The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Jill is a journalist, academic, and the author of five books. She’s best known as the first woman to become executive editor at the New York Times, from 2011 to 2014. She’s currently a professor in the English department at Harvard. We’ve been friends forever.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). For two clips of our convo — on whether women are better observational reporters, and looking back at the Supreme Court saga of “Long Dong Silver” — head over to our YouTube page.We have a new transcript posted for posterity: Jamie Kirchick on his new history of gay Washington, recorded in front of a live audience at Twenty Summers in Ptown. If you missed it, here’s a teaser:With Pride still marching along this month, a reader writes:You frequently cover the takeover of the gay rights movement by transgender ideology, and how that can be at odds with the sex-based rights our generation fought for. I want to share a glimpse that I got at another under-discussed appropriation of the movement that’s significantly less threatening, but still leaves me feeling a bit out in the cold as a gay man: Pride going mainstream.I live in a small Midwestern exurb that recently began hosting its own Pride parade. This is not a small event — the banners go up well before June and stick around much of the summer, and it draws a crowd on par with our largest town festivals. I’ve generally avoided it, assuming it would be chock full of pink-and-blue flags and wanting to spare myself the political frustration. I also figured that a Pride parade in a town like mine indicated how unnecessary Pride parades have become.But this year I found out my (straight) brother was bringing his family, including my very young nieces and nephews. I wanted to see the kids, and I hoped my presence might provide some contrast to whatever left-wing antics they saw there. I was also curious how a Pride parade could possibly be family friendly enough for elementary school kids.Long story short, the whole thing was incredibly anodyne. I saw a couple drag queens and exactly one trans flag, but otherwise you would think it was a parade to celebrate rainbows. There were a few other older gay men wandering around, looking as awkward as I was. I had been worried about how to explain things to the kids, but I don’t think they even realized there was any connection to myself or my husband — they were in it mainly to catch candy. I don’t even recall seeing the words “rights” or “equality” mentioned. The messages were along the lines of “Be Yourself” and “Love Wins!”Afterwards, I learned that this event had been founded not by a homosexual, nor by a trans person, but rather by someone’s mother. Her daughter came out to her (I’m not even sure as what) and the mother decided she needed to show her daughter she was loved no matter what. And it all suddenly made sense. This was what a well-meaning mom wants to see when she sees gay pride. Be yourself! Love wins!I don’t want to say this kind of thing should stop. It was a nice enough time, and I don’t disagree with the message. But, I do wish more people understood exactly how unrooted “Pride” has become from the gay culture that started it and the reasons it was necessary. As I explained to my own mother afterwards, I don’t know of any man who had ever been imprisoned or assaulted just for loving another man. It was always about sex, and it’s still about sex. We just can’t mention that at Pride anymore, I guess.I suspect a great deal of this is a function of getting what we asked for — and the consequences of that taking root. Pride now is for straights as much as for gays — just as all the old super-gay events — like the High Heel Drag Race for Halloween in DC - went from being broken up by the cops (in my adult lifetime) to being packed with countless young straight women trying to be cool — and parents and all the letters of the alphabet. I’m made uncomfortable by some of this mass cultural appropriation — but that’s just my nostalgia for an era which I’m glad is now gone. We need to take yes for an answer, and as I wrote nearly 20 years ago, a very distinctive gay culture will end because of it.If you missed last week’s pod with David Goodhart, here’s a primer:This listener enjoyed the episode:On the conversation with David Goodhart, I want to chime in about your argument that one of the great contributions of Christianity, historically, has been reminding smart people that they aren’t any better than anyone else — and might indeed be worse, because of the arrogance and ambition that often accompanies that trait. It reminded me of a seminal moment in my childhood. I was 10, and I had just lost the regional spelling bee in a hard-fought match in which the last kid and I went several rounds before I made an error that he capitalized on. I turned to shake his hand. My dad told me later that night, “When you shook that boy’s hand, I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of you. You showed graciousness in a bitter moment, and it’s one of the hardest things to learn to do. I’m never going to be proud that you’re smart. That was a genetic luck of the draw and you had no more to do with it than you did with having brown hair or being a little scrawny. But how you responded is your character, and I DO care about that, and I am immensely proud of you.”I think the fact that that was a consistent message at home when I was getting a lot of accolades at school probably made me marginally less unbearable than I would have been otherwise. I should say that my family is Southern Baptist; our faith was part of the warp and woof of daily life and the lens through which my parents interpreted life and what was worthy and valuable. Being smart was nice, but not nearly as important as being kind and generous and forgiving. I’m very grateful to have been raised like that.Me too. Another listener also took the convo personally:I’m so grateful for your episode with David Goodhart, which covered a topic that is both intensely personal and professionally important to me. My father is one of seven children of an Italian immigrant who was a short-haul truck driver. He almost flunked out of high school and only finished because his father threatened to kick his ass if he didn’t. Talking to my dad, any highly educated person would instantly dismiss his opinions and observations. But he wouldn’t care. After high school he started his own business — a car repair and towing company. After 40 years he retired with one million dollars, having bought our family home outright and having sent both my sister and myself to college, and me to law school.  Yes, he did this through hard work and persistence, but he also did it through extremely competent business management and strategic savvy. He survived the shutdown of a local mine (70% of his business at the time), the recessions and gas shortages of the 1970's, cyclical recessions and more.  You don’t do that unless you know how to identify risks and opportunities and exploit them to your own advantage. If that isn’t intelligence, I don’t know what is.  I myself work at a talent firm. My job entails creating a business model to help move junior enlisted veterans without college degrees into good-paying jobs with our skilled-manufacturing clients. It’s been fascinating to talk to companies who are still resistant to paying living wages at entry-level positions in the face of literally one million-plus competing job openings. I agree with Goodhart that reality is going to force a lot of rethinking about the value of labor of all kinds. It may take a while, but we are already seeing a few companies that are all-in on paying enough to attract this talent. They are far less nervous about the future.Thank you for this episode, and please find more guests who want to discuss this topic: How to recognize and reward everyone’s strengths, and how to measure success in new ways.  Another listener recommends a guest:I’d love to see you interview Greg Clark, economic historian at UC Davis. His work on the heritability of social status is fascinating. Using surname data from England, he’s found that social status is strongly heritable but that it drifts back to the mean over many generations. So everyone’s ancestors will be elite or downtrodden eventually, but it might take 400 years. The key factor is assortative marriage and mating. Even before women had careers and got educations, you could predict the type of person a woman would marry by looking at the social status of her brother. Clark has shown how the same phenomenon exists in Scandinavia, China, etc. Most interestingly the data show that although income inequality is less in Scandinavian countries because of redistribution, educational and other achievements like admission to scientific societies, it’s just as unequal as other countries. They also show that even communist revolutions in China and Hungary didn’t prevent people with high social status names from reasserting dominance within a generation or two.Twin studies and data where unexpected parental deaths happen show that the differences can’t be environmental. It’s just amazing and totally under reported for obvious reasons, but I do think this data will blow the lid off our current debate. It’s also great that Clark’s data is about white English people and doesn’t involve race at its core. (Here’s a link to one of his key research papers.)I’ve been impressed with Clark since his book, A Farewell To Alms. It’s a great reader suggestion. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

David Goodhart is a British journalist. In 1995 he founded Prospect, the center-left political magazine, where he served as editor for 15 years, and then became the director of Demos, the cross-party think tank. His book The Road to Somewhere coined the terms “Anywheres” and “Somewheres” to help us understand populism in the contemporary West. We also discuss his latest book, Head Hand Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century.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). For two clips of our convo — on why elites favor open borders, and why smart people are overvalued — head over to our YouTube page. Early in the episode, David discusses how his adolescent schooling in Marxism was “a bit like how people sometimes talk about the classics as a sort of intellectual gymnasium — learning how to argue.” Which brings to mind the following note from a listener:I feel compelled to tell you how much I enjoyed listening to your episode with Roosevelt Montás. I’m a retired lawyer in my 60s, and although I had a decent education growing up, my experience did not involve a full immersion in the classics. Hearing you two talk was like sitting in a dorm room in college — except the people talking are older, wiser, actually know what they were talking about. What a treat. I’m a pretty regular listener of the Dishcast, and this was the best yet in my opinion.Much of this week’s episode with David centers on how our capitalist society ascribes too much social and moral value to cognitive ability. That theme was also central to our episode last year with Charles Murray, who emphasizes in the following clip the “unearned gift” of high IQ:The following listener was a big fan of the episode (which we transcribed last week):I must tell you that your conversation with Charles Murray was the single best podcast I’ve ever heard. So deep, broad, and thought provoking. Thank you both for your willingness to explore “unacceptable” ideas so thoughtfully and carefully.I have read two of Charles’ books — Human Diversity and Facing Reality — and, among other things, I am stunned by how ordinary a person he seems to be. That sounds odd. What I mean to say is that, while few people could analyze and assemble so much data and present it so compellingly, his conclusions are what the average person “already knows.” I suspect that most people couldn’t plow through Human Diversity, but given a brief synopsis, they would say “duh.”When you mentioned your deep respect for black culture in America, you touched on something I wish had been more developed in Charles’ books: the option we have of celebrating human diversity rather than resigning ourselves to it or denying it. I would like to develop that idea a bit further:Conservation biologists understand (celebrate) the value of genetic diversity in nonhuman species, because each population potentially brings to the species genes that will allow it to flourish under some future environmental challenge, whether that be disease outbreak, climate change, competition from invasive species, etc. Humans too, as living organisms, have faced and will undoubtedly continue to face many unforeseen challenges, whether environmental, cultural, economic, etc. Hopefully, we will continue to rise to these challenges, but we have no way of knowing which genes from which populations will carry the critical traits that will allow us to do so. So, all the better that races DO differ and ARE diverse — in the aggregate, on average. Population differences are GOOD for a species because they confer resilience!Oh, and for the record, I tend to be center-left, with most of my friends leaning further to the left, so the ideas you presented are forbidden fruits. I cannot discuss them with anyone other than my husband, who can hardly bear to listen because they are so taboo in our circle.Here’s another clip with Charles, bringing Christianity into the mix:This next listener strongly dissents:Charles Murray, and you as well, seem to believe that you can magically separate out the effects of culture and poverty, and determine the effect of “race” on intelligence, which you define as IQ. The problem is, everything you’ve discussed here is nonsense.First, you assume that the term “race” describes a shorthand for people who share a common genetic background, and I suspect this is garbage. Most American Blacks have multi-ethnic backgrounds, with skin melanin being the main shared genetic feature. So, there’s little reason to believe that there’s a correlation between melanin content and other genetic features.Second, you assume that IQ describes general intelligence, that G factor Murray talks about. But intelligence is clearly multi-dimensional. My wife and youngest daughter have a facility with Scrabble, and general word enumeration games, that is way beyond me, and they’re better writers than I am. On the other hand, I have a general facility with mathematics that they can’t match (though my oldest daughter might be able to). And that’s just two dimensions; I’d bet there are many more, encompassing things like artistic talent, architectural design and talents in other arenas. You yourself are an excellent writer and interviewer, but I’ve read your writings for years, and I’d bet your understanding of statistics is elementary at best.Finally, you have no answer to the remarkable changes in IQ in Ashkenazi Jews over the past century. Supposedly IQ is supposed to represent an innate and unchangeable measurement of intelligence. And if you believe that average IQ of an ethnic group is a meaningful measurement, then you have to explain the changes in average IQ among American Jews over the past century. Goddard in the early 20th century claimed that 83% of tested Jews were feebleminded, while today, the great grandchildren of those feebleminded Jews now have IQs 1/2 to a full standard deviation above their co-nationalists. There’s an obvious answer here: IQ tests simply don’t test anything fundamental, but instead test how integrated into American culture the tested subjects were at the time.These are serious challenges to the idea that specific ethnic groups have unchangeable intellectual talents: some of your ethnic groups are non-homogeneous genetically, your definition of intelligence is simplistic, and there’s clear evidence that social integration greatly overwhelms any inter-group average differences. It is obvious that some people are more talented in one area than another, and that a significant amount of these differences are determined genetically. But when you move from the case of individuals to trying to correlate American racial groups with intelligence, I truly believe you’re just making a big mistake. Many Blacks in this country have grown up with the expectations that they simply can’t succeed on their own. I find it impossible to believe that we can filter out the effect of being raised with the expectation of failure. I work in tech, and it seems that a seriously disproportionate number of Blacks at my Gang of Five company come from the Caribbean — where, of course, Blacks are a majority and don’t face the same expectations of failure. We had a panel discussion on race and all the panelists came from the Caribbean, and all had stories of parental expectations that you’d expect from a stereotypical Asian-American family today.That said, right now, the Woke are acting more patronizing (and in my view, racist) than anything since the ‘60s. At this point, the Woke (I refuse to apply this label to the whole Left) treat Blacks as incredibly fragile beings who can’t handle any discussions of problems that aren’t laid at the feet of white people’s racism. It’s pretty disgusting.Instead of going point for point with my reader, here’s a comprehensive list of Dish coverage on the subject from the blog days. Another listener recommends a related guest for the Dishcast:After ruminating on some of your recent podcasts, I’d like to suggest a future guest: Paige Harden, author of The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality and professor of behavioral psychology at the University of Texas-Austin. I imagine you’ve read her profile in The New Yorker. Since your conversation with Briahna Joy Gray, the tension between matters of structure and personal agency have been echoing in my head.When I listen to other guests of yours, other podcast hosts, other conservatives, I see everywhere the tension between structure and personal agency. And having read Harden’s book this fall, I’ve been thinking of her work more and more as a bridge between these seemingly divergent world views. She swims in the same research waters as Charles Murray and Robert Plomin — but she (a) is explicitly clear that this research has, as of yet, no value in studying ethnic groups and (b) treats environmental factors differently than they do. On the latter, Harden makes some compelling arguments about the interplay between environment and expression of individuals’ genes (and thus abilities). It’s easy to see the corollaries in personal ability and responsibility (both with strong roots in genetics) versus the leftist tendency to dismiss people’s actions vis a vis blaming structural inequalities.Harden sometimes trades in some language verging on woke, for lack of a better term, but her more nuanced philosophical references are to John Rawls, not neo-Marxists. She’s really quite convincing. Also, I’ve always appreciated that you ask your guests to reflect on their upbringing and how they got where they are. Having read that New Yorker piece and her book, I think hers is an interesting story in and of itself.It is indeed. Harden is a great idea for a guest. I’ll confess that I felt I needed to read her book thoroughly to engage her, and didn’t have the time so put it off. Thanks for the reminder.A reader responds to a quote we posted last week praising Mike Pence for standing up to Trump after the assault on the Capitol:Pence had innumerable chances over years to expose Trump for exactly what he was. Besides one forceful speech since, there hasn’t been much else from the MAGA-excommunicated, nearly-executed veep. How about a live appearance before the Jan 6 Commission, Mr Vice President? Probably not. While I agree that Mike Pence may have saved the republic on Jan 6, he only did so with a gun to his head — with an actual gallows erected for him, while the Capitol was being stormed and people were dying. Better late than never, but he really cut it close, no?Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are the profiles in courage here, along with all those Capitol police. Pence doesn’t deserve this lionization … at least not yet.Points taken. But to be honest, any mainstream Republican who opposed the attempted coup is a hero in my book. Another reader quotes me and dissents:The early Biden assurance that inflation was only a blip has become ridiculous, as Janet Yellen herself has conceded. No, Biden isn’t responsible for most of it. But some of it? Yep. A massive boost to demand when supply is crippled is dumb policy making. And imagine how worse it would be if Biden had gotten his entire package. Larry Summers was right — again.European countries did not have stimulus like we did, yet they are experiencing similar levels of inflation. This would indicate that inflation is a world-wide phenomenon and not tied to our particular stimulus packages. Also, Larry Summers has been pretty much wrong on everything — here’s a synopsis from 2013 (or just google “larry summers wrong on everything” and see the articles that pop up). Money quote:And Summers has made a lot of errors in the past 20 years, despite the eminence of his research. As a government official, he helped author a series of ultimately disastrous or wrongheaded policies, from his big deregulatory moves as a Clinton administration apparatchik to his too-tepid response to the Great Recession as Obama's chief economic adviser. Summers pushed a stimulus that was too meek, and, along with his chief ally, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he helped to ensure that millions of desperate mortgage-holders would stay underwater by failing to support a "cramdown" that would have allowed federal bankruptcy judges to have banks reduce mortgage balances, cut interest rates, and lengthen the terms of loans. At the same time, he supported every bailout of financial firms. All of this has left the economy still in the doldrums, five years after Lehman Brothers' 2008 collapse, and hurt the middle class. Yet in no instance has Summers ever been known to publicly acknowledge a mistake.Sorry, but the EU provided a Covid stimulus of $2.2 trillion. And Summers was clearly right in this case, and Janet Yellen wrong. Another reader also pushes back on the passage I wrote above:I have a bone to pick with you when you discuss the Biden economic policy. Your contention is that the American Rescue Plan was “dumb policy making” because it exacerbated inflation. Fair enough — but if we are going to discuss the economy, then we need to have a full exploration of the policy choices and their implications. Yes, we have had six months of multi-decade high inflation, but we also have had about a year of near-record lows in unemployment and record-high job creation. Before you dismiss that as simply due to the reopening of the economy post-COVID, it’s worth noting that the American economic recovery has vastly outperformed all prognostications, as well as other Western economies. So in sum, the result of Biden’s policy is high inflation, high growth, high job creation, low unemployment. Let’s be clear then: when you criticize the ARP as too big and thus causing inflation, you are advocating for stable prices at the cost of a low growth, high unemployment environment. It’s a fair argument, I suppose. But after having lived through the weak economic recovery engineered by Larry Summers during the Obama administration, one that choked the early careers of many millennials, I’m not sure Biden’s choice was particularly egregious. But what we may well be about to get is stagflation — as interest rates go up even as inflation continues. It’s possible we fucked up both times: in 2009 with too little stimulus and in 2020 too much. I understand why those decisions were taken and the reasons were sane. But they were still wrong. Tim Noah has been doing great work lately on these questions of inflation and recession, including an interview with Summers. This next reader defends Biden’s record on the economy and beyond:The pragmatic counter-argument to your criticism of Biden is this: his economic program, while inflationary, produced unprecedented job growth after a recession, reductions by 50% in child poverty, more than five new business startups, and increases in business investment and personal bank balances of more than 20%. It’s among the reasons the American economy is outperforming China’s for the first time in two generations.Biden’s signature foreign policy achievements in Central Europe have led to the enlargement of NATO and awakened Europe to its responsibilities to its own security, all of which will contain Russia over the long term. This precedent, coupled with the Aussie-Brit nuclear deal, opens real possibilities for containing China’s potential regional expansion in Asia. At home, Biden’s Justice Department, like Gerald Ford’s, is fumigating the fetid stench of politics it inherited. The Biden White House has re-opened the doors to governors and mayors who need help from Washington in a disaster, regardless of partisan affiliation or views of Dear Leader; and it is laying the groundwork for a much-needed affordable-housing boom in our cities. Your hopes for a politics of dynamic centrism, which I share, does not take into account that as many as 10 million of our fellow citizens are prone to political violence due to the real-world influence of Great Replacement Theory, according to Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. There is no comparable threat from the illiberalism on the left — which is a problem, nonetheless. In the wake of Trump’s loss in 2020, leading Republicans, including the governors of Florida and Texas, are competing for those constituents. That’s a movement my fellow classical liberals and I — stretching from the center-left to the center-right — can and should live without. Bill Buckley wouldn’t have sucked up to them. In the real world, the GOP wooing of the violent right poses an existential threat to our quality of life. It’s why I am voting straight Democratic in 2022. And it is why I would gladly vote for Biden, again in 2024, if he sought re-election.Happy to air your perspective. This next reader is bracing himself for Trump 2024:I know it gives you a warm feeling all over to write a column about the revolt against the woke, but it won’t be wokism that propels Republicans into office in 2022 and returns Trump to power in 2024 — something I agree will be a disaster for the republic. Trump’s return to power feels inevitable to me today. The January 6th hearings will make no difference to Trump supporters.Don’t get me wrong; I think wokism is annoying and stupid, but it is not the threat to the nation that you believe it is, and it never was. Wokism has destroyed the left and that is the real tragedy. Instead of a populist left railing against the rich, we have a bourgeois left railing against heterosexual white men, leaving the working class in the thrall of an American Orban. The working class now feels that the left and Democrats have failed them; and they are right, they have.Americans will vote for Republican for one reason: inflation. It should be no surprise that inflation is out of control, but both Biden and Trump spent billions helping people who were unable to work during Covid (the right policy) without raising taxes (the wrong policy). Now, to fight inflation we need to raise taxes and that is impossible; there aren’t the votes in the Senate. American tax policy is insane. You can have low taxes, or you can solve social problems like helping people who can’t work because of a pandemic, an inadequate public health system still unprepared for the next pandemic, homelessness and addiction, and crime. But you can’t have both. It really isn’t that complicated.Grateful as always for the counterpoints, and you can always send your own to dish@andrewsullivan.com. Another dissenter gets historical:I agree wholeheartedly with your clarion condemnation of the odious Trump. But you are wide of the historical mark when you state that Trump is “the first real tyrannical spirit to inhabit the office since Andrew Jackson.” Jackson was authoritarian in character. He was a product of the trauma of the Revolution and he brought his military identity to the White House. But he was not a tyrant or dictator. (There is more historical evidence for Lincoln as dictatorial than Jackson.) More appropriate — if non-American — comparisons for Trump would be Henry VIII, Wilhelm II, Mussolini and Nixon.Mind you, an interesting Dishcast guest would be Jon Meacham to discuss US presidents with authoritarian tendencies: Adams Sr., Polk, Andrew Johnson, Teddy R and Wilson. All expressed some form of authoritarianism, but sometimes the presidency and the nation derived benefitAnother digs deeper into the Jackson comparison:I suggest you interview W.H. Brands, who wrote a biography of Andrew Jackson. There are many ways to judge a history book, but to me an important criterion is, did I learn anything I did not already know?  Reading this book I did.I am only going to mention one of a good number events in Jackson’s life that Brands brings to the forefront. After the Battle of New Orleans, Gen. Jackson had ordered that a curfew remain in effect and that the city was to remain under martial law. For good reason: while the British offensive on one flank was a disaster, they had relative success on the other flank, and their remaining commander could have ended the truce and ordered another attack. But the British never did a follow-up attack. One New Orleans business man then took Andrew Jackson to court, claiming he endured an unnecessary economic loss on account of the military curfew. The court ruled in the businessman’s favor. AND, incredibly, Andrew Jackson paid the fine! Now stop and think, what must have been on Old Hickory’s mind. Here he risks life and limb to save the city from British domination, and he’s fined. Andrew could think, why should I pay?  I’ve got the Army in my control, I’m not just a commander whom soldiers fear, but also one that has the adulation and respect of my soldiers and the populace at large.   To me, that episode reveals that Jackson was hardly the tyrant he is portrayed to be by most modernists steeped in presentism. He should never be placed in the same sentence as Trump unless the word “contrast” or “opposite” is used. Let's keep Old Hickory away from any such comparisons and let his image remain on that $20 bill!Well I learned something from that email — so many thanks. Meacham is a good idea too. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

We took the podcast on the road this week — to Provincetown for a live chat with Jamie Kirchick, whose new book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, I reviewed last week. We were able to discuss much more than could be covered in pixels — with questions from the audience as well. Many thanks to Twenty Summers for hosting the event.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 convo with Jamie — on the similarities between anti-Semitism and homophobia, and on whether J. Edgar Hoover was gay — head over to our YouTube page. Also: new week, new transcript — this time with Charles Murray. It was one of the most popular episodes last year, and if you never listened to it, now’s your chance to read it as well. Looking back to our episode with Kathleen Stock (who has since moved to Substack!), we still have many unaired emails from listeners. The first writes:I just wanted to email to say thank you for the work you’re doing on the (potential) threat of trans ideology to cis gays. I’m a 33-year-old cis gay in Australia, and I was a bit confused by trans stuff at first, because I felt I was supposed to implicitly understand trans issues, existing in that “LGBT” bloc. Back around 2013, any trans-related conversation amounted to laughing about the silliness of the “xe/xir” stuff, while still acknowledging that it’s simple human decency to use whatever pronouns someone asks me to use.As Kathleen Stock said on your podcast, respecting trans people through their struggle always seemed “costless.” Clearly, that is no longer true. Something has changed for the worse; the most visible, loud and most obnoxious segment of the LGBT community are the “queer fascists.” I’m called a bigot for simply acknowledging that there exist people who detransition (without even mentioning whether transgenderism might be a form of gay conversion therapy, in some cases). I could go on and on, obviously, but again: thank you.P.S. I adored your point on Brendan O’Neill’s show about how the queer community used to be the resistance, but has transitioned into being the censorious puritans.Here’s a clip from the Stock pod:From another listener who “LOVED the conversation with Kathleen Stock”:I’m an intersex person and can say with authority that human bodies are weird. Mine doesn’t produce enough sex hormone. I tried testosterone and developed anxiety, depression, and depersonalization, so I’m now going in the other direction and I’m much happier. My pronouns are “whatever you want,” and I’m fully aware that I’m atypical. I don’t care for the “trans” label because of how ridiculous it has become. That makes my heart hurt for those who have battled very hard to be recognized only to watch their identity subverted into something meaningless by a vicious and thoughtless mob. I hate what was done to Kathleen or anyone else who says, “Hey, wait a minute, we should talk about this.” I don’t know when talking about our differences became so damn dangerous. It’s intellectually dishonest. Weren’t universities supposed to be the places to halt this kind of thing, where ideas could be debated and reasoned through? But if the universities are all businesses now, and their incentives are about how to get more paying students, then where else can the debate be had? Where are the incentives more closely aligned with the public good rather than the almighty dollar? I don’t know. I worry that place doesn’t exist here in the US.One thing that was truly horrifying was when you mentioned that gay kids are being told they’re trans because they’re gay. That’s evil. I don’t know what else to call it. Human brains aren’t done forming until what, our 20s? There’s a reason peer pressure is so pernicious for teenagers, and it seems strange that many adults seem to have forgotten it and blithely go along with kids (rare exceptions aside) who want to block their own puberty or have a double mastectomy before they can legally vote.Anyways, I enjoyed every minute of your conversation with Kathleen, even the part where you went on about how “I don’t even know what non-binary IS,” because that’s how I feel as a non-binary person! I’m not comfortable with either of given options, nor am I comfortable in any same-sex space (but I manage in airports). Again, I’m atypical on the chromosomal level, so while I can’t speak to everyone’s experience, I can say mine is a bit more existential than the random 16 year old who’s decided, along with their entire social circle, that they’re suddenly non-binary and have all dyed their hair blue. Sometimes it feels like I’m riding around in a clown car, to be honest.From another fan of the episode, a medical doctor:I admire both you and Kathleen Stock. The more I learn about what is being done to children who don’t conform to stereotypes, the more horrified I’ve become.  During my lifetime, much has been done to accept people, including children as they are. We’ve come to recognize that there’s a great deal of variance of normal around the mean. But when it comes to subjecting children to dangerous medical interventions, we no longer need to worry about causing real harm? To me it appears that some physicians have no qualms about experimenting on healthy children. Malicious intent is all that’s missing for this to be criminal misuse of medical science.I have no platform to use to try to stop this. I appreciate that you and Dr. Stock are making an effort to put the brakes on this madness. Another medical doctor who sounded off on the trans debate was the great Dana Beyer:Listen to the whole episode here. Another listener reflects on the trans debate more broadly:Though I find the entire trans/gender battle beyond exhausting, the recent events surrounding the swimmer at Penn brought it front and center for me. Partly because I was a competitive swimmer in HS, but mostly because my girlfriend’s daughter is a championship-level swimmer with a scholarship to a top-tier program after HS. (By the way, the daughter is not okay with the Penn swimmer.)I have a degree in English, and I’m fortunate to have a lifelong best friend whose father is a linguist. And there were two linguistic tools recently designed to serve one group’s agenda while doing a terrible disservice to the one that should matter. The first was to change the term transsexual to “transgender,” shifting from a term defining the biology of gender dysphoria to one that is intentionally far more vague. The second was to create the shorthand term “trans,” which acts a vehicle for the first by turning something that affects .03% of the population into something broader and far more inclusive.It’s these subtle yet effective shifts in language that facilitate the gender vs biological sex movements, and accepting that someone who still has a penis can be defined as a woman. Now, “trans” is a definition designed to cover any permutation of gender non-conformity instead of actual gender dysphoria, as defined in the DSM-5. And it has opened the door to well-meaning (I assume) adults making terrible decisions regarding child development.Growing up as a boy, all my closest relatives — sister, cousins, an aunt three years older than me — were girls. I ended up playing with them often, regardless of the game or what items were involved (dolls, etc). I followed their lead and even thought I was supposed to pee sitting down. None of this was driven by a desire to be a girl, but rather just to be included. And like many boys, my first forays into my own genitalia involved other boys, as we learned about our bodies. But by the time I neared puberty, it was clear that I was both male and heterosexual. Yet, I fear that children growing up today in similar circumstances will find themselves in a world of confusion, brought on by adults, not their playmates.Speaking of confused kids, another listener:I’ve heard you express frustration and/or disbelief at the rate of depression among gay youth today, despite how much easier things are for them compared to the ‘70s and ‘80s. I just wanted to point out that many young people seem to believe that gay means same-gender attraction, not same-sex. This seems to be part of the Queer umbrella where heterosexual people can identify as another gender and so claim a gay identity. This makes no sense to me (I also find it homophobic), and I wonder if the whole mess contributes to the rates of depression among Millennials and Gen Z.One of those confused kids was Helena Kerschner, a young woman who transitioned and then detransitioned:Listen to her whole story, along with the inimitable Buck Angel’s, here. Another good point comes from this listener:I see the current kerfuffle about trans identities as reflecting the inability to experience complexity without anxiety and a desire to simplify things. That a person can have what are seen as conflicting senses of themselves — as a man, as a man/woman, woman/man, or somewhere in-between — is too complex for some people. Some I expect do find the idea anxiety-provoking — leading to questions about themselves, in a Freudian way — and they are trying to solve their problems by forcing others into boxes.Circling back to the Stock episode, another listener:I do want to push back on, and encourage you to revisit in depth, your point of disagreement with Kathleen over the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments in transgender youth. While the issues are surely different in the case of adults who have reached the age of consent (though even here there is a strong reason for limiting what can be done in the name of medicine in the strict sense, with consequences for what insurance policies should have to cover), the idea that a child could be given permanently life-altering treatments on the basis of a diagnosis for which, as Kathleen observed, there are simply no rigorous criteria, and to treat a psychological condition that could very well turn out not to be lasting, seems utterly abhorrent. What serious arguments are there in defense of this? What are the responses to the obvious objections? Finally, what should liberal people, who are opposed to these treatments but nevertheless prize individual autonomy and fear governmental overreach, think about the various legislative strategies that are on offer to forbid or restrict access to them? I hope that this is a conversation you’ll be able to keep on having.Some kids are definitely trans, know it, and panic at the thought of puberty. In extreme cases, in which the child seems truly desperate, I don’t want to get in the way of an individual doctor, child and parents making this decision. But as routine care? It scares me. For more debate on this ongoing issue, check out the Dishcast episode with Mara Keisling, the founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. A clip of our constructive disagreement:Lastly, a listener looks ahead:I’m writing to suggest a guest (though I am not sure she accepts podcast invitations). There’s a point of view on trans issues I haven’t really heard adequately represented on your podcasts or in your blog posts. I think the person who best articulates it is Natalie Wynn, aka Contrapoints. I recently watched her YouTube episode on J.K. Rowling (and TERFs in general). It was brilliant, and opened my mind to many of the tropes and biases we hear all the time that I wasn’t fully hearing. Natalie is extremely smart, articulate, funny, and not afraid to say things that piss off her tribe. Thanks so much for the suggestion. Keep them coming — along with your dissents, assents and personal stories: dish@andrewsullivan.com. And you can browse the entire Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Bob is a journalist, public intellectual, and the author of many books, including The Moral Animal, Nonzero, The Evolution of God, and Why Buddhism Is True. He’s written for countless magazines, including The New Republic, where he co-wrote the TRB column with Mickey Kaus. He and Mickey also co-founded Bloggingheads TV, and the two regularly converse on The Wright Show and The Parrot Room. He also has his own Substack, the Nonzero Newsletter.Bob is quite simply brilliant, and his books have been very influential in the development of my own thinking. Empirical but spiritual, he’s one of a kind.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). For two clips of my convo with Bob — on what could possibly stop Putin now, and on the danger of humiliating a country — head over to our YouTube page.New transcript just dropped: my convo with Jonathan Haidt over the damage wrought by social media over the past decade. A primer:A listener gives “thanks for producing an interesting, thought-provoking podcast” — then dissents:There was much interesting material in your interview last week with Francis Fukuyama, but there was one major source of disappointment and irritation: your misrepresentation of the ideas of Michel Foucault. Blame Foucault for what you want, but at least try to represent his work truthfully. Contrary to what you asserted, there is no theory of conspiracy in Foucault. On the contrary, he sought to explain that power is exercised in society much less by domination by a few than by influence through diffuse means. He documented how mechanisms of power emerge over time to establish social order in the face of changing economic, social and cultural conditions.  In fact, Foucault sought to answer the question you asked at the end of your interview: if we’re all autonomous, how do we create community? What is it, Foucault asked, that brings order to society at different times, that makes us behave and think in tune with each other, that makes us behave in socially compatible ways, that makes us see ourselves as part of society, and how do we deal with those who seem to deviate from prescribed ways of being and acting? There’s no conspiracy there. There is the steady construction, by numerous people looking to make life more manageable, more productive, etc., of intellectual, institutional and practical means of bringing some order to things and of getting individuals to internalize that order. Here’s a clip from the Fukuyama episode that’s getting a lot of views:Next, a long dissent over last week’s column, “Can A Cult Become A Movement?”:You wrote: “A figure who could mimic Trump’s broader f**k-it-all style, and focus on substantive policy more than Trump does, and have a record of actually getting s**t done, could conceivably co-opt the Trump populism without the Trump baggage.”You must be joking. How do you propose for Trump’s successor to “mimic Trump’s broader f**k-it-all style” — the “it” apparently including democratic norms, the U.S. Constitution, and America’s 200-plus-year tradition of peaceful transitions of power? Trump doesn’t have “baggage.” Not telling your fiancée that you’ve fathered a child during a drunken one-night stand is “baggage.” What Trump has is a proven willingness to burn everything to the ground rather than do the right thing when said right thing involves any damage to his ego. And here’s the kicker: Trump would not have been able to do what he did had it not been for the approval of the GOP.You seem to believe that Trump is the problem, and as soon as he goes away, we can all get back to normal and pretend the Trump presidency never happened. Sorry to shout in all caps, but this is really freaking important: TRUMP IS NOT THE PROBLEM. TRUMP IS A SYMPTOM.Trump is a symptom of a political party that (with very, very few honorable exceptions) wants to grab onto power and hold onto it, ethics be damned. They stood by while Trump spread vicious lies, tried to pressure a secretary of state into altering vote counts, incited a riot (complete with chants of “Hang Mike Pence”), and continues to act like a victim who has been wrongfully deprived of his throne. Had some combination of his cabinet members and GOP congresspeople told him, “Shut up, you clown, what you’re doing is wrong,” January 6 would not have happened. As Bill Maher said on his show, “It’s time to admit that the Republicans don’t just hate the Democrats; they hate democracy. They hate the player and the game!”And you want them back in the White House? Because Biden is old and decrepit and something about trans children and CRT and inflation? I’m sorry to say it, but you sound like Trump apologists back in 2016: “Yes, Trump did some bad things, but Hillary’s emails! And Benghazi!11!!!11”As for the Democrats, I highly recommend this piece by your fellow Substacker Freddie de Boer. To summarize: Democrats suffer from a “worst of both worlds” scenario. On Twitter and in the media, they are the woke fanatics who want to cancel you for using the wrong pronoun and to teach your children that all cis-het white Americans are the Antichrist. In Congress, they are a coalition of woke activists, centrists, and everyone in between, forced to plead with Romney, Collins, and Manchinema to get anything done. The former is more conspicuous than the latter, and so the average voter gets a mental image of Democrats as crazy extremists, while actual progressives are tearing their hair out in frustration with not being able to save the climate and implement universal childcare.Also, I am well and truly flabbergasted by your juxtaposition of “How awful that innocent children have been murdered with a gun! We must do something about the easy availability of guns in our country!” with “Wouldn’t it be swell if Governor DeSantis [who received an A rating from the NRA] became our President in 2024!”Face, meet palm; head, meet desk.Mr. Sullivan, I know you’re a conservative, and I don’t expect you to be happy about the Democrats’ positions on taxes and abortion and whatnot. But please, for the love of all that is holy, do not let that blind you to the danger that the GOP represents. To answer the question in your headline — Can A Cult Become A Movement? — no. No, it cannot. Not if you want America to remain a democracy. As any longtime reader will know, I have no brief for the GOP. I’ve been harshly criticizing it for decades. I would vote for any Democrat rather than Trump, who remains a profound threat to what’s left of liberal democracy. And even if you think Trump represents the real GOP, I don’t think you can argue that his personal vileness, demagogic genius, and insatiable narcissism didn’t also make a difference. And the fact is: we have two parties, the Democrats have completely bungled their opportunity to recapture a vacated center, and I profoundly oppose their ever-leftward social authoritarianism. As for my reader’s defense of the Biden Dems, it’s no defense. The president knew how slim his Congressional majority was, and instead of working from the center out, as he promised, proposed the biggest spending package in decades, has echoed every extreme left position, from abortion to race to immigration to sex changes for children, misjudged the economy by funneling more borrowed money into an overheated economy with supply restraints, and committed the US to a long war of attrition in Europe which Russia believes it cannot lose. There is no one I can see who can replace him who isn’t even further to his left. I voted for Biden, a moderate. I got a woke extremist who cannot command the country’s attention and clearly hasn’t a clue what’s going on in the country. Do you think he understands why and how he may be pushing more Latinos into the GOP camp? I don’t. Pragmatically speaking, in other words, I’m pretty sure the Dems have handed the country over to the GOP for the foreseeable future, and so I’m trying to see how that can somehow save us from a second Trump term. At this point, that’s my main hope. I’m not happy — but DeSantis could be the least awful option in that context. Do you want Biden to run for a second term? It would be “Weekend at Bernie’s,” but not funny.Another reader recommends a book:I was reading your “Rumblings of Rome” piece and couldn’t stop thinking about How Democracies Die by Levitsky and Ziblatt. According to them, democracies are based on a series of unwritten norms of political restraint followed by all the players. They call this “institutional forbearance” and consider it one of the two pillars of a healthy democracy. (The other is “mutual tolerance.”) Money quote:Forbearance means “patient self-control; restraint and tolerance,” or “the action of restraining from exercising a legal right.” For our purposes, institutional forbearance can be thought of as avoiding actions that, while respecting the letter of the law, obviously violate its spirit. Where norms of forbearance are strong, politicians do not use their institutional prerogatives to the hilt, even if it is technically legal to do so, for such action could imperil the existing system.According to the authors, institutional forbearance legitimizes democracy and keeps it going, but once the players start violating the norms, things fall apart. It’s an awesome book and I recommend it to everyone.It is also happening right here right now. It’s a textbook case of the extinction of liberal democracy. Trump was and is incapable of functioning in such a system, and he made everything far far worse. But the Democrats’ response — to shift drastically to the left and to assault our entire system as illegitimate because it doesn’t reflect majority rule in every respect — has made things worse. The response of the Dems to the GOP view that the system is rigged is to argue that the system is rigged in another way — by white supremacy. Both parties are now run by their extremes which do not believe in the rules more than they believe in their agenda. And Biden’s decision to move far to the left of Obama — when he was elected to do the opposite — has told voters like me that voting Democrat means enabling the far left’s seizure of government as well as every other major institution and corporation.Another reader has a truce proposal for the culture wars:I have always voted for Dems because I’m pro-choice. Right now, I’d vote for someone sane who says, “How about we ban assault weapons in exchange for no abortions after 16 weeks?” I’d be in favor of that — with a heavy heart, since it entails giving up a huge chunk of liberty for women. But it might mean less death all around. Everyone loses something and gains something. But who am I kidding? Not going to happen in our lifetimes. Nope. That kind of horse-trading — like building a border wall in return for amnesty — is only accomplished by a liberal democracy. And that’s now extinct in this country. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Fukuyama is simply the most sophisticated and nuanced political scientist in the field today. He’s currently at Stanford, but he’s also taught at Johns Hopkins and George Mason. The author of almost a dozen books, his most famous is The End of History and the Last Man, published shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His new book is Liberalism and Its Discontents.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. For two clips of my convo with Fukuyama — explaining why we need to pay attention to “the men without chests,” and remembering when the political right championed open borders — head over to our YouTube page.Did you ever catch the episode last year with Glenn Greenwald criticizing Bolsonaro, woke journalism, and animal torture? We now have a full transcript available, if you’d rather read the conversation.Back to Fukuyama, the following meme captures much of the sentiment addressed in the episode:A fan of the Dishcast has been anticipating the episode:You announced a few weeks ago that you’d be interviewing Francis Fukuyama, so I decided to re-read The End of History. While I’m sure you’ve no need of assistance of any kind, I wanted to remind you of why some folks are struck by its prescience. Towards the end, he highlights the potential danger for liberal societies that have solved so many problems — there is no end to the amount of “problems” that a society can then invent:To find common purpose in the quiet days of peace is hard…. [When] there is no tyranny or oppression against which to struggle, experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause, because that struggle was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain kind of boredom. They cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. If the world they live in is a world characterized by peace and prosperity, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity … and against democracy.He then refers to some French college-student protests in 1968 against Charles de Gaulle:… [they] had no rational reason to rebel. They were, for the most part, pampered offspring of one of the freest and most prosperous societies on earth. But it was precisely the absence of struggle and sacrifice in their middle-class lives that led them to take to the streets and confront the police … they had no particularly coherent vision of a better society.Like the old Cervantes metaphor — then and now, we see people inventing enemies and problems while they obliviously find themselves “tilting at windmills.”There is no greater example of this, to my mind, than the current LGBTQIA++ movement. Fukuyama and I discuss these people, also known as “the men without chests”:Related to that conversation is a reader email over my recent item, “The Rumblings of Rome”:I enjoyed your take on the faltering mos maiorum of our American republic, and I think you’re onto something important. These values and practices are what keep the system together in times of crisis, and their abandonment is a canary in the democratic coal mine. I know you’ve used the Weimar analogy before, and it is apt: Hitler may have issued the coup de grace to German democracy, but its demise was hastened by powerful elites who in the years beforehand eroded republican norms and removed safeguards to authoritarianism. Certainly the Roman example is also apt, as you convincingly argue here.But what troubles me is a point you make in the linked article in New York Magazine: “But a political system designed for a relatively small city had to make some serious adjustments as its territory and prosperity and population exploded.”  The system was ill-equipped for how Rome evolved over centuries from a city-state to a sprawling empire, and the lack of meaningful reform amplified popular frustrations and opened the door for opportunists like the Gracchus brothers to demagogue, generals like Marius and Sulla to assert political authority, and Senators — desperate to preserve the system — to embrace political violence and thus inadvertently hasten its demise. The system did not evolve enough to meet the challenges posed by expansion, and so people began to reject the system, sometimes for cynical and self-serving reasons, sometimes due to righteous anger born from real suffering, and sometimes in a misguided attempt to save the system from itself.Our America, of course, is vastly different from the Founders’ in any number of areas, and I have often wondered how well our system, even with the amendment process, can respond to the challenges of the 21st century. Especially given our partisan intransigence, our social media echo chambers, and our Super-PAC funded campaigns — things no one imagined in the 18th century — do we really have any chance of meaningful reform on healthcare, welfare, immigration, election integrity, etc.?  To put this another way, democracies work best, I think, when they combine change and continuity — keeping a foot in virtuous traditions while also adapting to new circumstances. If we can’t do the latter, what chance is there to also do the former? I mean, are we fucked?Thanks for your historical thinking on this issue — I try to tell my students that a working knowledge of history is essential to making sense of the modern world. The Sinister Symmetry Of CRT And GRT, CtdReaders continue the debate from this week’s main page over my comparisons of CRT to GRT. This next reader shares a brilliant video on the parallels between right-wing racists and woke racists:Your excellent piece reminded me of this very funny sketch:I recently read James Lindsay’s new book, Race Marxism. His analysis isn’t always watertight, and people have picked holes in the past, but his explanation on page 239 is that this conflict results from the Hegelian dialectical process at the heart of CRT (thesis/antithesis/synthesis):In a very real sense, all of this “alchemy” is meant to reinvigorate the master-slave dialectic in a contemporary cultural and legal context. Indeed, this feature of Critical Race Theory is why so many people rightly perceive that it is, for all its “anti racism” built on an undeniable engine of white supremacy that regards whites as superior, blacks as inferior, and this state being in immediate need of being abolished through critique and multiculturalism. In fact Critical Race Theory defines itself as the antithesis (and method for seeking synthesis) to the systemic “white supremacy” it believes fundamentally organises society …CRT’s version of anti-racism therefore isn’t about a liberal process of using democratic institutions to reduce racism gradually through passing laws and changing public opinion through education. It’s a deliberately confrontational process by which you challenge an idea (racism/white supremacy) with its opposite (antiracism/anti whiteness). We end up in constant racial conflict, as the Hegelians forever continue to restart the dialectic process after every failure they suffer.  This next reader, though, senses a false equivalence:You quoted a reader voicing one of the right’s standard new grievances, about alleged differences in media treatment between the Buffalo shooter and the recent NYC subway shooter. Instead of just nodding along, you should pause for a second and examine this critically, because it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. The Buffalo shooter wrote a manifesto in which he apparently explained that he intended to target black people and why. And then he did so. The NYC subway shooter, in contrast, made some rambling videos expressing a mishmash of racist views, and then, in addition, he shot up a subway. Have you ever been on the subway? Did it strike you as a bastion of whiteness or white privilege? Is it where you would go to try to kill white people (or shoot them in the legs, as he apparently did, for whatever mentally disturbed reason)? Is there any evidence that he selected white people out of the crowd? His attack was just some kind of weirdly disordered thinking, or perhaps intended in a foggy sense as an attack on New York City, whose (black) mayor he had also criticized.I think that’s a fair distinction, especially the choice of target. Another reader claims a false equivalence of a very different sort:I found your latest column unpersuasive. While I like the aesthetic symmetry of “CRT and GRT” as a title, I am not at all convinced there exists an actual intellectual symmetry of the two things as distinct ideas. Yes, both depend on and promote a race-essentialist worldview, and both undermine our nation’s ideals and identity. But that is where their symmetry ends. On a political level, CRT not only claims far more power throughout all our elite institutions, but it also holds responsibility for far more violence and destruction. Which major institution has propagated anything close to GRT? One could make a case for Fox News through Tucker Carlson. I would disagree — as would your podcast guest Briahna Joy Gray, who is on the left. But even so, that is one institution that claims any kind of power in our society, compared to all the others captured by CRT. In terms of violence and destruction, see no further than the summer 2020 riots and the various other attacks motivated by anti-whiteness. Of course, none of this is to dismiss the vile atrocities committed by white supremacists. But I don’t understand why you find the need to draw a false equivalence between the two when one of these evils is clearly a fringe element of our society, with no real threat of spreading further beyond its current limits, while the other already has near-complete elite capture.Also, a minor but important point: you wrote that “Hispanics are originally from Europe.” This is false. The reason Hispanics/Latinos are considered an ethnicity and not a race in the U.S. context is that we are a complete mix of many races. There are Asian Peruvians, Black Cubans, Indigenous Mexicans, White Argentines, and a complete mix of all of the above and more, including mestizos, mulattos, et al. Of course, Hispanics/Latinos (which are not the same circles, by the way; most of Latin America is considered both, but Brazilians are Latinos and not Hispanics, and Spaniards are Hispanics but not Latinos) are united by a common Iberian history, which has resulted in common institutions, heritage, culture, religion, and pair of languages (Spanish and Portuguese). But given the deep, centuries-old mix of indigenous peoples and African slaves and Asian immigrants beyond just Europeans throughout Latin America, it’s just false to claim that “Hispanics are originally from Europe.”Along those lines, another adds:In 2019, Mexican-Americans comprised 61.5% of all Latino Americans, so by and large, when we discuss Hispanics, we are generally discussing Mexican immigrants. Weren’t there a lot of indigenous people in Mexico and Central America at the time of the Conquest? Didn’t most of them have children, so that those children are reflected in current demographic analyses of Mexico?The 1921 census shows Mestizos and indigenous groups as the majority — usually the vast majority — in literally every Mexican state. Numbers of self-reported “white” Mexicans have increased substantially since then (though no explanation is posited for the decline in Mestizo or indigenous populations), but self-identified “whites” still are a minority at 47% of the Mexican population, with 51.5% as either indigenous or “most likely Mestizos.” Frankly, it is likely not the white groups that are congregating at the border. Your explanation seems to assume that Mexico was unpopulated at the time of the Conquest, which is a gross misrepresentation. Thanks for these complications of too breezy a statement. Another reader gets philosophical:I enjoyed your piece this week on CRT/GRT. Also, on Friday I read David Brooks’ piece on conservatism/progressivism, and it made me think of John Keats’ bitter — and ultimately incorrect — epitaph for himself: “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” That would fit most of those who have ever walked the earth, including most “public intellectuals,” to use your phrase. Humans come and go, and we know damned well that we are likely soon to be forgotten, unless we become a curiosity for ancestry researchers.It strikes me that this is a defense for conservative “philosophy.” We don’t live a life entirely within ourselves. We pay attention to what has gone before. Progressives see a long history of oppression, identify with it, and project it into the future. Conservatives are mindful of the past, in family, ethnicity and faith; even if some of it is wrapped in a flag of “patriotism.” Tradition is important to both sides, for better or for worse. We can’t escape it, so why not find ways to discuss it civilly? Which brings me back to Keats. His eying expression of humility was mistaken. Present-day feelings of certitude, on left or right, are badly in need of humility — and that, I believe, is a conservative thought.Me too.David French On Religious Liberty, CRT, Grace, CtdFrom a “gay, Christian, moderate conservative”:I thoroughly enjoyed your episode with David French, especially since I got to hear the two of you discuss Church of Christ theology at the beginning. I grew up in the Church of Christ denomination and went to a sister school (Abilene Christian University) of the one French attended (Lipscomb). The faith journey you both described is one very familiar to me. My boyfriend also grew up in the Church of Christ tradition and we still feel a certain affinity to it, although it’s obviously not a tradition that affirms same-sex relationships.I loved that the two of you were able to have such a gracious conversation about faith and politics. I enjoy reminders that one’s stance on gay marriage is hardly the litmus test for both conservatism and Christianity that it once was. There’s so much more common ground to explore, and Christianity and conservatism are big enough for differing views — even in the midst of this bizarre cultural climate we’re in.Here’s a snippet of my convo with David: Another listener makes a recommendation:In follow-up to your conversation with David French, could you possibly interview Tim Alberta? His new article in The Atlantic, “How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church,” is worth your attention.Indeed. Thanks for the tip. Lastly, a sermon for Sunday:I am an Episcopal priest in Atlanta (though hopefully one not quite as woke as Douglas Murray accuses us of being). If it’s not too bold, I wanted to send you the manuscript of my sermon from last Sunday. The sermon is from a small passage for Easter 6, Revelation 22.3-4: “Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.”I started working on it, and then on Friday I heard the first part of your interview with David French. I think that interview found its way into my sermon, and I know that your ongoing conversations have affected my preaching in a positive way.The manuscript is pasted below, but I’ll close by saying again how grateful I am for your podcast, and I hope that you might consider occasionally having theologians onto your show.  I’ve loved hearing you talk about faith with Cornell West and David French, and I think it might be fascinating to have a systematic theological think through issues like CRT and gender.The sermon in full:“They’re out to get you.”  That’s what the world will tell you, over and over.  “They” — whoever they are — “really are out to get you.”Now, sometimes it’s true.  The world can be a dangerous place, after all.  But usually the message isn’t that they are after you, Jennifer, or you, Meredith, or Kevon, or Rafael, or whatever your name might be.And they’re not after you because of your character or your choices.  The message is that they are after you because of your team, because of your skin color, or where you were born, or your gender.  They’re after you because of what you represent.And again, sometimes it’s true.  Last weekend the threats were real on both sides of our country.Last weekend a young man consumed by evil drove 200 miles to Buffalo to open fire on innocent people.  But not just any innocent people.  He targeted a black neighborhood because he wanted to send a message of hate, a message of terror.  He wanted black people all across the country to believe that they had a target on their backs. And with our history of violence and terror, our black sisters and brothers heard his message.On the other side of the country another man used a gun to send the same message of hate to a different group of people.  In California the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church was enjoying a church picnic when a Chinese-born American citizen walked up and started shooting.The sheriff said the man was motivated by his hatred of Taiwan, and he sent his message of hate and terror to those innocent people.+++The messages don’t always come with bullets, and they aren’t always about race, and they also aren’t limited to one side of our national divide.When you listen with a careful ear to the issues that divide us, what gives them their power is the underlying threat that something of YOUR identity, something of YOUR autonomy, is about to be taken away.“They” are going to take something away from you because of who you are.+++I remember 20 years ago after the Twin Towers fell, the rhetoric on both sides of our political culture was that “they” hated our freedom, hated capitalism, hated democracy.  That “they” were coming for us.Two years later, our church was almost split apart by the debate over same-sex relationships.  For the progressive, the message was that “they” were coming for your right to love who you choose.  For the conservative the message was that “they” were coming to destroy the social values you had been taught were right and good.We hear those threats still today.  The uproar over cancel culture and over excesses in cultural trends doesn’t feel to some conservatives like an interesting social trend; it feels like a threat.  It feels like “they” are telling conservatives,  “We’re coming for you.”On the other side, progressives and especially progressive women heard an old threat earlier this month: “They’re coming to take away control of your bodies.”  When that Supreme Court draft was leaked, the message went forth - “They’re coming for you, they’re coming to take control of your bodies away from you.”In fact, they’re not just coming for your right to an abortion, they’re also coming to take away Obergefell and then Loving and then Brown v. Board of Education.+++So…I’ve been taking some big swings up here this morning, on things that are frankly outside of my area of expertise, and I haven’t said a word yet about God or Jesus or had any kind of gospel message.That’s about to change, but the reason I’m trying to bring up all the touchy stuff is because the call to follow isn’t just for other people and it isn’t just for when somebody cuts you off in traffic. Now let me repeat my disclaimer.  I’m not saying the threats are all imagined, or that they’re all equal.  Sometimes the threat is real.  BUT, in the face of those threats, in the face of the world’s desire to put you on notice that you NEED to be afraid, the question for us this morning is, “Should my being a follower of Jesus affect how I respond?”+++When I was first ordained Bishop Alexander told me to always keep my vows in the correct order. He meant that FIRST I was a baptized child of God, THEN I was Emily’s husband, and THEN I was a priest, and if I remembered the hierarchy of those vows my life would be properly ordered.I haven’t always gotten it right but when I’ve gotten a little unbalanced his advice has helped me get back where I need to be.And Bishop Neil’s advice helped me to see something even deeper:  we all move through the world with multiple identities and we have to keep them in their proper order.In my case I can think of myself as a man, even as a white man, as a Georgian, an American a Christian, a father, a husband, priest, neighbor, brother, and of course a really, really good singer/dancer.Almost all of those identities are important but for me to be who I aspire to be there needs to be a hierarchy to them.  I need to make sure all those identities are properly ordered.+++There’s a distinction in Christianity between being a Creature of God and a Child of God.All of us are Creatures of God.  All of us, every person who ever lived, are creatures of God.  Our first and most important identity is that we are created by a God who loves every single one of us and that, as Fr. Rhett said last Sunday, there’s not a thing you can do about it.And for those of us baptized into the body of Christ, those of us who believe in Jesus as the crucified and risen Lord we have a second and eternal identity - beloved Child of God.+++A properly ordered life embraces those two identities - beloved Creature of God and beloved Child of God - as more important than all the others we have.  And then downstream of those two come all the rest:  gender, sex, family, values, race, creed, and on and on.So am I white?  Am I black?  Am I Taiwanese or Woman or Man or Husband or parent or Democrat or Republican or even American? Yes, I am all of those things and more, but my first identity, the very core of who I am, is always beloved Creature of God, and my eternal hope is not in escaping the threats or defeating my enemies but in holding on to my identity as a Child of God, as a member of the Body of Christ.+++The world will try to disorder your identities.  The world will whisper and then shout fear & danger & division, will try to make your threatened identity the center of who you are.When evil drives to Buffalo, fear will tell you that your first identity is the color of your skin, and that it always will be.When evil drives to a church picnic, fear tells you that your primary identity, your fundamental self is as a pawn in a great ethnic & political strife.When cultural values change, when marriage is redefined, or social programs try to right historic wrongs, or when human laws try to legislate that which cannot be legislated but must be legislated, when they try to balance the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn, fear will tell you that your core identity is not beloved Creature of God or beloved Child of God, but is your demographic or political or racial or gender identity, and that your response has to come from that threatened self.But Jesus tells us something different.  Jesus tells us to love our enemies.Jesus tells us we are all beloved creatures of God, the just and unjust alike, AND that those baptized into his death and resurrection have an ETERNAL identity greater than anything else about us, an ETERNAL hope that will live  beyond any other understanding of self.+++Our response to Jesus’ message is to understand who we really are and order our identities so that we do not respond to threats as the world does.Our call is to respond as beloved, as BELOVED children of God who share a common humanity and a common creator, and as people whose hope is not in temporary victories but in eternal life.+++It’s not easy.Hate invites you to respond with hate.  Fear invites you to respond with fear.Change makes you want to dig in your heels and hunker down and defend YOUR turf, YOUR way of life, with all that you’ve got.No wonder Jesus said we must give up our lives to follow him.+++In the Revelation to John, Jesus showed John a vision of the heavenly city.  In that city the Children of God had the name of Jesus written on each of their foreheads.Using our language of baptism, they were sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.WE are those Children of God.  Our true identity is not in any of our human distinctions but in the name of Jesus written across our faces.Our task is to understand that truth and to live it, to treat one another with that common heritage as Creatures of God even when we feel threatened by one another, and to teach our children that no matter what the world whispers to them about who they are, their truest, deepest, most fundamental self will always be … Beloved of God. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

David is a political writer and former attorney who took on high-profile cases for religious liberty. He was also a major in the Army Reserve who served in Iraq, and before that he served as president of FIRE, the campus free-speech group. David now writes for The Dispatch and The Atlantic, and his latest book is Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. Last summer he wrote this wonderful review of my essay collection, Out On A Limb, but this is the first time we’ve spoken.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above. For two clips of my convo with David — on how many political Christians completely miss the point of Jesus, and on the “God gap” within the Democratic coalition — head over to our YouTube page.That convo is a good complement to our January episode with Christopher Rufo (the two have tussled before), so we just transcribed Rufo’s episode in full. Here’s a reminder of his stance on CRT in the schools:Starting around the 30-minute mark in the new episode, David and I discuss the tricky defense of liberalism in the face of both CRT curriculum and anti-CRT bills. We also grapple with the corrosive effects of Twitter and, in particular, the commentary surrounding the racist massacre in Buffalo this week. On that note, a reader writes:I am a member of a mainline Christian denomination and parent of young children. My personal and professional experience of social media is centered on connections with clergy colleagues and active church members attached to a wide variety of Christian denominations. When news of the racially motivated shooting in Buffalo broke, my social media relationships immediately shifted to a flurry of outrage, comments about the pox of racism built into the American way, and pithy memes noting that the root problem of all that ails us is white supremacy.For example, one friend wrote in response to the Buffalo shooting, “The root cause of gun violence is white supremacy. We will not be safe from gun violence until we end white supremacy. White fam, we are the ones who can end white supremacy. It is on us.” Presiding Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Church released a statement decrying the racism behind the shooting. Members of my left-leaning church have asked and encouraged me to preach from the pulpit about the evils of white supremacy and white fragility, especially now in light of the Buffalo shooting. However, I did not hear a thing from these same people or religious bodies following the racially motivated shooting by Frank James on the NYC subway last month. Mr. James has been indicted on federal terror charges after shooting ten people. Were there no official prayers for victims and to end racial violence from religious bodies because no one ultimately died in the subway shooting? Why were there no tweets, memes, or impassioned calls to “do better” after such a horrific, calculated attack? The silence after that racially motivated shooting compared to the outcry after this month’s racially motivated shooting is noteworthy. And essential to the CRT worldview. Racism is unique to white people. Another sign of our racialized culture war comes from this listener:In your episode with Douglas Murray, you mentioned that you had to explain to someone how white people did not invent racism. I serve at the school board in Manhattan and we had the same discussion at our last meeting. The district is pushing a book called “Our Skin” to teach elementary kids how white people invented racism. Money quote:“A long time ago, way before you were born, a group of white people made up an idea called race. They sorted people by skin color and said that white people were better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else,” the book declares.Here’s how Murray addresses the canard that white people invented racism:On a lighter note, here’s a fan of last week’s episode with Tina Brown:In your conversation about the Queen’s inscrutable nature and unceasing impartiality, you forget one spectacular lapse into utter bias: the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty!Pierre Brassard, a Quebec disc jockey, called Buckingham Palace impersonating the (then) Canadian PM Jean Chretien begging her to support the NO side and, astonishingly, got through to Queen Elizabeth! In the conversation, broadcast live in Montreal, she actually said, “It sounds as though the referendum may go the wrong (!) way...”. She said many other things that were blatantly against Quebec separating and was willing to make a public statement. Here’s the audio (and pardon Elizabeth R’s surprisingly bad French!): While I voted Non and thought the hoax was screamingly hilarious, this referendum was about the self-determination of a nation and she was hardly a glowing example of non-interference and impartiality. Quebec separatists were apoplectic. She wouldn’t even make a clear declaration in favour of the “No” side in the Scottish referendum! Ah, well ... even Captain Kirk broke the prime directive 33 times. Self-determination must be overrated. Here’s Tina on why the best British monarchs tend to be women:Another fan of the episode writes:So I’m a stereotypical NPR-listening, NYT-reading, Anglophilic liberal, happy to watch whatever B-grade pablum PBS airs on Sunday nights, as long as it has a British accent. So of course I fell in love with Downton Abbey. Part of my stereotypical outlook is holding a certain condescension toward the lower-class examples of American culture — you’d never catch me watching a soap opera, for example. But somewhere in the last season of Downton Abbey, it hit me full-on that the show is just a soap opera for snobs. That realization was a nice, bright, uncomfortable look in the mirror. What a hypocrite I am! That said, I can’t wait for the new Downton Abbey movie that opens this week:On the subject of Americans and their relationship with the British monarchy that you and Tina Brown discussed, to me it isn’t very complicated. It’s the embodiment of our cultural heritage, so it represents roots and stability in our land that values change and progress. And the monarchy is sacramental — another quality our society lacks, and which we’ve projected onto the office of the president as compensation. Toggling from listeners to readers, one of the latter writes:I have been thinking a lot about your May 6 column on the SCOTUS leak (“How Dare They!”) and the following week’s large number of reader responses to it. First, I want to say that, although I’m fiercely pro-choice, your column was strongly persuasive and helped me to think about Roe v Wade in a very different way. I love this about the Dish — the way you introduce complexity and nuance to issues that are polarizing and thus typically presented in stark black-and-white terms. But there is one potential detail of your argument that I continue to struggle with. While I accept that, in a liberal society, such issues as abortion should be a matter of debate and resolution via the popular voice, in practice they rarely are — because of the reality of our political system. Because of our two-party system and the primary elections that determine candidacy, most moderate, centrist voters simply do not have a choice to exercise their opinion on a wide variety of issues. They cannot vote individually on issues of substance, in an a la carte fashion. They are forced to accept a homogenous party platform that, in toto, represents the least worst of two extremes. For example, if I am a pro-choice moderate conservative who supports free markets, minimal government regulation, and low taxation, and is concerned about wokeness and CRT, my only choice to cast a vote in support of access to abortion is to vote for a candidate who is antagonistic to these other issues of import to me. You cite statistics in your column indicating broad support among Republicans for a moderate stance on abortion. Yet, I would argue that relatively few of these voters are going to voice that support by voting for a Democratic candidate — especially a far-left candidate — even if this means voting for the far-right opponent. This, then, is interpreted by the GOP as proof that their constituency supports the extreme view held by the majority of the GOP candidates. If we had a center party, I may be more optimistic in sharing your view of things. But as it stands, I feel like our choice is no choice at all.I feel you. But this is unavoidable in a democracy with political parties and winner-takes-all systems. Another reader has a few more laments:I believe anti-abortion-rights activists have not fully considered the consequences of how eliminating legal abortion will impact families. It is almost certain that the rate of child poverty in America will increase if a ban on abortion takes place.  Most of the states which want to ban abortion also have small child-welfare programs. That will result in more children being born into poor economic circumstances.Another thing that will probably happen is an increase in crime. The crime rate in the US has been falling since the early ‘90s, when kids born after Roe first started reaching adulthood. There is a clear link between kids being neglected and unwanted and then turning to crime. This was documented in the book Freakonomics.I believe the pro-choice side will win this debate. But perhaps it will only win when the full, horrifying consequences of banning all abortions — such as in the Oklahoma bill just passed — comes into focus. This next reader goes meta:In your otherwise excellent compilation of reader thoughts about Roe, you had one response I want to quibble with. After quoting one reader, you wrote: “Oh please. This next reader gets specific:” — and then went on with the next quote.I don’t recall what the first reader said, and it doesn’t matter because your response was inappropriate no matter what was said. If you think the reader’s argument has no merit, omit the comment. If you have a rebuttal to the reader’s argument, offer it. Even if you disagree with the reader but lack the time or energy to formulate a proper response, that’s fine too: Just print the comment with no response.What’s not OK, ever, is to reply with just a snarky dismissal and no further comment. That’s rude to the reader, and it makes you look like a dick.That whole big collection of reader dissents was compiled and edited by my colleague, Chris, who does that every week to hold my feet to the fire. I don’t censor the reader criticism he offers — so forgive me the occasional harrumph. Another reader switches topics:I read these two excerpts in your weekly money quotes:“There were also homosexual women at the Pines, but they were, or seemed to be, far fewer in number. Nor, except for a marked tendency to hang out in the company of large and usually ferocious dogs, were they instantly recognizable as the men were,” - Midge Decter, who died the week, on Fire Island in the summer of 1980.“Well, if I were a dyke and a pair of Podhoretzes came waddling toward me on the beach, copies of Leviticus and Freud in hand, I’d get in touch with the nearest Alsatian dealer pronto,” - Gore Vidal, responding to Midge.I had known about Decter’s “The Boys on the Beach” essay for decades, maybe since the late ‘80s, but I had never read it — until a few months ago. I am 66 years old, was practically always out, loved to read all the gay literature, and I have to say, that essay got the pulse of ‘70s gay life and society better than Edmund White (his “States of Desire” was published in 1980 and I still have my copy) or any other commentator I know of, with the exception of Randy Shilts’s “And the Band Played On.”Decter had gay acquaintances, friends, and frenemies, and she saw aspects of gay life with a beady-eyed sharpness and skepticism I wish more of us had had back then. I remember when I officially came out in 1974 at 18, met a couple of good-looking guys in their late 20s/early 30s who, like the vast majority of gay men, talked about sex all the time, with a greater intensity than straight guys I knew. So I asked them how many guys they had been to bed with and they said maybe 500 or 600. Asked them if they were afraid of getting diseases, and they said “no” because they just went to the public health clinic to get a shot. And right there, I sensed that at some point, there would be a gay healthcare catastrophe. I was not the only who had that sense, but it was very censored in the community.I tend to agree about Decter’s accuracy and perception, however laced it was with disgust. It’s a riveting piece — proof that sometimes being alien to a subculture makes you a better observer of it. She and Larry Kramer were essentially on the same page when it came to gay male culture in the 1970s. And yes, the omens were there. And now there’s monkeypox, which seems as if it might have found the same transmission route as HIV. Gulp.Lastly, because we ran out of room this week in the main Dish for the new VFYW contest photo (otherwise the email version would get cut short), here ya go:Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

She needs no introduction — but in magazine history, Tina Brown is rightly deemed a legend, reviving Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, before turning to the web and The Daily Beast (where I worked for her). Her new book is The Palace Papers. We talked journalism, life and royals.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above, or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app. For two clips of my convo with Tina — on Meghan Markle’s epic narcissism, and why women make the best monarchs — head over to our YouTube page. Having Tina on the pod was the perfect excuse to transcribe our popular episode with Michael Moynihan, who used to work for her at The Daily Beast — which also hosted the Dish for a few years. So we’re all old friends. From the Moynihan chat:Andrew: I was talking to Tina Brown about this not that long ago, with the great days of the big magazines in the '80s and '90s. Really, when you look back on that time, it was an incredible festival of decadence and clearly over the top before the fall.Michael: I love Tina. I did a thing — you can look this up — an interview with her, when her Vanity Fair Diaries came out, for The Fifth Column. Just Tina and I sat down and talked for an hour and a half, and it was one of the best things I think we’ve recorded, and got one of the best responses. Because people miss those stories.Perhaps Bill Kristol should check out the clip with Moynihan on how to change your mind on stuff you get wrong:A listener looks back to last week’s episode:Wonderful interview with Douglas Murray, with the two of you riffing off each other with brilliant dialogue. Very warm and affirming as well. I particularly enjoyed your discussion of the religious dimension as one aspect of our present dilemma. I know you would want to provide variety for the Dishcast, but please consider having him on again.Another fan:This was the most memorable episode in a long time (although they are all great). Of course, your dialogue was choir-preaching, and so I need to be careful in avoiding confirmation bias. That said, I found Murray’s elegant way of encapsulating the obvious — which I fail to express myself — truly invigorating. I rewound and listened to many parts several times over. I ordered his book today.Another listener dissents:I find the armchair psychoanalysis regarding ressentiment — as the organizing principle of what is happening in our culture today — to be one of the least compelling arguments made in the episode. Why not go ahead and attribute our perpetual unwillingness in the West to recognize what is great about it to Christianity’s concept of original sin? Or maybe read psychoanalytic literature on why an individual or group of people who are objectively improving might hold onto beliefs of the self or society as rotten? These seem just as likely as Nietzsche’s argument. Ultimately, what a person speculates to be the primary motivator of another person or group reveals a lot. Your speculation that it’s mostly ressentiment suggests you want or need to demonize the CRT crowd. This is tragic given that this is precisely what you and Douglas accuse the CRT crowd of doing. Another listener differs:I don’t agree with everything you and Douglas Murray write, but thank you for talking about the resentment and bitterness that’s driving politics and culture today. It’s gone completely insane. I used to work for a small talent agency, and during the pandemic I coached some actors over Zoom. During the George Floyd protests, one of my clients was up watching the news all night, not getting any sleep. I told her, look, you want to be informed and want to help. But you have to take care of yourself first or you’re no help to anyone. Go to bed and catch up on the news tomorrow. People criticized me for this kind of advice, saying I was privileged, that I just wanted to look away and not examine myself for my own inherent racism, etc. I couldn’t understand why people were being so unreasonable.I’m also a Mormon. After George Floyd was murdered, our ward started to discuss racism. Mormonism has a checkered past when it comes to things like Black men and the priesthood. Or even language in some of the scriptures. These are important conversations that our church needs to have. There were good things that happened, like Black people in the ward shared more about their experiences during meetings. But almost immediately it became weird. The women’s group did a lesson on Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” for example. We didn’t actually ever talk about the things I was hoping we’d talk about — how Brigham Young stopped Black men receiving the priesthood, for example. We were just told we all needed to acknowledge our white privilege and feel guilty about it. There was a part about redlining. There was no acknowledgment that some of the white people in this ward lived in low-income housing, basically had nothing, and had been stressed even further by the pandemic. It just felt unnecessarily divisive. I have no idea what the Asian members made of this talk, because it basically excluded them. There were so many holes in these theories, but I wasn’t brave enough to point them out.So it was a real relief to hear you and Murray talk about the way these ideas have infiltrated churches. The Mormon thing is typically like, “God wants you to be happy. Live this structured life, show compassion, work hard, love your family, and be happy.” But the DiAngelo ideas felt like, “you can’t even be saved, at least not if you’re white. Some people don’t deserve to be happy; they should only feel guilt.” It was easier to bring in a fad book and talk about property values than to talk about the awful passage in the Book of Mormon where it says dark-skinned people are cursed, but other people are “white and delightsome.” I felt like the second the door opened to have a serious conversation about the church and race, they immediately jumped the shark instead.From a fan of opera and ballet:Douglas Murray mentioned Jessye Norman and how her obituary was racialized. Well, in January of 1961, Leontyne Price made her Metropolitan Opera debut, and she and Franco Correlli received an ovation that was around 50 minutes long ... possibly the longest in Met history, or among two or three longest. There have been so many great black singers at the Met, such as Shirley Verrett, Kathleen Battle (who was loved by James Levine but whose voice I never liked), Eric Owens, Grace Bumbry, and many others. Here’s a snip of Price’s Met debut:Balanchine choreographed Agon (music by Stravinsky), arguably his greatest dance, for Diana Adams (white) and Arthur Mitchell (black) in 1957. They danced the pas de deux, which is an erotic tangle of bodies. Balanchine wanted the black/white tension. Here is a bit of it:And to my beloved Jessye Norman, whom I saw only once, here she is at her best:Another listener rolls out some poetry:I greatly enjoyed your conversation with Douglas Murray. He is fierce! Your mention of Clive James’s “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” reminded me of a similarly minded poem from Nina Puro. (I suspect one of them inspired the other.) I LONG TO HOLD THE POETRY EDITOR’S PENIS IN MY HANDand tell him personally,I’m sorry, but I’m goingto have to pass on this.Though your pieceheld my attention throughthe first few screenings,I don’t feel it is a good fitfor me at this time. Please know it receivedmy careful consideration.I thank you for allowingme to have a look,and I wish youthe very best of luckplacing it elsewhere.Shifting away from the Murray episode, here’s a followup from a intrepid Dishhead:I was excited to see my letter published on the violent toll homelessness takes on communities recently. I’ll be listening to the podcast with Maia Szalavitz soon, and I’ve got Johann’s book on harm reduction to read as well. (I loved the episode with Johann, bought his new book, loved it, and stopped being so online for about a week before backsliding ...)Shortly after I wrote that last letter to you, I realized that I wasn’t satisfied with just writing indignant letters about the bloody cost of complacency on homelessness. It’s really the story of Ahn Taylor — a sweet 94-year-old lady stabbed by a homeless man as she was walking in her neighborhood — that made me understand that complaining is not enough.So I’ve started a non-profit, Unsafe Streets, to take on this challenge. It’s sort of a “Take Back the Night”-style public safety crusade. It’s early days still, but we have a website, including pages for NYC and San Francisco, a Twitter feed, and a crowdfunding campaign. Next on my agenda is to create a page for Los Angeles, a detailed policy platform, and then to recruit a board and apply for 501c3 status.I’ve been keeping up with the Dish when I can (LOVING the conversation with Jonathan Haidt, and I HIGHLY recommend this complementary Rogan episode.) I’ve been busy with the kids and trying to get Unsafe Streets going in my free minutes.She follows up:I just listened to Maia’s episode, and I am pretty unsatisfied with her proposed solutions. Non-coercive acceptance and decriminalization is fine for people who are using drugs they bought with their own money in the privacy of their home. But public drug use, public intoxication, and the associated “quality of life” crimes (public defecation, indecency, etc.) make public spaces unsafe and uncomfortable for everyone else. Laws against these crimes should be enforced, which means arresting people and taking them to jail or some kind of treatment. Injecting fentanyl and passing out on the sidewalk is a very antisocial and harmful behavior, and should not be “decriminalized.”I agree with Maia that this is a complicated mix of addiction and severe mental illness. But I don’t think the cost of housing argument holds up. (A brief scan of the news will show you that there in fact ARE homeless encampments in West Virginia.) I think she was unfair in her characterization of Michael Shellenberger’s proposal, which includes tons of resources to expand access to and quality of treatment. Overall, Maia’s perspective is very focused on the benefit to the addict, but discounts the costs to the surrounding community. Thanks for keeping a focus on this subject!Another listener looks to a potential future guest:Hello! You invite your readers to submit guest ideas here. I submit Kevin D. Williamson — another nuanced “conservative,” Roman Catholic, Never Trumper, and admirer of Oakeshott. Oh, and he was fired after five minutes at The Atlantic for a previous statement about abortion.Thanks for the suggestion. Lastly, because we ran out of room this week in the main Dish for the new VFYW contest photo (otherwise the email version would get cut short), here ya go:Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Douglas Murray is a British writer and commentator, primarily for The Spectator, and his latest book is The War on the West. It’s a powerful narrative of the past couple of decades, in which a small minority waged ideological war on the underpinnings of Western civilization: reason, toleration, free speech, color-blind racial politics. 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 seductive power of ressentiment and the case for gratitude, and on many Americans’ ignorance of history outside the US — head over to our YouTube page.My convo with Murray complements the one I had with Roosevelt Montás, the great defender of the humanities at Columbia University and beyond — his episode is now available as a full transcript.As far as last week’s episode with Bari Weiss, an addendum: she used our conversation for her own podcast, “Honestly,” and her version includes at least a half hour of conversation you won’t find in the Dishcast version — namely on the early marriage movement and my role in it. Here’s a snippet from that section:This listener liked the episode:You and Bari addressed the (increasingly popular) argument that if the illiberal left has taken the gloves off, then its opponents should do the same. I thought your response was commendable, and it reminded me of something Hitch said during a debate on free speech many years ago. He referred to the scene from A Man for All Seasons in which Sir Thomas More argues with Roper over whether a man should be arrested for breaking God’s law. It’s a marvellous exchange that I have often reflected upon in recent years:Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.Someone at Reason — Peter Suderman, I think — observed last year that politics is becoming outcomes-based rather than process-based, which expresses much the same point, I think. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I’m glad you and Bari are willing to stand up for liberalism when so many of your peers have come to view it with disdain.I love that section from A Man For All Seasons. It’s why I chose Thomas More as my confirmation saint. But it’s difficult to know the best way to stand up for liberalism when it comes to gender ideology in schools, as Bari and I discuss in this clip:Another fan of the Bari episode gets more personal:I am the mother of a trans-identifying child — now 23 years old. (I can’t give my name for fear of alienating her.) You captured the rollercoaster of emotions many parents going through this feel — the fear that she has adopted this ideology as a coping mechanism to deal with underlying mental health issues and that she will do irreparable harm to her body. And that we are politically homeless. I can’t vote for anyone who would support Trump. But Biden and his team have it wrong when they quote the lie of “better a trans son than dead daughter.” I agree with DeSantis on many aspects of the so-called “don’t say gay” bill. I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss sexual orientation and gender ideology with young children. I also don’t think it’s appropriate to review the periodic table with them. That doesn’t mean I'm anti-chemistry. What I wish for my daughter is that she not be beholden to gender stereotypes, that she be comfortable in her own body and that she avoid a lifetime of medical intervention with life-long negative consequences (including infertility) which cannot ultimately transform her into a man. If she were anorexic, we’d have support and options to return her to health. Because her coping mechanism is trans ideology, we get no support from medical or psychiatric professionals, from schools or from most liberals.You captured all that in the podcast. Thanks for getting the word out.Another listener points to another trans story:I saw this interview with an ex-transgender woman and thought you might find it interesting:I found particularly interesting the parts where he indicates that he found a group of “activists” that encouraged him to transition when what he really needed was therapy and sobriety. It’s also interesting that young men/woman fleeing the labels and baggage of “gay” or “lesbian“ may pursue gender reassignment, rather than unwrapping their trauma and accepting themselves for who they are.I just wish all the nuances of this were better aired. Another fan of the Dish anticipated our coverage this week with a “pre-emptive email”:I wonder whether the Supreme Court leak has caused you to reconsider your stance on the culture wars and whether it was the woke who are really the big enemy here. After all, while certain elements on the far left do much damage to themselves and to their own cause, their biggest achievements seem to be about gender-neutral toilets and pronouns, while it is the reactionary right that actively tries to curtail hard-won rights such as the right to vote, or the right to legal and safe abortion. Is it only a culture war when the left does it? Even when you have admitted that both sides are guilty, there seems to be a grudging reluctance to accept that one side is significantly more dangerous than the other, or to pretend as if it was the left’s fault all along and the right was merely reacting to it. Following on from January 6th and the wave of right-wingers across the globe currently dominating our news agenda (Putin, Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, Le Pen, et al), it seems evident that there is a radical asymmetry in the scale of the threat that each side poses. Yes, there is much on the left that deserves to be called out, but it is nothing like as dangerous or as damaging as the very real risk that our liberal democratic norms are overturned by reactionaries in the name of a kind of Theocratic Nationalism. An approach that says “A plague on both your houses” seems to me the height of fatuity. Who is the bigger threat here, Donald Trump, or Bernie Sanders? There seems to be a skewed kind of moral equivalency going on. It reminds me of those US conservatives who used to say “Yes the Tea Party is terrible and there is real racism, but Obama is just as guilty for stirring them up.” This simply will not do. From the Tories and Brexit, to Putin and Ukraine, Republicans and abortion, is it not clear that everywhere you look at the moment, it is the right — the conservative, reactionary, radical right — that poses a greater and more urgent threat to our democratic way of life? There’s a balance to be struck here — and I’m not saying it’s easy. But the way in which the far left empowers the far right and vice-versa is an important part of the toxic dynamic. I’ll just note that, when push came to shove, I voted for Biden. There is no conceivable scenario in which I would vote for a deranged wannabe-tyrant like Trump. Next up, “a looong-time reader who discovered you in the early aughts”:After a discussion this evening with my housemate I was inspired to look for your It's So Personal threads.  I don't seem to see them in the Substack, and it looks like your dish.andrewsullivan.com site is no longer active. Can you make this thread available to revisit? The whole thread is compiled here. How I framed it at the time:Perhaps the best posts of 2009 were penned by readers, and the most illuminating, gripping and emotional posts were related to late-term abortion, in the wake of the assassination of the abortion doctor George Tiller. I’ve never seen the power of this blog medium so clearly and up-close: one personal account caused a stream of others. How could old-school reporting have found all these women? How could any third-person account compete with the rawness and honesty and pain of these testimonials? It was a revelation to me about what this medium could do.Another listener looks ahead:David French just wrote the op-ed, “A conservative Christian quietly battles against right-wing hysteria,” and he would be an excellent podcast guest.”David is actually scheduled to record a Dishcast later this month, so stay tuned. Another suggestion:Hope you are weathering Covid ok and are feeling better. Suggestion: check out the staggeringly brilliant new essay by N.S. Lyons, “The World Order Reset: China’s Ukraine Catastrophe, the Rise of Trans-Atlantis, and a New Age of Power.” You’ve linked to one of his essays previously, saying it depressed you for a week. You should try to interview this mystery person. Everybody is wondering who Lyons really is. It would be a real coup for your podcast/Substack.Thanks for the suggestion. We’ve actually been in touch. You can send your own guest idea here: dish@andrewsullivan.com. Browse the entire archive for the Dishcast here.Lastly, because we ran out of room this week in the main Dish for the new VFYW contest photo (otherwise the email version would get cut short), here ya go:Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Bari was an opinion editor at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times before leaving to create her own op-ed page on Substack, “Common Sense.” She’s also the author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, and for some reason one of the most reviled figures on Left Twitter, despite being one of the most gifted editors of her generation. We talk groomers and culture war desperation and the amnesia of recent triumphs.This was a joint podcast, and you’ll be able to hear a somewhat longer version of the discussion next week on Bari’s pod, “Honestly.” You can listen to our version 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 — on wokeness enabling the far right, and on the agonizing choice when it comes to gender theory in schools — head over to our YouTube page. New transcript just dropped: my conversation with John McWhorter, which is still our most downloaded episode on the Dishcast. We get into his latest book, Woke Racism, and how the successor ideology hurts black kids:First up in Dishcast feedback this week, a “brief note of appreciation from a longtime reader and subscriber”:I’ve been following the Dish since the inception of the blogosphere, and your Substack is a welcome addition to my intellectual life, especially the podcasts, which seem to get better and better. The last two — with Nicholas Christakis and Jonathan Haidt — have been especially wonderful. (I’ve also benefited considerably from Johann Hari’s excellent new book, which has largely taken me off social media). There are episodes that have annoyed me (e.g. the one with Anne Applebaum), but I listen because I don’t want to be part of an echo chamber.Speaking of the Haidt pod, a listener dug up a gem from my favorite philosopher:I appreciated the episode and Haidt’s recent piece in the Atlantic that invokes the Tower of Babel. The essay you mentioned by Oakeshott on Babel was not, as you worried, easily found, but it’s nonetheless attached:The Haidt episode “sparked many new thoughts” from this listener:The word “proportion” was mentioned in passing, but I think that word is crucial to understanding the real dysfunction wrought by social media. We have lost all sense of proportion in this post-Babel world. Whether it’s the trans debate — a conversation that really only affects one percent of the population — or CRT in schools, it’s difficult to talk about these heated culture-war topics while holding them in proportion to the real problems facing our society. The power (or fear) of going viral on Twitter makes proportion impossible, which is one of the reasons why journalism is in such a bad place. Because nuance and context are hard, journalists and media figures — particularly cable news anchors — appear to be simply unequipped to deliver information in a way that holds these things in balance. Consider the Hunter laptop story. Why was this story “buried” by the media? Was it a conspiracy in which corporate elite journalists just didn’t want Hunter Biden to look bad? Or, more likely, do they intuitively understand that in the post-Babel world, they don’t have the skills and tools to talk about this story, which may not have been the biggest of deals but also didn’t look great in the lead up to a pivotal election? They didn’t want “But her emails” 2.0 — another viral story that had no sense of proportion. Most people couldn’t even tell you what, exactly, was corrupt about Clinton’s emails; they just knew they existed because that’s all anyone talked about, and since it was all anyone was talking about, it must be bad, bad, bad! The media simply doesn’t know how to function from a place of nuance; it can’t communicate information in a way that holds that information in proportion to its relevance, context, and importance. Is this the fault of social media and viral dynamics? Is it just really bad journalism? Or do journalists have such a low opinion of the polity that they believe most people won’t be bothered to try to understand complicated stories? Thank god for podcasts!This next listener also tackles Twitter:I think it is worth pointing out, as you have, that Twitter is at best 80 million US users (per Newsweek / Statista in 2021) whereas Twitter reported 38 million monetize-able daily active usage in the US in 2021. This number is probably closer to actual usage to account for dormant / duplicate accounts. Normal Americans, outside of radicals (which aren’t normal), don’t engage in the elite masturbatory thing that is Twitter. I am in a demo that should use it but have never had an account, because I view it as a complete and utter waste of time. The US Census has the 2021 population at 330 million with 22% under 18 (call it 73 million). I assume some portion of those are on Twitter, but they can’t vote. At the low end, that leaves 180 million voting Americans not on Twitter. So I think it’s worth reiterating that Twitter is not real life (or a majority of voters). If you were to break it down by ideological lines, I am sure it is further skewed in one direction, you needn't guess which. Today’s “journalists” investigative efforts often seem to largely rely on copy pasting tweets as the “public reaction” — it is no wonder why they are out of touch. Furthermore, as Jesse reminded us during this week’s freakout over Elon Musk buying Twitter, “Twitter Is Not America”:In the United States, Twitter users are statistically younger, wealthier, and more politically liberal than the general population. They are also substantially better educated, according to Pew: 42 percent of sampled users had a college degree, versus 31 percent for U.S. adults broadly. Forty-one percent reported an income of more than $75,000, too, another large difference from the country as a whole. They were far more likely (60 percent) to be Democrats or lean Democratic than to be Republicans or lean Republican (35 percent).This next listener dissents over the Haidt convo:I try not to be a scold, but sometimes the temptation is too great. Early in your talk you talked about how you didn’t understand young kids these days — why they are killing themselves at a high rate, since everything for them is so much better than it was in the old days. It sounds just like all of us old guys not getting youngsters. Haidt did talk about how he learned to approach unfamiliar cultures like an anthropologist — a good place to start for us old folks. While I agree with you about the proliferation of gender types, it was not so long ago that homosexuality raised the same kinds of questions that you ask, and it was looked at the same way. Some people questioned the reality of such a thing, or saw it as a simple choice that perverse people made, or as a psychiatric illness that required treatment, and of course as a crime. I don’t think you intend to imply any of those things, but you do seem to veer in that direction. How people’s identity is created is still an open question — and someday we may know more. That said, I agree with you that medical interventions for children is very very premature and should not be happening. Let people grow up first. You seem to imply that biology supports a simple dichotomy, but sexual expression is more complex than that. As for cultural/religious acceptance, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero Of A Thousand Faces, discusses some civilizations that saw gender as fluid and containing both male and female elements.One more thought: although Plato then, and others now, did raise questions about democracy, I fear that the Republican answer is to emulate the worst counter-examples, such as their current infatuation with Orbán’s near dictatorship. Prof. Haidt mentioned Karen Stenner’s work, The Authoritarian Dynamic, in which she reports that 20% of the population has an authoritarian personality type. She also talks about the conditions that stimulate it to express itself — fear and anxiety, the kind that is stirred up by demagogues and unscrupulous politicians, namely Trump. Stenner’s book also has suggestions on how to tamp down the fear. Maybe a conversation with her is in order.Thanks for the tip. My best response to my reader’s first point is probably at the beginning of my chat with Bari, where I try to make distinctions between the gay and trans movements, and why the conflicts are inevitable and intrinsic. As for fluid gender, I agree! I don’t believe in a gender binary, just a sex binary. In fact, one reason gender expression exists at all — and is comprehensible at all — is precisely its tension with a fixed, binary biological reality. But I also think this over-states the relevance of “gender identity” for the vast majority of humans. Most of us don’t get up every day thinking of how we are a man or a woman and where we fit on a spectrum — because we don’t really have many conflicts. This looms much larger for trans people for whom it is a daily challenge, and to a lesser extent for gay people whose affect contrasts with the stereotypes of their sex. But for most of us, our gender expression is simply our personality packaged in a binary form of biology. And this isn’t just on a scale of Barbie to G.I. Joe. And seeing it that way — as gender ideology does — strikes me as a regression, not a way forward.This next listener “loved the Haidt interview, except for one jarring bit”:You pronounced the Chinese as stupid for suddenly pursuing Zero Covid. Here’s a scary possibility: They know something you don’t know. Suppose the Chinese detected a Covid variant with a 20% death rate, rather than 1.5%. Gotta save face, gotta stamp it out. What we’re seeing is a reasonable consequence. Or it could be a variant immune to SinoVac. I’m not laughing at them, and, with difficulty, not yet condemning them. I’m worrying.Chill, baby, chill. The chances of a virus crossing from animals to animals to humans in the next decades of rapid climate change is very high. The chances of it wiping out humanity is not negligible. F**k with the planet the way we have, and the planet is at some point going to f**k you. I know this sounds fatalistic — but in my adult lifetime, I’ve contracted two new viruses, both of which have killed millions. This next listener worries about the political center in America regaining control:There was much to agree with in your Dishcast with Haidt about the effects of social media, particularly with regards to how it amplifies polarization. But this analysis feels a bit like blaming kerosene for a fire instead of the arsonist. The biggest share of responsibility for where we are today lies at the feet of the center-right, center-left, and the institutions that supported them. Free trade, the war on terrorism, the Iraq war, the financial crisis, and the extremely tepid recovery thereafter were all the brainchildren of the center and various elite institutions. They have been complete and utter disasters for most Americans. What is more, the outright refusal of many to take accountability for these disasters — indeed the doubling down and moralizing tone in Haidt’s defense of the center — only leads to greater resentment and polarization. If these are the people who are expected to lead us into brighter days, we are doomed.Point taken. Lastly, a listener looks ahead to our next episode:First I wish you a speedy recovery from Covid and your hip surgery. Please do rest sufficiently; I know a lot of people who neglected to do that and are now paying the price.I am a recent subscriber. After listening to a gazillion of your podcasts on Spotify, I realized it was the decent thing to do! Although I do not always agree with you (especially on the EU, which you seem to misunderstand), I want to thank you for your work and for broadening my horizons, i.e. about gay culture, which I ignorantly thought was synonymous with gay pride parades. And please continue to invite people you disagree with — it’s such an important message, even though, frankly, those episodes are not always the most interesting ones.Since you are talking to one of my intellectual heroes in your next episode, Francis Fukuyama, I was wondering if I could suggest one or two questions. His End of History and the Last Man is still widely misrepresented by people who either never read it or willingly distort it. Fukuyama is actually one of the very few people who foresaw the possibility of what we are going through now — in that very book. Yet his responses to these deeply ignorant and unfair criticisms are, in every interview of him I have ever read or heard, unfailingly courteous, measured and constructive. I am just wondering how he does it. I would have blown my top. Where does he get the energy?Although of course he’ll talk about his latest book, if I can make an additional suggestion, please get him to talk about Political Order, his magnum opus in two volumes, and how he responds to the very different views developed in Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything. I look forward to hearing you again, when you feel better!Yes, he’s a model of reason and restraint. And thanks for the tips. We won’t have time to debate his many works, but I’ll do my best. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Haidt is a social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business, and he co-founded Heterodox Academy. His latest book is The Coddling of the American Mind, but our discussion centered on his new piece for The Atlantic, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” a history of social media.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 our convo — on why the Internet nosedived in 2014, and what we could do to fix Twitter — head over to our YouTube page.For more on the precarious state of the liberal order, check out the full transcript of our episode with Jonathan Rauch we just posted. Jon being the optimistic liberal and me the pessimistic conservative, we debated Trump, the MSM, and Russiagate.Meanwhile, a listener remarks on last week’s episode:If Dr. Christakis’s appearance was part of a book tour, it worked on me. I’m going to buy his latest book. I’m reminded again of all the significant voices I’ve heard since I subscribed to the Dish. If I fail to resubscribe in the future, it will be only because I didn’t know that payment was due. I’ve definitely got my money’s worth from this subscription.Here’s a clip of Christakis and me talking about why friends — especially male friends — rip on each other:Here’s another listener on the “wonderful interview with Professor Christakis (a personal hero of mine)”:Your comment about the uniqueness of Christianity, with respect to love, rather surprised me. Are there not very revolutionary (and non-obvious) similar attributes in Buddhism? Or even certain aspects of Judaism (or any number of other philosophical/religious traditions that predate Christianity)? That somehow the faith that you happened to be raised in is the system that uniquely changed the world seems, frankly, a bit parochial to me. And if it did change the world, why was it that it took another 1700 years for its promises to be at all realized? (Full disclosure: I’m partial to Pinker’s argument that the Enlightenment was the singular inflection point in history.)  So my first request would be for you to interview an academic with broad knowledge of other faiths/philosophical systems to have a conversation (not a debate!) about the uniqueness of Christianity (and as you mentioned in the interview, the Catholic church). If that treads on your personal belief, then I would certainly understand your reluctance to have such a conversation.My second request is that you would have an interview with an academic about theodicy. While I’ve read a number of layman’s discussions of this topic, I’d love to hear an honest, intellectual discussion on this subject.I didn’t mean to suggest that the Buddha wasn’t also deeply instrumental in shifting human consciousness. Judaism and Islam also have deep traditions of mutual respect and love. But the radicalism of agape, a universal love to be expressed in action every minute, across tribe and race and region, is one of Christianity’s core legacies. Theodicy was well-covered on the Dish blog, but a pod convo is a great suggestion. This next listener finally got around to our December episode with David Wallace-Wells on Covid — a topic that Christakis and I covered last week:I'm a bit late in feeding back on this interview, but I just caught up with it on my daily dog walk this morning. David is obviously very well-informed on Covid and seems (as you note) to be an “honest broker” of information, which is relatively rare nowadays given the extent to which everything is politicized. That said, I was taken aback that he was unaware of where Covid ranked in terms of causes of death in America today. Heart and stroke and cancer both kill far more people than Covid (approximately 850K and 600K per year, respectively). Interestingly, we seem to have learned to live with these levels of systemic death, much of which could be prevented through lifestyle changes.You covered a lot of Covid ground and I was pleased to see that David avoided the standard condemnation of alternate public health approaches in some red states (Florida et al) and countries such as Sweden, acknowledging that Covid presents complex issues and the solutions are not always clear. One size does not fit all. By now it should be obvious that the widespread condemnation of the Trump administration’s Covid actions was misplaced and utterly political. In fact, America, under two administrations, has pursued most of the same policies as the rest of the world with middling success. And the results have not been markedly better (or worse) in 2021 than in 2020.I thought you shortchanged the whole discussion of therapeutics and failed to even mention the appalling fact that we are now two years into the Covid epidemic and there is still no standard, effective protocol established for early, outpatient treatment. There are countless studies showing that many lives could have been saved by simply promoting safe, readily available, over-the-counter therapeutics like vitamin D to strengthen immune systems and regular nasal wash to kill viral particles at the point of entry (the nasal passages) before they have a chance to circulate and replicate.  Nor was there even a mention of the successful therapeutic efforts of doctors like Tyson and Fareed in California. There are many other examples around the country of doctors using cheap, repurposed drugs (anti-inflammatories, anti-virals, etc.) with excellent safety profiles to successfully treat Covid patients. Rather than sharing these stories, we hear endlessly about the next dose of experimental vaccine and expensive new pharmaceuticals with significant side effects and no long-term safety records.In summary, the Wallace-Wells interview provided listeners with a fairly thorough summary of the current, approved Covid narrative, but failed to even acknowledge the contrarian views of tens of thousands of medical scientists and practitioners around the world who have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, rejecting the damaging public health approach taken throughout most of the developed world (lockdowns, quarantine, mass vaccination during a pandemic, etc.) — an approach that ran counter to virtually all established public health policy for handling epidemics.Speaking of going against the conventional wisdom on Covid, Jerusalem Demsas has a great piece on “the four pandemic predictions about the economy that never materialized”: the eviction tsunami, the “she-cession,” the housing-market crash, and the state- and local-government deficit explosion.Listeners are still gushing over the Fiona Hill episode:I absolutely adored your interview with Ms. Hill. Your camaraderie was delightful, and I loved hearing about how she and you both took your tests and were admitted to gifted school programs. I loved her take on Putin as well. And Trump:But the biggest highlight of your discussion, in my opinion, was at the end where you both suggested ideas for how to get America out of the quandary we now find ourselves. I read/hear far too often about how we got here and what the problems are and far too little about what we should do about it. I loved the idea of strengthening unions and investing in small communities. I could easily see either a Republican or Democratic candidate who ran on a platform that tries to seriously tackle wealth inequality and our failing local communities winning an election by a landslide. Andrew Yang perhaps? Whoever it is, this is the time for a new kind of New Deal. We need new ideas and new leadership. I’m almost to the point where I simply will refuse to vote for anyone over 60. In any case, thanks for actually making a case for potential solutions instead of just wallowing in what ills us as so many others have done.This next listener, though, thinks I’m not focusing enough on tangible stuff: You should talk about material issues. Most of the young people in France support Le Pen (per Eurointelligence). Young people around the world are turning to left- and right-wing populism (Boric in Chile, Orbán in Hungary, etc.), since centrist politics have failed them. Why is this? Financialization of the economy, cutthroat competition in the labor market with mass immigration, elite overproduction, deindustrialization, decline of labor unions, austerity, and the rise of China. You will not have any “liberal democracy” to preserve if you do not address material issues. If you are my age, you have lived through one elite failure after another, with politics dominated by the boomers. What do you have to lose by voting for the political “hand grenade”? Completely rational.As always, keep the dissents and other commentary — including guest recommendations — coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.Because we just ran out of space on the main page for the new contest photo (Substack has a space limit for emailed versions of posts), here’s the new challenge this week:Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a three-month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!The results for last week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe