a sacred belief. “Intent doesn’t matter” goes further along the path, essentially implying that everyone and anyone is guilty, and can be shamed at the pleasure of the attack dogs. “Follow the science” implies that there is only one true correct explanation, as determined by experts deemed in good grace by the media and government. Anyone who disagrees is distributing “misinformation.”Brilliantly put. This next reader, using the tool of rationality but also empathy, continues a discussion thread from the summer driven by an anti-vax reader:Immediately before reading the dissents over your “Let It Rip” piece, I read with disgust a wildly judgmental essay that a friend of a friend posted on Facebook. While I agreed with the spirit of frustration with the unvaccinated, the bitterness and judgment of the essay were breathtaking. These essays followed Sam Harris’ mea culpa regarding taking a preachy tone on the topic of vaccination. A pretty easy pattern emerged.It’s not hard to see that many of us are communicating in tone and tenor that is completely devoid of any understanding for people who are simply afraid of the shots and any potential side effects. And whether these unvaccinated folks are behaving in a way we find rational isn’t really the point, is it? We all know what fear feels like, and no one arrives at a place of fear through a rational exercise — so how can we then judge fearful actions only by the standards of rationality? Yet that seems to be what much of the vaccinated population (of which I am one) wants to do.Your impassioned final dissenter implied as much, and I sympathize: “What are we up against in the future? No one can say with concrete evidence. You might argue, that’s because there is nothing to worry about. Well, I don’t buy that. I know people in my own circle who have experienced heart issues, long-term fevers, menstrual changes and frequent illness since being vaccinated. That’s within months, imagine years.”I also know women who suffered strange menstrual changes and people with days of heart palpitations. Those folks’ symptoms did subside, and they know that their cases are rare and that most others’ with the same problems will experience similar relief because they’ve read the opinions of people like Your Local Epidemiologist or watched Scott Gottlieb or plenty of others on the Sunday shows. But many others won’t have found their way to that type of information for whatever reason.Assuming these experts are correct, should people like the dissenter seek out these data and figure all this out for themselves? Perhaps. But this is a confused media landscape we live in, and as The Dish has well documented, traditional outlets like the New York Times have been caught with their pants down on many occasions — not just with their allegiances to the Woke but with over-exaggerating the nature of COVID, so that the left comes off as psychotic paranoids to much of the right. The mainstream media has earned its reputation as the boy who cried wolf, and while I personally think it’s possible to parse through the hyperbole for the “real” news, I can at least understand the skepticism of those who don’t. While I’ve come to the conclusion that “there is nothing to worry about,” I understand some of the many reasons why others might not.That said, I hope your dissenter would allow me to take exception with a claim that, while no doubt made in good faith, is simply wrong: “Not one person from the CDC or otherwise has compassionately addressed the very real fears that many of us have surrounding this shot. Not one ‘expert’ has given any feedback or concrete evidence regarding the hesitations that are plaguing the un-vaxxed. At least, no one has done that from a place of respect and understanding that I have been made aware of.”No vaccine in history — and we have many — has developed long-term consequences. Vaccine side effects have shown themselves within matters of months, not years. I know this — and I suspect you know this — because many experts have addressed several of the primary fears people have about vaccines, including this one for COVID. While it’s true that the CDC has hosted a clinic over the last 18 months on how not to communicate to the public, the information the dissenter wants is now widely available, especially if we broaden our query to experts outside the Center for Disastrous Communication.To start, if one can get past Sam Harris’ tone and that of his guest, Eric Topol, you’ll hear an obviously bright interviewer talking to a respected physician and researcher discussing the slim odds of short-term side effects, the history of vaccine side effects, the effectiveness of this vaccine compared to others, the misrepresentations of reported side effects, et cetera. Or another friend recently posted a concise University of Alabama-Birmingham press release citing a doctor running a vaccination center, tackling specific concerns over long-term side effects. The list of experts needn’t get longer here, I hope, to persuade your dissenter that experts are speaking out.Your dissenter hopes to be communicated to from “a place of respect and understanding,” which shouldn’t be too much to ask in stressful times. I empathize. But I hope he or she would similarly consider that many of us find that the evidence is rather settled. Yet within that context of available data, we see people making decisions that put our immunocompromised friends in danger, leave us all exposed to greater chance of variants, and put the small risk of our children getting terribly sick against an even smaller risk of a side effect in getting vaccinated. This is where our sense of urgency comes from.I think that gets the tone and the facts exactly right. This next reader addresses last week’s episode with John McWhorter on the woke religion:I think woke culture certainly provides a worldview and a personal sense of a narrative arc. But the central aspect of Christianity — and most religions — is making meaning of our own mortality and easing death anxiety. Think of the famous Bible verse on the promise of everlasting life. For that reason I feel like woke culture is not a religion — there’s no talk of an afterlife.Indeed. But that makes its religious energy more worrisome. If heaven can be made on earth, and there is nothing else, the justification for radical action in the here and now deepens. Back to more dissents over my column on “betraying our gay inheritance”:I agree with your take on where the illiberal left is going, but aren’t these just the children of ACT-UP with similar tactics? Didn’t ACT-UP make a big difference in the end? You seemed to think so when you reviewed the film “How to Survive a Plague.”Yes, they were. And you’ll notice that my review was not lacking in criticism of some of the tactics. I opposed “outing” quite strongly, for example. I decried the violation of churches. And my measured defense of ACT-UP — largely as a psychological movement for overcoming a sense of helplessness — was in an extremely relevant context. Hundreds of thousands of gay men were dying in a terrifying plague, in a society in which they had almost no rights to family or decency.I’m sorry but the plight of gay or trans people today is in no way comparable. And the way in which the risks we face are grotesquely exaggerated seems to me to be a rebuke to those of us who tackled a real life-or-death moment, under actual oppression. And dying of AIDS in the early 1990s was a little bit more traumatizing than being misgendered in 2021 in a country where trans people have full civil rights, and where the alleged “epidemic” of anti-trans violence doesn’t actually exist.But this reader has had enough:I began reading you when I was in college, in 2001 or so, to counterbalance my own leftward impulses. I’m bi, and having a gay “conservative” as a thought leader felt useful to my brain. Watching you support Obama gave me hope that reasonable conservatives could see that the Republicanism had become deeply violent and dysfunctional.So I regret so much that I’m unsubscribing to the Dish, because I just can’t stand your constant defense of those who would do violence against trans people. If Trump were re-elected and decided to amp up the cops or round up the gender-nonconforming (like my partner, maybe? Or do they “pass enough”), his Goebbels would quote you left and right to steady their intellectual justifications.I’m very sorry to lose you. But let me ask: which person “who would do violence against trans people” have I ever, ever defended? You’re not including Dave Chappelle or J.K. Rowling, are you? Because that’s completely insane. Engaging in a debate about some of the thornier questions about trans ideology, especially with respect to kids, is not condoning violence. If it is, then liberal democracy is over. Caving to every mounting demand from every victim faction because of “violence” is crude emotional blackmail that is indistinguishable from irrational hysteria. And it’s worth recalling that Trump had four years to “round up” the “gender-nonconforming” and somehow didn’t. He failed to make his improvised trans military ban stick. While he was president, the Bostock decision was the greatest breakthrough for trans rights in history. I support trans freedom and equality strongly. I always have. I do not support critical queer and gender theory — and that position is honestly held by me and by plenty of trans people too. I believe in liberal society. I will never apologize for it. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.