The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Moynihan is one-third of the The Fifth Column — the sharp, hilarious podcast he does with Kmele Foster and Matt Welch — and he’s a long-time correspondent for Vice. In this episode we mostly cover the cascading news out of Afghanistan, but also bounce around to topics like old media, woke media, neocons and Israel, Big Tech, and third rails. We also reminisce a little about our mutual friend, the late Christopher Hitchens — like that one time Hitch called me a lesbian on air. 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 three clips of my conversation with Moynihan — on our shared bewilderment over anti-vaxxers, on the need for intellectual humility and occasionally eating crow, and on gay men having a very different culture of consent and flirting — head over to our YouTube page.Two of the subjects that Moynihan and I covered in the episode — wokeness and anti-vaxxers — are discussed by readers below, spurred by previous pods with Wesley Yang and Michael Lewis. This first reader “really enjoyed your conversation with Wesley and his idea of the ‘successor ideology’”:I appreciated your and Wesley’s suggestion that a kind of racial anxiety feeds into both “woke” and Trumpist takes on culture, specifically the woke anxiety that America will soon (if not already) no longer be primarily black and white, and so they will be less justified in framing their projects in his mode. Yes, I agree! I am a mother of two young children. My family mostly hails from the British Isles (though it was a long time ago!) and my husband was born in Iran. Thus our children are, in the current understanding, “biracial” — or if you prefer, “brown” — or “white”? depending on the season? And yet, what an empty, grasping way to look at them! I shudder to think of the day my children will be informed by someone that they are growing up not with vegetarian, Catholic, urban, Persian, Muslim, musical, and Midwestern values and influences, but with “whiteness” or “brownness” to which they must confess some kind of allegiance. The absurdity of this idea should be obvious. Not just the absurdity, but the toxic crudeness of it all. Another multi-racial perspective from a reader:A recent piece at The Atlantic, “The Surprising Innovations of Pandemic-Era Sex,” reads like a parody of 1990s POMO-speak: “Many queer people are reimagining their own boundaries and thinking of this reentry period as a time for sexual self-discovery.” When you boil it down to ordinary English, the piece argues that any person should be free to have sex with whomever they wish and however they like.Well sure. Almost all readers of The Atlantic would agree. Those who don’t will not be persuaded by sentences like, “This drive stems from the fact that many queer and trans people — especially those of color — live under a kind of sociocultural duress in which our livelihoods and human rights are constantly subject to negotiation and popular debate, to say nothing of our physical safety.”It’s not surprising that the author, Madison Moore, is “an assistant professor of queer studies” at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Their” personal web page is here. I’m not sure how to name this kind of young gay thinker with whom I agree at root, but whose mode of presentation is … risible. They “discourse” only with each other and their university’s uneasy tenure committee.I myself am a white male gay boomer who bought a home in Central Harlem and lives there happily with my Black boyfriend. I studied for the Ph.D. in English at UCLA, progressing to all but dissertation. If even someone like me finds this kind of writing to be counter-productive for the cause, I’m not sure who else is left to applaud it.P.S. The conversation with Yang was tremendously fine. The crucial part came when you debated whether the successor ideology was merely a fad, or the ineluctable doom of liberalism, or something in between. Listening, I felt some hope.I too wince at some of the brain-dead grievance porn that now passes for “queer” discourse. But it’s particularly painful to read it in the pages of the Atlantic. A dissent from a reader:I tend to concur with your dislike of the “woke” ideas that have increasingly percolated in the media in recent years. However, I think your emphasis is misplaced. In my view, the essential problem with this ideology is its phoniness; the people pushing this rhetoric are from the professional bourgeois class, and many of them aren’t actually concerned about lower strata of society on their own terms — they’re definitely not concerned with the values of the working class and the indigent.If you accept this premise, then the ideology isn’t quite the threat to the liberal order that is your refrain. And the most effective response is not to continually sound the alarm about the danger of these people, but, rather, to mock them dismissively and then move on to more important topics (climate change, the rejuvenation of right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism, anti-vaxxers, mortality, love, the beauty of a perfect spring day, etc). The alarmism — which is being aped by Trumpist reactionaries — only perpetuates the culture war and doesn’t serve to push beyond it.Shifting to Covid, many readers have responded to the impassioned dissent from a vaccine holdout, starting with this reader:To the anti-vaxxer who asked, “What are the long-term side effects of the COVID19 vaccine?” I’m not sure it’s logical to fear the long-term side effects of a vaccine as opposed to the disease itself, whose long-term side effects are also unknown, and whose short-time side effects — particularly for some 600,000+ Americans — are all too well known. Another reader looks at the risks:We know from clinical trials what the side effects of the vaccine tend to be: mild flu symptoms and arm pain for most people, up to myocarditis and sudden death for a small sliver of people: “6,789 reports of death (0.0019%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.” We’ve seen millions of people take the vaccines and no other serious complications emerge. There is a small group of probable side effects linked to a vaccine, because there is always a group of side effects tied to a disease. The reader leaves open that ANYTHING could happen longer term, but we know from other vaccines and disease theory in general that that is not the case.Another articulates the core reality of society, especially in our hyper-connected times:To put it briefly, respecting and fulfilling public-health requirements is an important component of the responsibility of being a citizen and justifies the exercise of the limited rights that we enjoy and help us prosper. Are there risks? YES. And we all share them, because the chaos that an unrestrained plague would sow is far, far worse. But the scientists have shared data and analysis methods, and they too have taken the vaccinations, so they’re in the same situation as the rest of us who fulfill their citizen responsibilities. Is your reader’s opinion, backed with unknown credentials, the equivalent of experts in virology, immunology, etc? Especially based on his/her communication style, the answer is NO.The husband in this video has a very effective communication style:A softer touch comes from this reader:Kudos to you for printing the letter from the anti-vaxxer — and not responding to being called a selfish bully! In any case, if your reader wants some of their questions answered, I would recommend one of the American Society of Virology’s vaccine town halls. They have real experts who try to answer whatever questions come up (Vincent Racaniello was on Aug 12th and he has literally written the textbook on virology). Don’t think this will necessarily change anyone’s mind, but everyone deserves to have their questions answered. A person who has changed minds on this is Frank Luntz, the famed GOP pollster. He volunteered to be featured in an episode of This American Life that hosted a town hall filled with vax holdouts. Here’s some key context from the narrator:Frank had a stroke a year ago in January, which is actually one of the reasons he wanted to work on this. The experience made him really angry with all the people who weren’t getting vaccinated. He says the stroke was this thing he probably could have prevented if he’d done what the doctor said. But he didn’t take care of himself, didn’t take his medication. And now, seeing people do some version of that, not protecting themselves by getting the vaccine, endangering themselves and others, it was driving him crazy.Another recommendation from a reader:This is what I’ve been sharing with people I know who are still hesitant, but it’s a bit of a commitment that I fear they won’t all make: Sam Harris’s discussion with Eric Topol, a cardiologist who famously challenged Trump’s head of the FDA during the vaccine rollout:A final reader has a quick dissent against me and then addresses the anti-vax reader:You wrote, “the most potent incentive for vaccination is, to be brutally frank, a sharp rise in mortality rates…” First, that would all be fine if unvaccinated COVID patients only harmed themselves. The fact is that morally (and legally) all those unvaccinated COVID patients will have to be cared for by healthcare workers who have been under extreme duress forever a year and are now asked to suck it up and do it again when an effective vaccine is widely available. (See Ed Yong’s recent article.)  So I respectfully disagree with your proposition to just “let it rip.” Since local and federal governments cannot mandate vaccinations, our only recourse is to encourage marketplace vaccine mandates. We should also stop the counter-productive demonizing of vaccine refuseniks, and provide local public-health officials adequate support to mount local public-info campaigns that engage trusted community allies to neutralize misinformation and provide non-judgemental evidence-based answers to people’s questions. I acknowledge the fear of the writer who defended his choice to remain unvaccinated because there is no guarantee that the vaccine won’t have some long-term side effects. But using that logic, polio would never have been eradicated nor ebola brought under control. Personally speaking, my father suffered polio as a child, an aunt and her newborn baby died from bulbar polio, and my sister is still recovering from a five-month hospital/rehab ordeal due to a near-fatal COVID-19 infection.  I’m firmly in the pro-vaccination column.That being said, we who are vaccinated took a calculated risk as well. We weighed the risks against the evidence that the vaccine minimizes serious infections and deaths from COVID-19. We made that choice in hopes of returning to a more normal life for us all. What I don’t accept is the right of the unvaccinated to unnecessarily stress healthcare workers, overburden the healthcare system, prolong disruption and viral spread, when a safe vaccine exists.  On another note, I appreciated your conversation with the incredible Michael Lewis. His analysis of the bumbling efforts of the CDC and government leaders was sobering and enlightening. And God bless him on his own journey through grief.I hope and pray that we will get through this pandemic. When we do, a lot more humility, empathy and brilliant thinkers like Michael Lewis will be needed to sort out what went wrong and how to fix it before the next pandemic. 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

Michael, currently in Hong Kong, is a veteran journalist on East Asian affairs and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and Bloomberg. He’s written a book on Confucius, and his most recent one, Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World, explores the driving force behind the current Xi regime. After our episode with Peter Beinart that touched on China, and after the reader dissents that made me rethink, we wanted to bring on a Sinophile to help us sort through the most important foreign policy issue of the next decade.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 three clips of my conversation with Michael — on whether China is really that culturally alien to the West and its economic system, on the overt structural racism and sexism in China, and on the current relevance of Confucius in foreign affairs — head over to our YouTube page.Keeping the debate going, a Canadian reader who recently moved back from China responds to my initial column on the darkness visible there:I wanted to say thank you for finally talking about international politics again, even if it is just to reach another disappointingly isolationist/non-interventionist conclusion. It’s so sad that there aren’t any bold freedom hawks in the West any more, whether conservative or liberal. I thought freedom mattered, you know? Spreading democracy, trying to make the world a better and fairer place.I don’t know what the solution on China is, but I wish we got to hear more varied opinions than “work side-by-side with a genocidal government because climate change is worse than authoritarianism,” or “ignore the foreign fascists trying to shape media narratives internationally because U.S. journalists writing about systemic racism is a bigger threat to the liberal order.” It’s depressing that there isn’t a unified voice of resistance. That means the authoritarians already won, since they seem to have already defeated the spirits of most Western elites.In that spirit, here’s a tangible tactic from a reader that doesn’t involve the military:Your column on China was the most clear-headed piece I’ve read on the subject and I appreciate the practicality of it. But you missed something major: We can accept refugees. One of the greatest moral errors of the 20th century was the failure to accept Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler. One of our greatest moral triumphs against Communism was the open arms with which we embraced refugees from every place the Soviets and their allies controlled. This is the right course of action on principle alone, but in an ongoing struggle for global hearts and minds, it’s practical as well. No one flees a utopia, especially not en masse, and especially not toward a country that’s a nightmare. The sight of refugees arriving on the shores of America, telling their stories, using newfound freedom to organize in a way that's impossible in the land they fled from is devastating to China on a global scale. Think Avital Sharansky campaigning across the world to free her husband but boosted by TikTok. (The irony of a Chinese platform serving endless anti-China content would be delicious.)I know the escape would be difficult, but as the Talmud says, he who saves a single life, it as if he has saved the entire world. And perhaps we’d be lucky enough that Xi would pull a Castro and allow people to flee. If we coordinate well, we can probably also prevent the sort of backlash that came from the Syrian refugee crisis. Regardless, it’s the right thing to do.Offering Hong Kong citizens asylum seems a no-brainer to me. To his credit, Boris Johnson has offered a path to UK citizenship to anyone fleeing the former British colony. Maybe the US could do the same for Taiwan. What other forms of soft power can we deploy? Vaccine aid, says this reader:I’m curious about your take on Pfizer and Moderna raising prices on their Covid vaccines and not sharing manufacturing capabilities with the rest of the world. This behavior and its lack of coverage seems both tragic, hypocritical, and an inevitable blow to America abroad.For the past year and a half, we’ve made tremendous sacrifices to confront this pandemic and forced many of those sacrifices upon small businesses in the name of public health. Why won’t we force similar sacrifices upon the large vaccine manufacturers? How can people decry the possibility of mutations developing among the unvaccinated in the US without screaming about our corporations refusal to do all that they can to end the pandemic abroad? And how can we claim a moral standing in the world when even the tyranny of China can take this right-minded step?I wish I could trust our companies and their corporate leadership to make these decisions. But the vaccine manufacturers stand to benefit far too much financially from a never-ending pandemic with ongoing cycles of mutations and booster shots.  In my view, it’s time to examine nationalizing this capability and making it available abroad. We can help the world recover as well as build manufacturing capacity that can assist during the next pandemic.Er, no. I’m a big supporter of private sector healthcare and pharmaceuticals. They’re essential complements to universal access to insurance. Here are a few other suggestions from a reader to counter the Chinese Communist Party:1) the massive, well-organized underground Christian church made up of believers who have proven they are ready and committed to suffer hardship and even death for their faith. The CCP has yet to learn what every other totalitarian regime in history learned: the Christian faith thrives under persecution. As selfless compassion, real faith in God’s imminent and powerful love, and the supernatural work of the Spirit infiltrate a totalitarian culture the culture is transformed.2) Unleash the dynamo of the American and British satire industry to expose the ludicrousness of CCP propaganda. No threats of violence or embargoes needed; the CCP will cower before the West in shame. Unfortunately, the West has been completely compromised by its lust for cheap (and mostly unnecessary) goods provided by China and Vietnam. This lust might well be the West’s Achilles heel.Sadly, Hollywood is so craven the chance to deploy mass culture to ridicule the Chinese is pretty remote. Matt and Trey will have to keep doing the heavy lifting. Next is a reader who dabbles in some whataboutism:I was fascinated by your column on China. I have worked regularly in the country (and most of Asia) over the past 30+ years, and I have never sensed that my freedoms were more restrictive in China than most other countries. I realize that the Uyghur situation is particularly challenging and horrible, and I would never apologize for such oppression of any people. Having said that, it is hard for our nation to be taken seriously about oppression of minorities with our own history, and our own continued treatment of certain folks here as second-class citizens — which I trust you would not deny, even if it is not so obvious in your own daily life and work. You and I are both fortunate in our birth (I am a mongrel of German, Swiss, and Scots-Irish heritage), but I regularly see disrespect shown to immigrants and people of color— my wife being a good example of somebody who regularly receives second-class treatment. She is not imprisoned, but she is harassed and disrespected on a weekly basis from folks who are no better than she is.While I appreciate your advocacy of a pragmatic approach to China relations, I hope you can see the need for at least as much attention paid here in our own nation. These past few years have made me all but hopeless about the future of the US as a civil and coherent nation, and we need those who have influence (as you do, even with its limitations) to keep pushing for fair, honest, civil behavior in our own nation. I think that we will  be much stronger advocates of fairness in China when we see a lot more fairness here at home. At the moment, we seem to be casting stones from within an increasingly fragile glass house.Comparing micro-aggressions in a free, multiracial society with organized genocide and rank racism in a totalitarian regime is preposterous. Equating resilient racism in America to full-on Han Supremacy in China is just as mad. On the more specific topic of Taiwan and its tensions with China, here’s a dissent from a U.S. sailor stationed in Hawaii who insists that “Taiwan is extremely important to our strategic and military posture in the Indo-Pacific”:I agree with most of your analysis regarding our strategy vis-a-vis China and the depressing choices we face in regards to the Uyghur genocide and rollback of democracy in Hong Kong, but I must strenuously object to your strategic assertion that Taiwan is not a critical interest to the U.S. Back in the 1950s during the Cold War, American officials came up with the idea of three island chains dominating the Pacific — a kind of defense in depth:* The First Island Chain (FIC) runs from Japan, through the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the Philippines, and rounding out in Borneo* The Second Island Chain (SIC) consists of the Mariana Islands, Guam, and Palau* The Third Island Chain (TIC) is the Hawaiian Islands stretching from Midway to Big Island.What’s critically important about Taiwan is that by being a hostile, anti-CCP entity, it prevents China from easily projecting power into the Western Pacific and thus threatening the SIC. We maintain bilateral security alliances with Japan and the Philippines, and our policy of strategic ambiguity regarding Taiwan helps keep Cross Strait tensions down.Nevertheless, if Taiwan were to fall, the SIC — specifically Guam, which its many U.S. military bases — would be threatened by China’s ability to break the FIC and project power deep into the Western and Central Pacific. Taiwan would also turn into a giant forward operating post for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which would threaten our security guarantees and forward deployed forces to Japan and the Philippines.Make no mistake, if Taiwan falls, our positions in the Western Pacific and our ability to project power to defend our allies in Japan and the Philippines (and even Thailand and South Korea) becomes gravely endangered. Our forward deployed forces in Japan specifically become highly endangered. I urge you to reconsider your position on the importance of Taiwan.Another reader tries to thread the needle of not going to war with China but backing our allies against the Chinese military:It strikes me that thinking about Taiwan has suffered too much from over-reliance on the binary of “abandon Taiwan completely” or “roll the dice to try to stop an invasion.” The following is a note I wrote to myself in an effort to think through this issue and the possibility of pursuing a different, less direct path to both defending core interests and averting a wider war. (It was partly inspired by reading about how Queen Elizabeth I worked to undercut Spain by walking right up to the line of open war without stepping over.)Rather than use US forces to prevent an invasion of Taiwan, we could accept that an invasion will likely occur and be at least temporarily successful, so we would commit to doing everything we can to convert that short-term victory into a long-term defeat for the CCP. This means working before, during, and after an invasion — in concert with our allies— to make the occupation of Taiwan into a bleeding ulcer for China. In the near-term, we would help Taiwan lay the groundwork for serious military, economic, and civil resistance. Being open about our choice not to put US troops between China and the island would presumably give us space to be quite explicit about our intentions there (“We won’t block you, China, but we will bleed you”). We could then use the long-term subversion of a Chinese occupation as a rallying point for our diplomacy in the region.Even in a best-case scenario for China, pacifying an island of 25 million people who do not want to be pacified would be a monumental undertaking. We would keep our commitment — we would underwrite chaos for China in Taiwan, and in Taiwan’s name, just as ruthlessly as Iran funds proxies to get its way in the Middle East.This next reader thinks that China wouldn’t have to invade Taiwan to take it over:Instead, it will look more like Hong Kong. China started defanging corporate entities in Hong Kong by investing in them and coopting their leaders. Taiwan has enormous investments in China, all of which are at risk. Lately China has been showing the world that it has no interest in corporate independence, by screwing with its own Internet titans. That message is not lost across the strait. It is very much in Taiwanese firms’ interest to stay in China’s good book. They will not resist.Then there’s the government in Taiwan. It can be subverted in old-fashioned ways — by blackmail, bribery, post-government sinecures, etc. It doesn’t happen overnight, but China’s timeline is measured in decades.Finally, there are the citizens of Taiwan. They come basically in two groups, as in Hong Kong. The older group has found its way in the world. As long as daily life is not disrupted, they won’t resist, and they are likely to object to the disruption stemming from the protests that will come from the second group. The problem is the youth, who are more sensitive to political matters and how the tightening noose can disrupt their futures. Hong Kong shows what will happen to them: a gradually shifting mix of intimidation and incarceration will shut them down.I see this as the optimistic scenario, but one that fits China’s recent and longer-term history. The pessimistic one, of actual war, seems less likely, partly because of China’s poor history of fighting. The border dispute with India shows China’s propensity to use its army more as a demonstration than as a fighting force. This is also illustrated by their gradual moves in the South China Sea. Slow and steady is how China win races.If you want to get into the weeds of semiconductors, a reader recommends a long Substack piece by an expert on the subject: “It’s a combined case for why China wouldn’t gain control of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, even after a successful invasion (which they probably know), and for why China’s aggression is about reducing TSMC’s customer base in the West.” One more reader for now:Support for Taiwan should be about more than semiconductors. It troubled me that the well-written dissents from your readers failed to mention the values-based reasoning for America to stand by Taiwan: liberal democracy.After the civil war in China ended, two despotic regimes chose two different routes: one maintained an autocracy while changing economically, the other became a functioning liberal democracy. The latter country, Taiwan, is much richer per capita and much freer. The only major advantage that Mainland China has is sheer numbers. Will the United States have any credibility once it lets China crush the 20th largest economy in the world? Will there be any hope for Asian forms of liberal democracies once China runs amok over a not-so-small democracy? You talk the talk about defending liberalism, Andrew. Don’t over-learn the lessons from Iraq, and walk the walk in calling for support for an important, successful yet vulnerable democratic and liberal ally. I hear you. For much more on the subject, a new cover-story for NYT Magazine reports on “how young Taiwanese people watched the Hong Kong protests be brutally extinguished — and wondered what was in their future.” 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

Michael’s latest book, The Premonition, spotlights a band of dissenting doctors that battled the inept government response to Covid-19.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 three clips of my conversation with Michael — on how we should approach Covid right now, on why Americans in particular are so vulnerable to viruses, and on the profound grief of losing a child — head over to our YouTube page.The Covid-related conversation from our main page continues below. This first reader sums up many of the dissents from parents:I enjoyed your perspective last week on the virus, masking, and lockdowns, but you made a major mistake: Children who can’t get vaccinated and the societal costs of long COVID behoove those of us who are vaccinated to work together to protect others. There is also the evolutionary biology, which you do touch on, but more infections mean more mutations and a more complex vaccination strategy going forward. So I think indoor masking for now in areas above public-health threshold levels of infections are important. Yes, the recalcitrant and stupid should get vaccinated. But a really important demographic (children) can’t yet, so it’s not fair to pursue policies that we know will unfairly penalize them. I am not a parent, but when I talk with those who are, they are terrified.“Terrified” is not a reasonable response to the reality, even though, of course, it’s understandable. And if taking these measures, we keep slowing down the trajectory of the pandemic, we also extend the time for the virus to mutate and evolve again. There isn’t a perfect solution. But I don’t think my trade-off is reckless. From a parent:I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of the path forward on the COVID front — i.e., not delaying any longer the point at which this virus is no longer novel to significant elements of humanity. But there’s one important caveat: kids. I know that children generally don’t face the same level of risk as do adults (this guest essay on Zeynep’s stack explains why), and I’m biased by being the father of two young girls, but I think it’s reasonable to think about bringing back some NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] over the next bunch of months until we have vaccines approved for children.Notice I am *not* saying the same thing about the severely immunocompromised, for whom the vaccines may be truly ineffective. Unfortunately, it seems to me that that population may have to continue to avoid high-risk settings and/or wear high-filtration masks until the pandemic has truly subsided and case rates have come way down — and we’ll be there sooner if we “let it rip,” as you say.Let’s hear from a reader who is immunocompromised:I must say that I am quite taken aback by your prescription, Andrew. You see, I’m a responsible person who eagerly got doubly vaccinated as soon as I could. Like all my friends, family, and colleagues, I was excited and relieved to be protected against an insidious virus.However, unlike my friends, family, and colleagues, I am immune-compromised with a very rare disease that, without medication, would leave me blind and paralyzed. That medication, I have come to find out, leaves me unprotected against Covid-19. So, unlike you and your friends in Ptown, if I get infected, there’s a relatively good chance I will have more than a brief period of the sniffles, feeling sick and missing the chance of having a great night out. In fact, you and I live with this virus in a crucially different way: there’s a good chance that I would require hospitalization, suffer serious consequences, and die if I were exposed to it. But that is what you gladly foresee and accept by allowing natural forces to take over, right? I cannot put myself in your shoes of living with HIV, so I don’t know what you’ve gone through over the years. But please put yourself in mine. Vaccinated people can be effective passive carriers of the highly-contagious delta variant. That being the case, I still need to sequester myself in my apartment, with very limited person-to-person contact for about a year and a half. Would that I could go to a bar or any indoor place. I wasn’t able to be with my elderly mother in her final days to comfort her, nor was I able to attend her funeral or burial services. What do we do in the meantime while the vaccine-deniers reach their moment of awareness? I’m sorry that you feel that taking sensible institutional measures to protect the continued vulnerable is unfair and constraining. But it is the last line of a defense that, I hope, others can provide me. After all, aren’t we all in this together? Or are the immune-compromised expendable? You wrote, “And this seems to me to be the key question here: do we really want to get back to living? I do.” Yeah, so do I.But again, slowing the pandemic down won’t help you. It will actually extend the period you have to be sequestered from the world. Another vulnerable reader takes the opposite approach to Covid:It’s striking how resonant your column was to me, a 36-year-old double lung transplant survivor of 20+ years. The odds were 9 to 1 against me at the time, and to this day I battle with chronic rejection and pulmonary hypertension secondary to two decades on borrowed organs. I have a fraction of a healthy person’s breathing reserve, and any infection that is even moderately severe would likely take me out. Yet I find myself of your same mindset. People like us are acutely aware of the paradox inherent in the efforts to STAY alive while also … living. I’ve become so sensitive to the tradeoffs myself that, reasonably or not, it feels a moral indignation when others can’t seem to process mortality *as part of* living. You articulated well the almost incontrovertible fact that Covid, in some form, will become endemic, and that any notion of wiping it completely from Earth is nothing short of hubristic. Such an achievement, at least in the short term, would be genuinely miraculous.In case it’s not obvious, I am vaccinated. But I’m glad you pointed out that “in a free society, coercion is not an option.” If the cost of liberty is the consequences of our personal decisions, then it is a fair price and a just bargain every time. Freedom, and all the baggage it has, is what makes life simultaneously beautiful and tragic. As one of the “vulnerable,” all I’ve ever expected from society was a fair shot at survival, which all the initial mitigation efforts were there to accomplish. In a post-vaccine world, all that can reasonably be done already has been, and I know that my unique burdens are back to being my own to bear. Life has to go on, unencumbered, unless a singularly virulent threat re-emerges.I’m also maddeningly frustrated with the general illiteracy of the public (at the hands of the media) as it pertains to most of this topic — everything from vaccine science to the limits of masks to appropriately sizing up Delta. The belligerence and conspiratorial activity on the right, as you wrote, will sort itself out in a grim Darwinian way. But poor comprehension and misinformation from left of center is particularly asinine because it’s accompanied by the usual self-righteousness: The “party of science” routinely gets science wrong or zeroes in on things like Provincetown to the exclusion of the big picture that demonstrates cases have become decoupled from hospitalization and death. The split realities along partisan lines are growing increasingly divergent.So on that note, thank you as always for being the signal through the noise.You’re welcome. And I think you’re right that living for decades with a potentially fatal virus shifted my perspective. Another reader goes into more detail about our depressing new normal:You make a compelling case as always, and I’d love to get on board, but I can’t stop thinking about our local healthcare systems and their ability, or lack thereof, to deal with a resurgent Covid outbreak. It’s not a matter of just letting the vaccine/mask hesitant deal with their own choices — all that s**t rolls downhill.Last year, as you will recall, the lack of available beds in many locales due to hospitals being at or near capacity with Covid cases led to many “important but not urgent” medical procedures to be postponed, sometimes for six months or more.  This led to great suffering for many, and at worst, appears to have led to some additional needless deaths because many of those procedures, while they could be put off for some amount of time, certainly do not have an unlimited timeframe for delay.But the more pressing concern revolves simply around the people who man our healthcare system. Knowing what our nurses, doctors, PAs and everyone else involved in that sector went through last year, especially in hard hit areas, I have to believe there are many who would be ready to hang it up and just find another career rather than deal with that again, especially when they know it’s all so preventable at this point.What’s going to happen if many of those folks stop showing up for work? We already can’t find workers for much easier jobs than being a nurse in an ICU.  And it won’t be just folks with Covid who are left sitting outside hoping to see someone, anyone. It’ll be the rest of us too. Maybe you break a bone, or maybe you get strep and you need to see someone … hurry up and wait, and hope it doesn’t get worse.I actually agree that the best way for the recalcitrant to get on board is to let them see and experience the suffering. As you said, that’s proven. But I don’t agree that we can just let the experiment run freely with NO other mitigations. There’s A LOT of risk in that strategy. As I said, s**t rolls down hill.Lastly, an impassioned dissent from a vaccine holdout:According to USAfacts.org’s US Coronavirus vaccine tracker, as of July 31, 2021, exactly half of the population has been fully vaccinated. I think we can safely assume that a significant percentage of the unvaccinated feel so uncomfortable with the shot that they are willing to risk the virus instead of the shot’s potential side effects. Simply put, they do not trust the vaccine. Why, you might ask? Well, I invite you to google “What are the long term side effects of the COVID19 vaccine” and reply to me directly with any concrete answers you manage to uncover. You really can’t. Because it’s not there. Sure, we can find some vague opinions by nameless experts on the CDC’s website [link unavailable], such as the following:Regarding Long Term Side Effects: Because all COVID-19 vaccines are new, it will take more time and more people getting vaccinated to learn about very rare or possible long-term side effects.Unfortunately this still doesn’t answer the question. What are we up against in the future? No one can say with concrete evidence. You might argue, that’s because there is nothing to worry about. Well, I don’t buy that. I know people in my own circle who have experienced heart issues, long-term fevers, menstrual changes and frequent illness since being vaccinated. That’s within months, imagine years. You may tell me to “listen to the science” — to Tony Fauci and whomever he deems “expert” enough to impart knowledge. We aren’t presented with a diverse panel of doctors with varying views on the subject, despite knowing other opinions are out there and they do exist. No no no. Those alternate opinions are quickly censored so that we are subject ONLY to the information that the White House chooses not to wipe clean from the internet. A generic panel of “doctors and experts” with the same exact viewpoint as the man/women/x/y/z sitting next to them. All approved by one institution that a large part of the country, make that the world, does not trust.   I am not vaccinated. Clearly. I have no intention of getting vaccinated. Clearly. And do you want to know why? Not one person from the CDC or otherwise has compassionately addressed the very real fears that many of us have surrounding this shot. Not one “expert” has given any feedback or concrete evidence regarding the hesitations that are plaguing the un-vaxxed. At least, no one has done that from a place of respect and understanding that I have been made aware of.Not at all. We have been attacked and vilified for it. Sounds a little like, oh I don’t know … cancel culture? I know how much you like that!Have you considered that your fears around the virus are just as debilitating as mine are around this shot? Look at what I am willing to give up to avoid this injection: ease of travel, visits with COVID-obsessed grandparents, a movie in Paris, a new job … do you think I am doing this to be selfish? To be as “delusional and deranged” as you so eloquently put? To “live in denial”? Why do you assume I have “somehow convinced myself that the virus is a hoax or a deep-state plot or a function of white supremacy or whatever…”?Because you are a bully. Because you are selfish. Because you haven’t bothered to put yourself in the shoes of those of us on the other side. Because you don’t care about MY health even though I am supposed to care about YOUR health. Because you, like much of vaccinated society, has decided that I am a monster, that I am unrealistic, that I am a conspiracy theorist, that I am “not nearly as smart” as POTUS thought I was because I am not at all comfortable with the possible repercussions of this shot.Perhaps I am just real, I am human, having a human experience. Perhaps I have fears like you do — my fears just happen to be about something else, something you cannot relate to. Why does this put me in the category of “deranged” human being? I have very legitimate questions! My questions are NOT being answered. My fears are NOT being addressed with the data I would require to make this decision. And until they are, I will hold on to my sovereignty and my right to CHOOSE the trajectory of my health without being openly bullied by someone who doesn’t value it as I do. 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

Wesley is a columnist for Tablet magazine, the author of The Souls of Yellow Folk, and a newly minted substacker. I’ve long admired him both for his essays and for his dry-as-toast Twitter feed. In this episode, we discuss the Great Awokening and critical race theory in great detail. You’ve be warned.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 three clips of our conversation — on Wes describing the core concepts of the successor ideology, on some ways BLM has arrested a multi-racial liberalism, and on how wokeness has captured corporate America, including top magazines — head over to our YouTube page.Understandably, given the polarizing topic of Israel and Palestine, many readers are upset over last week’s episode with Peter Beinart, who has become highly controversial in Jewish circles. This first dissenter accuses me of having a lens similar to the successor ideology when it comes to Israel:I could begin this email denouncing you for letting Beinart lead us into the factual swamp of Israel/Palestine. I’m sure some will. But surely over the years you have read all the bulletins and bullet points — about how many times the Palestinians and their leadership has been offered generous, or at least negotiable, promising terms for a peace settlement. These are proposals that would have given Palestinians so much more than they might get today — land swaps, half a capital city of Jerusalem, etc. I would even spare you the history of the 48 War of Independence (who invaded whom etc.); the attempts to negotiate after various conflicts; the failure of Oslo; the terror; the genocidal Hamas charter; the refusal to give up the right of return; the fact that Israeli Arabs CAN vote in Israeli elections; the miserable conditions of Palestinians in neighbouring countries which so many anti-Zionists couldn’t give a damn about. Etc. Etc.No doubt you know all of that — and how the center and left in Israel have been hollowed out by the failure of all of this, and the poisonous lack of trust on both sides. But what really amazed me about your episode was how you seemed to discard all that. It’s a great example of how a “successor ideology or narrative” can drain the complexity and nuance from the situation — even from from you, a complicated conservative who argues for nuance and complexity every week. It’s a victory for what might be called “ideological capture.” I expected more from you.  (Your friend Beinart, well, I expect little from him but utopian fantasy.)I do indeed know all of that, and sympathize with much of my reader’s points. I also know that the settlement policy is now and always has been the core obstacle to any deal and that Israel has doubled down on that repeatedly, enabled by Washington in successive administrations. Another reader, “genuinely saddened by your episode with Beinart,” gets into more specifics:I’m an Israeli, and like you, I’m originally from the UK. I’ve come to regard your podcast as essential, and up to this episode, you had not discussed Israel, and I had no idea of your views on my country. I listen and read enough from people, from all sides, discussing my all-too-obsessed-about little state. And it turns out that you share Peter Beinart’s far-left, anti-Zionist, historically selective views. You say that liberal Zionists are lying when they claim to want two states. I know that’s not the case. I’m a liberal Zionist, I want two states. I’m desperate for an end to the conflict, if for no other reason than I’d like my young children to not have to serve in the army. I also know Palestinians, who I would love to see free from occupation. But it’s not that simple. (This blog piece I wrote in the wake of Trump’s “Deal of the Century” non-peace plan is a decent summary of where I stand.) You, who are so consistently excellent at understanding the nuances and complexities of American society, and capable of seeing the threat to liberal democracy from both sides of the political map, must surely appreciate that you are not getting the full picture from your vantage point in the U.S. I’m sorry, but it is not the case that no Israeli government was serious about two states. We can agree that the Netanyahu government was not, but even that government, under pressure from the Obama administration, took steps towards negotiations that the Palestinian leadership rejected. There was a long piece by, I think, Jeffrey Goldberg telling the story of Obama/Kerry’s failed push for Israeli-Palestinian peace. In addition to much criticism of Netanyahu (all of which I agree with), there was also the retelling of a scene where Obama administration officials are raging in disbelief at Mahmoud Abbas’s seeming unwillingness to, at the very least, call Netanyahu’s bluff and sit down at the negotiating table that Kerry’s efforts had brought to his door.Peter Beinart knows all of this, and he can be really thoughtful and nuanced, but he’s totally bought into the anti-Israel left. An example of his willful ignorance was his endorsement on the podcast of the idea that South Africa and Israel had an ideological partnership, not just a marriage of convenience, “especially under Begin.” I happen to know that’s b******t. In fact, it was Begin who visited South African Jewish communities in the 1960s and refused to talk at events where blacks were banned from attending. Begin’s plan for the West Bank (never realised) involved offering the Palestinians the option of Israeli citizenship because, as he said, “we do not want to be South Africa.” I’m pretty sure Beinart knows all this. I wish you would realise that your frustration at his distortion of U.S. politics, through woke lenses, almost exactly mirrors the way liberal Zionists experience his description of Israel.Israel is facing its own challenges to its democracy, not directly connected to the occupation but rather to the growing illiberal, populist nationalist right — we have our own Trumps and Viktor Orbans. (This is a struggle I’m very involved in here, and I’ve written about for the Persuasion site.) One of the reasons the revelation of your Israel views was so disappointing for me was that I see Americans like you — committed to liberal democracy, with zero tolerance for its enemies — as allies.I am an ally. And I’m glad to air your dissent. I have long recognized the self-defeating intransigence of the Palestinians and the excrescence of Hamas. But again, I can’t explain or defend the settlements. It’s really that simple. And it’s striking that neither of my two correspondents mentions them. This is precisely what frustrates me about liberal Zionists: in the end, they always avoid that inexcusable reality. Which is why the two-state solution is definitively dead. Another Israeli lays into me:Your substack — intelligent and insightful — has been a highlight of my week since its inception. But I was horrified listening to your conversation about Israel with Peter Beinart. I would not have guessed that you would buy into the patronizing view that the main obstacle to peace is Israel’s unwillingness to make concessions, denying all agency to Palestinians, whose rejectionism is manifestly the primary reason that peace has failed. The Israeli public moved from support to suspicion of the two-state solution after two painfully deep gestures were met with violence: the Clinton peace initiatives having been answered by deadly intifada (in which nearly every Israeli, myself included, had a personal connection to one of the thousands of murdered Israelis), and the wrenching Gaza withdrawal of 2005 having been met with murderous rocket attacks targeting civilians. Absent any evidence whatsoever that Palestinian attitudes have moderated, why would Israelis make a 3rd such deadly mistake? Based on real historical experience, Beinart’s bi-national state is a delusional proposal.Personally, I felt deeply wounded and insulted to hear your own view that Israelis’ new skepticism about Palestinian readiness for peace is evidence that earlier support of two-state initiatives by people like me was in bad faith. Seriously? Maybe you think that Jews’ expressions of concern about being murdered are exaggerated, but alleging that they were made in bad faith is going way too far. I used to advocate for a two-state solution, but changed my mind because I prefer not to be murdered. Two generations ago, close relatives of mine were murdered by the Nazis. During the Intifada, in response to peace gestures that you see as based on “lies,” my younger brother’s close friend was murdered in a bed in which my older brother had slept five days prior. Two months ago, my 9-month-pregnant daughter labored in a bomb shelter, listening to missiles explode that were sent by a Palestinian government with the intent to murder her. Two weeks ago, a Rabbi in Boston was stabbed by an Islamic extremist, four minutes walk from the house where I raised my children, surviving only because he was a judo black-belt.  Peter Beinart has the excuse that he is exorcising his own demons, but I am much more shocked by your assertion that people like me are liars. Although I would like to believe that you personally bear my people no malice, I cannot help but see the open disparagement of realistic Israeli safety concerns in your conversation with Beinart as aligned with the current worldwide surge in antisemitism that quite literally endangers me and my family. I expected better from you.I’m sorry you feel that way. And to be clear: I don’t think liberal Zionists were consciously lying all those years; just that their convictions about a two-state solution never amounted to backing pressure to stop and reverse the settlements, which made the whole process a farce. They did everything to prevent Washington imposing real costs on Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Another dissenter turns to Beinart:Your interviews are a kind of litmus test, for if someone won’t consider all sides of an issue with you, they’re unlikely to do so at all. But I’ve never heard any of your interviewees turn off their intellect in the midst of an interview before this week.  At the start of the last half-hour of your interview with Peter Beinart, when you started talking about the lack of intellectual diversity at the NYT, the give and take of the preceding hour vanished and Beinart transformed into an Ally. As I listened, I pictured Beinart putting his hands over his ears and screaming la-la-la-la-la in order to ignore your persuasive and well-founded criticism of identity politics. He could be objectively compassionate about Palestinians or non-white South African. However, his ability to reason vanished when it came to criticizing, even indirectly, black Americans who have graduated for the most part from elite universities (like Beinart himself) and who are generously compensated at papers like the NYT and magazines like The Atlantic. It’s so bizarre. That is one of the tragedies of Allyship on the part of otherwise talented journalists. It happens all too often these days, alas.Another reader notes an omission:I felt as if you were challenging Beinart effectively throughout the episode, especially midstream when he was letting South African black leadership for the last 30 years off the hook a bit (the soft racism of low expectations on his part, methinks). But then I listened in dismay as there were no similar call-outs of Palestinian leadership (I listened — the word “Hamas” wasn’t uttered once).We didn’t discuss everything but, for what it’s worth, I share your belief about the Palestinian leadership’s complicity in the quagmire, and of Hamas’ evil. Yet another dissenter:It’s funny how you can see how wrong Beinart is on racial issues in the U.S. without realizing that his wrong views on Israel stem from his insistence on exporting American views about race and white supremacy to an arena where they simply don’t fit.Israel is not a melting pot in the same way that the U.S. is (though I think it’s supposed to be racist to use the term “melting pot” now). Israel is a Jewish ethnic democracy that extends full rights to citizens of other backgrounds. While this definitely feels foreign to Americans, it is roughly the same deal as in Japan, Korea, Portugal, Greece, Norway, etc. So when you and Beinart go on about how Israel is denying the right to vote (to whom? to the Palestinians who aren’t citizens of Israel and don’t want to be citizens of Israel? certainly not to the Israeli Arabs whose votes proved the linchpin in the latest round of elections), or when you two compare Israel to apartheid South Africa, you are only proving your ignorance.You can follow, and challenge, and learn from Peter over at The Beinart Notebook, his trusty substack. As far as future Dishcast episodes on Israel and Palestine, this Israeli reader has some recommendations:I don’t know if you want to explore Israel and Zionism more on your podcast — I suspect not, as I know it’s not your focus and it’s a horribly radioactive topic, attracting extremists on both sides. But if you did, I’d recommend you have on someone like the Israeli-American writer Yossi Klein Halevi, or the Israeli-British journalist David Horovitz. Both are highly knowledgeable and sophisticated thinkers about Israel, both committed to liberal Zionism.Indeed. Halevi would would be a wonderful guest. We’ll invite him on. Another reader:Please consider bringing a thoughtful dynamic Israeli thinker on the program who views things very differently than you but with whom you can relate well on an intellectual level, just so you can kick the tires on your views of Israel and that part of the world, potentially learn a bit, and maybe even help bring about a tad of healing and better understanding. Whom am I thinking of? Maybe Hen Mazzig, a Zionist Jew of Iraqi and Tunisian descent. Maybe the two guys (Palestinian and Israeli) who just did that provocative rap video that has really struck a chord. Or even a more familiar, pro-Israel voice (like Bret Stephens or Bari Weiss) whom your listeners would enjoy and benefit hearing from.Agreed. Even more suggestions from this reader:I’d love to hear you engage with a Zionist on this issue. Former MK Einat Wilf has that Oxbridge pedigree you love, and Yossi Klein Halevi and Micah Goodman are two of the most interesting contemporary Israeli thinkers. All three are committed liberals who would make for fascinating guests. I hope you’ll consider it.Absolutely we will. 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

Peter is a long-time friend and fellow former editor of The New Republic. His latest book is The Crisis of Zionism, and he’s the editor-at-large for Jewish Currents and the creator of his own substack, The Beinart Notebook. In this episode we focus on foreign affairs — China, Israel, and South Africa — as well as our shared apostasy when it comes to Iraq and neoconservatism. In the last half-hour of the pod, we get into a heated debate over the merits of racial diversity and viewpoint diversity in magazines and op-ed pages.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 three clips of my conversation with Peter — on how the U.S. should deal with China; on whether Zionism has failed; and how Peter has dealt with the Jewish-American tribalism — head over to our YouTube page.Related to our latest episode with Michael Pollan, here’s a reader response to my October 23 column, “The Psychedelic Election”:I can’t say thank you enough for your piece. As you probably know, nature-based psychedelics were decriminalized in Ann Arbor, where I live. And it’s personal for me. I spent the better part of a decade slowly circling the drain because of alcohol addiction, unexamined effects of child abuse on my personality, and career frustrations trying to become a successful orchestra conductor. I sought out the “best” addiction treatment, went to rehab, dragged myself to AA and frequent individual and group therapy sessions for years. It kind of all sucked. Intuitively, I just knew it wasn’t working for me on a deep level, and it took a long time for me to recognize it and get over the guilt of just feeling like a I was a broken, bad person. I suspect I am not alone. One of the unfortunate cultural outcomes of AA is that people just assume that’s where you get better. That is the case for some. But if a thinking person truly digs deep into the data, the success of AA and rehab, etc. is abysmal. Finland has a drinking cessation treatment (pioneered in the USA) called the Sinclair Method, which utilizes the drug naltrexone in the service of “behavior extinction” issuing a remedy of drinking while taking naltrexone, decoupling the reward of the high, and hence ending reliance on ethanol. I tried this too, after having had to do a lot of research, and I found only one in four doctors in the state of Michigan who utilize this method (and even then, my MD was an AA fundamentalist who only begrudgingly endorsed the Sinclair method). But naltrexone caused me terrible anxiety and the inability to feel pleasure, or “anhedonia,” as is the warning of possible side-effect issued with naltrexone. Finally, in part due to Michael Pollan’s book, but also my hair stylist, Sam Harris’s podcast, and various YouTube videos, I decided to seek out a trained trip sitter and have a spiritual experience on psilocybin mushrooms. I’ve done this four times now in three years, and I can tell you: it is an anti-addictive experience. It’s way too intense to want to repeat with any regularity. But it was the only thing that truly, interrupted my drinking and depression by permanently altering my worldview just as you described, with respect to the view of death, and several incredibly powerful experiences of what felt like a Divine Feminine, bathing me in pure light, love, beauty, and acceptance. It’s not an exaggeration to say that these trips saved my life and my sanity, and gave me unexpected insights about my life, relationships, work, and the beauty of the world. And yes, I used to be an evangelical Christian, and am now an agnostic/atheist (thank you Hitch, Sam), but in a softer way, where I now have a deep sense of the inner spiritual capacity that is even more stupefying to me as a natural occurrence of molecules and processes inside my body, and the potential that lay deep within each of us. Talk about the ultimate rejection of woke/identity politics, as an experience like this explodes these crushingly small-minded categories of difference. Speaking of wokeness, the persistent debate over CRT continues with this reader:I found your reader’s dissent recognizing the tendency of cultural values to swing like a pendulum, and suggesting that the pendulum be encouraged to swing to pro-black racism, an example of limited insight. Yes, cultural opinions nearly always swing from one extreme to another, but I am not convinced that this is an insurmountable law of nature. Swinging the pendulum to a new kind of racism guarantees the future ascendance of the Proud Boys ideology, as they will be joined by previously reasonable people angry at being displaced through the hypocrisy of racism.Keep in mind that in a nominally democratic society, the pendulum will tend to swing harder in favor of the majority. So aiming for a neutral centrist approach to “race” seems like a far better long-term strategy for poor minorities, not just the majority. A culture that denies any relevance for race has no fuel for a white supremacist movement. Reverse racism is the surest way to create a resurgence of white supremacism.I feel exactly the same way. We have come so far with liberalism, and to junk it now would be a disaster. The perfect should never become the enemy of the good - especially if that perfection is ultimately unachievable. Another reader sees what I’m trying to clarify:Your summary of CRT in your latest item about Kendi and DiAngelo finally helped me understand what you have been trying to express, namely this line: “If you merely believe that the legacy of ‘white supremacy’ is indeed one core aspect of America, but that it isn’t and never has been the sole one, then you are not a critical race theorist.”Yes, for me, I do believe that White Supremacy was a major contributor to the foundation of this country but not the sole contributor. To suggest it as being the sole contributor seems, for lack of a better word, too simplistic. The human condition and motivations are just simply not that simple. The unfortunate reality, however, is that white supremacist thoughts, actions, processes, policies, views, etc. appear to have had a major influence in this country for far too long. Not finding ways to eradicate it earlier is our biggest crime as a nation. Going forward, if we do nothing else as a nation but simply have a greater awareness of that impact and reflect that awareness in our education and policy making, etc., I think we’ll be OK. At least, that is my hope.My issue with CRT is precisely this: its crudeness, its obsession with race in everyday life to the exclusion of everything else, its inability to see diversity and agency among minorities, and its naiveté with respect to history across the world. Another reader thinks I’ve been painting with too broad a brush:I can’t tell you how much I enjoy your writing, how excited I am for your book, and also how much I enjoy hearing you pronounce the word “risible.” But I must correct you on a comment you made on your Dishcast interview with Amy Chua. You lamented that CRT has become so widespread that it’s infected every cultural institution, including “the entire education establishment — high schools, elementary schools” and cited a cultural sensitivity course from the NEA and the AFT’s invitation to Kendi to speak at one of their conferences as somehow evidence of CRT's influence in American public education. As a former teacher and current administrator in the New York City public schools, I can assure you that CRT’s influence is very small indeed, and that most teachers in this country probably couldn’t even tell you what “NEA” or “AFT” are acronyms for, what their ideological positions are, or, more importantly, what those organizations actually do. Those organizations, while nominally representing millions of teachers, have no influence on what actually happens in classrooms and are regarded by most teachers as purveyors of the occasional junk mail or annoying robo-call. I think most people who freak out about what happens in American classrooms have no real idea about what actually happens in American classrooms or how American classrooms actually work. It bears keeping in mind that there are 14,000 school districts, about 130,000 K-12 schools, over 3.3 million teachers and millions upon millions of individual classes taught each year. There’s simply no idea, or text, or policy that’s going to have much of an effect on what happens at 10:30 am on a Tuesday in an Algebra class in El Paso. We have no national curriculum (or even national standards), like South Korea. Most teachers listen to the national conversation about school closings or curriculum with mild bemusement, looking up briefly from the stack of essays they’re grading before diving back into the real work of teaching, which is at once far more interesting and far more tedious and far less political than most non-educators realize. I’ve written about this in my own Substack newsletter, Cafeteria Duty, which I pray you peruse, if only to get a clearer idea about what actually happens in schools:The brilliance of American public school is in the slow, steady indoctrination of students that happens over the course of many, many days, and many, many years, under the care of many, many adults. The pat idea that one teacher, or one intervention (like free Warby Parkers), or one curriculum alone will transform a child is false, for the groundwork for that transformation was laid by a thousand previous lessons and a hundred other teachers, and a million little words and corrections and pieces of feedback, most of which we will all eventually forget, or might not ever see.And though there’s tremendous variation not just across districts and schools but often within a teacher herself (see above example), everyone involved has the same idea about what we’re supposed to do: make kids smarter — academically, emotionally and socially. And most of the time, most people aim for that target.Students are aircraft carriers, not light switches. So all of this is just to say that there is never one clean line of causation between even a well-researched intervention, like tutoring, and academic outcomes. Or one clean line of influence between one kind of curriculum, and student beliefs. There’s a whole lot of other stuff that happens around it. Be skeptical of anybody who claims the opposite. Schools are a hot mess.In a good way.This next reader zooms out to a philosophical vantage point:From what I’ve gleaned so far, CRT is fundamentally pointing out that unconscious, implicit biases have cumulative negative effects. I don’t think this is controversial at all, or at least it shouldn’t be. I work in finance, and it’s similar to efforts to eliminate cognitive biases in decision-making. Nothing about the theory directly implies that the USA is inherently racist, as there’s a distinction between overt racism and the effects of implicit biases.This is interesting to me philosophically, as democracy and classic liberalism sort of presume the existence of free will, or at least that the aggregation of various free opinions results in better outcomes than alternative forms of government. Cognitive biases challenge the concept of free will since choices are influenced by unconscious factors baked into the way our brains work. It also potentially means that democratic decisions can be “polluted” by unconscious biases, resulting in less-than-optimal outcomes. To me, this doesn’t mean that any alternative forms of government are preferable — rather, that we need to incorporate some safeguards to help people be aware of their unconscious biases, and perhaps implement processes that mitigate their effects. Though I haven’t seen these particular terms used, that’s what it seems CRT is ultimately “for.” If such training is good for cops, why wouldn’t it good for everyone?My guess is that CRT freaks out many people because it implies that they don’t have full control over their actions. This is particularly disturbing to religious fundamentalists because cognitive biases undermine the concept of a soul that makes free choices that are subsequently rewarded or punished. This might be the source of the gap between secular “elites” and the rest of the country — there’s been a bit of a revolution in secular thinking regarding the existence and effects of cognitive biases that hasn’t happened among religious fundamentalists because the concepts are tied to evolutionary theories (i.e., that various cognitive biases, including preference for those who look like yourself, had evolutionary advantages in our past). And ironically, the current Republican Party, while attempting to cater to these fundamentalist voters, seems intent on exploiting every cognitive bias that exists rather than attempting to minimize their effects to make better decisions.Count me skeptical of the notion of “unconscious bias” and programs to weaken it. Here’s one more reader, who offers a way to think about the dual rise of Trumpism and wokeism:I love Alain de Botton’s book Status Anxiety and I think it offers a reason for the dangerous trends you highlight. If you are unfamiliar, Alain argues that the “free” nature of American society — the lack of a rigid class system — actually creates “anxiety.” In a rigid caste system like in India, you are born into a class and die in it. It’s not your fault and there is no opportunity to move up, so there is not anxiety about it for most people; it’s just your lot in life.But in a “free” system like in America, you are told “anybody can make it if you work hard enough,” and it’s probably truer here than anywhere else. Many immigrants, underdogs and hustlers do take advantage of the opportunity. But for those who don’t (or can’t), status anxiety is a state of knowing it’s your fault for your low station, for not taking advantage of the opportunities to move up. This is an emotionally painful state that is uniquely American — and I think the Obama presidency unleashed its fury around 2015.On the one hand, for underachieving whites (for many socio-economic reasons), Obama’s presidency especially highlighted their status anxiety because it made them think, “Even a black guy could become President, so why am I not moving up? It must be my own fault.” That was a painful realization, and rather than admit to their own failings, they looked for a way out. Trump offered that way out of the painful reckoning with Trumpism and his war on elites: Obama was not a regular black guy who made it; he was an elite who represented a rigged system. The “rigged system” lie is very appealing to the Trumpists because it relieves their status anxiety.On the other hand, Obama’s presidency also excited status anxiety in black America.  If Obama could be president, and we were supposedly in a post-race America, then why wasn’t every black person doing better? Individually, a lot of black people felt status anxiety in a new and potent way with Obama’s success. I think the pain of that reckoning opened the door to CRT. They replaced “Obama is president, so I should be doing more with my opportunity” with another (Trumpian) lie: the system is racist, rigged against me — thus CRT and BLM’s surge in popularity.Maybe you can interview Alain on your substack.But first, next up: Wesley Yang, followed by Michael Lewis. 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

One of the writers I most revere in journalism, Michael has a style that is as lucid as his research is exhaustive. His new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants — specifically coffee, poppies, and the San Pedro cactus — is a continuation of his magisterial How to Change Your Mind, a deep dive into psychedelics that made the subject more respectable than it’s ever been. (My 2018 review of that book, “Just Say Yes to Drugs,” is included in my new essay collection.) 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 three clips of my conversation with Michael — on our shared love of gardening and why it’s so zen; on whether psychoactive drugs may have sparked the rise of religion; and how the first coffee houses were a kind of proto-internet — head over to our YouTube page.A reader has a related email on the subject of this week’s episode:I just wanted to say thank you for “Reasons To Be Cheerful” (I know I’m a week late on it). I’m particularly thrilled that you mentioned the stuff about various psychedelics and their potential to help those suffering from mental health issues, especially veterans. As a retired Navy SEAL with a 100% anxiety disability, I can tell you that I believe those medicines offer tons of promise. They should be taken seriously, but we need to pursue their use in a clinical setting. Given the fact that just as many Americans kill themselves every year as die from breast cancer and opioid overdoses (both of which receive lots of media coverage), we need to start paying better attention to mental health and how to actually help those who are suffering, instead of continuing to push drugs manufactured by pharmaceutical companies that do a lot for their profits, but very little for the afflicted.That reader’s message is especially needed this week, as news broke that a record 93,000 Americans died last year from a drug overdose, up 29 percent from the previous year. It’s a staggering loss on top of the pandemic, and one I’m not happy to say I predicted.Another reader looks back to last week’s episode:I loved your conversation with Amy Chua. It gave me lots of pep in my step. As an Iranian immigrant, I am extremely grateful to America.Another reader dissents — toward me:I’m a long-time reader since 2008 and have been a subscriber to all iterations of the Dish. With that said, Andrew, STOP TALKING OVER YOUR GUESTS SO GODDANG MUCH. I can’t count how many times you cut off Amy to do a little disquisition about your own frustrations with the woke left. When I wanna know your opinions on the topic, I read your columns, but in the podcast, I wanna hear what your guest has to say!Point taken. I was feisty last week and may have gotten over-excited. But I don’t see the podcasts so much as interviews as conversations. This reader liked my rants:I think your podcast with Amy Chua helped you to clarify your concern for CRT and its effects on our democracy. It is easy to dismiss CRT as irrelevant since, like most people, I know of no black person who believes in CRT or the 1619 Project; no Hispanic who uses Latinx; no one who wants to defund the police; no white person who is a White Supremacist, and no one at all who thinks that someone with a penis should be allowed in a spa with naked women.What I thought most important was your discussion about minorities thriving in the face of oppression. Chua pointed out how there are cross-cultural traits that lead to success. This is true on my block. I live in an integrated but predominantly white neighborhood. The black families who live on my block have been successful and have accumulated impressive wealth. They have in common the things you discussed: stable, two-parent homes; both parents employed; college graduates. I would be foolish to say that I have not benefited from being a member of the cis-heteronormative white patriarchy, but these advantages have not prevented others from achieving success.The promise of liberal democracy is that it’s not zero-sum. Another reader:Your liberal friends have changed — dramatically — and are telling you that you are the ones that have changed. There is a word for that, and it is one that they should understand well: GASLIGHTING. I’ve had many conversations just like the ones you reference, and ever since I started using that word, I have been winning those arguments. It’s especially effective if you use combine it with a haughty victim-valorizing tone: “I’m not going to let you gaslight me!” Woke jiu jitsu.Another week, another dissent over CRT:I’m still working on why I’m so annoyed with your take on Critical Race Theory. Two things: 1. Your tone of outrage is so close to that of right-wing nuts that it offends me, and gives more power to them; and 2. I think you are looking at it wrong. I don’t think anyone who is thoughtful about and supportive of CRT meant to erase the Enlightenment or its values. And I don’t think it is intended to replace anything. It’s not a “philosophy of life” or a complete history of the USA. It’s a way of looking at the world, and specifically US history and society that has been sorely lacking. It’s supplemental to the education I received oh so long ago in MA public schools. My mainstream US education covered the unfortunate history of slavery (in MA, something that happened “down there, certainly not here”); the Civil War and Lincoln’s principled, moral decision to free the slaves; some vague stuff on Reconstruction, then fast forward to the Civil Rights movement, Voting Rights Act and Title VII. It’s a really comfortable view of US history, and one I am painfully nostalgic for.That history isn’t false; it’s incomplete. And a view of society that shows various statistics about how a higher proportion of African-American citizens fail to complete high school, end up in jail, become addicted to whatever, and do not own homes or have savings is all true, but putting an Enlightenment lens on it is inadequate and incomplete. Racism is baked into many of our systems, and it has been since the beginning. Much improvement has occurred since the ‘60s due to the Civil Rights movement, but it’s not yet gone.I suppose my study of history has also led me to believe there are no straight lines, but often there are pendulum swings. In the past the pendulum favored WASPs over all others. With the Civil Rights movement, it favored them less strongly. But it hasn’t gone over to the other side! Perhaps that’s what all this silly identity politics is about. Perhaps for a generation, “victims” of oppression need to be recognized, perhaps in close cases, the minority candidate should win that place at Harvard, or that promotion, or some prize or recognition. That will be a tiny start towards balancing the old pendulum.So I say, instead of declaring CRT to be imposing an end on our Western, Enlightenment values on which our democracy is based, how bout we just say Thanks CRT! You’ve got a really important perspective that we need to incorporate into our worldview to supplement what we already know/see.As with so many issues during this time of a great divide, it’s not black or white, it’s not a zero-sum game; we can take ideas and connect them with an “and” instead of “or.” Isn’t that what intelligent people should be arguing for? And to the extent proponents of CRT are arguing it’s a comprehensive, singular historical truth and true worldview, well that’s what we should be exposing, rather than attacking the ideas that CRT contributes. What do you think? I’m sorry but you cannot be a supporter of the Enlightenment and also CRT. The whole point of CRT is to dismantle the Enlightenment, its claims to universal reason, its notion of an individual, and the primacy of means over ends in liberalism. And you suggest as much by saying we should now discriminate against Asian-Americans, say, the way we used to discriminate against African-Americans, because of balancing the pendulum. I agree that we should have more awareness and study and teaching of the darkest side of American history; but not as a way to argue that nothing has changed, or that these darkest moments define America still, and that we have to dismantle all the systems — of free speech, free association, free markets, and individual rights — by revolution if necessary. That’s what’s being taught to kids now. Along those lines, a reader recommends a guest for the Dishcast:I have been fascinated by the debate over Critical Race Theory, with you espousing it as an assault on the foundations of our liberal democracy. It has been interesting for me to wrestle with this, while, in parallel, listening to The Witness podcast: ABlack Christian Collective. It’s co-hosted by Jemar Tisby and Tyler Burns, two compelling Black Christians standing in the tradition of the Black Church. Both areworking tirelessly in the field of racial justice, with Jemar having released two NYT best-selling books; “The Color of Compromise” and “How to Fight Racism.” Of keen interest in the current debate over CRT is Jemar’s insistence that CRT is not a new thing, and instead has been coming from white evangelical churches for years, as a label to dismiss the work of those fighting to reduce systemic racism in our beloved country, and is part of the virulent cancer of white Christian Nationalism. See especially this Substack post.Having the cognitive dissonance of these two competing views in mind, I would love to see you pursue a debate on the issue with Jemar or Tyler or another of the members of the Witness. I have the deepest respect for both you and Black Christians epitomized by Jemar and Tyler, which seem to be on opposite sides of this debate, even as you are united by the extremely dangerous threat of white Christian nationalism.Another reader recommends Gloria Purvis, a black Catholic who grew up in Charleston and recently launched her own pod for America magazine:The podcast centers the opinions, stories and experiences of individuals who have been marginalized in the Catholic Church and in society. A consistent ethic of life informs the conversations and honestly critiques narrow applications of church teachings or ideological attitudes. It’s all about fostering a culture of charitable dialogue around the most complex and contentious issues in the Catholic Church today. The reader adds, “In one of her episodes, Purvis talks about ‘structures of sin, including systemic racism,’ saying that Derek Chauvin was ‘destroyed by systemic racism’ — which made me think of this passage from your recent column”:And so Biden, influenced by Catholic Social Teaching, has tragically blurred its essential distinction from Critical Race Theory. Yes, CST has a conception of “structural sin” — primarily deployed by liberation theologians as a critique of capitalism, and rehabilitated in some measure by Francis in his priority for the poor. But it is not rooted in atheism, as CRT is; it does not believe in race essentialism, as CRT does; it does not see the world as purely a function of a zero-sum power struggle between “white” and “nonwhite,” as CRT does; for Catholics, there is “neither Greek nor Jew” — there is only humanity. CST offers salvation in the after-life, while CRT is rooted in the Marxist belief that there are no souls, only bodies, and no life after death, merely deathIf you also have a good recommendation for someone to debate and discuss CRT on the Dishcast, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com. Here’s one more for now:I was just reading the historian Patty Limerick’s latest blog post about reckoning with Harold Bloom as a way of thinking about other flawed historical figures. It occurred to me that she would be an interesting Dishcast guest, someone who, arguably, was the Nikole Hannah-Jones of her day in the 1980s, shredding the myth of the American West in the Reagan era — but who in later life, has taken up a mission to create bipartisan conversations for a broad public audience. She’s down-to-earth, funny, and would get your listeners off the Atlantic coast for a little variety.Lastly, here’s yet another look back at our popular episode with Jon Rauch, from a professor of philosophy and religion in the South:I thought your discussion with Rauch was very interesting. It’s rare that you have someone on the podcast who really seems at your intellectual level. And to have Rauch’s calm analysis of the situation establishing a clear hierarchy of threats was a refreshing take. But as I listened to your increasing discomfort at his unwillingness to attribute all evil in the world to the 1619 Project, culminating in your declamation that critical race theory controlled “all three centers of culture — the academy, the media and the congress,” I suddenly had an insight as to what was going on. First, a little background. I’m an academic myself. I teach in a joint department with Philosophers, so you’d think I’d be at ground zero of the academic takeover by critical theories of race and gender. And yet as I look around the table at faculty meetings, I recognize that those who espouse CT are really a small minority. When we went through racial sensitivity training for our last hire, I was appalled not by its radicality but by its banality — keep discussions to qualifications rather than proxies for race and gender like hair, clothes, or physical traits. How is it that a few academic scholars whose writings are admittedly obtuse should generate so much more passion from you than the movement that truly has captured half of America, that set to obstruct a peaceful transition of power, that has tried to tamper with the judiciary, that broke every norm of civility and tradition? And how is it possible that those few Ivory Tower intellectuals should in your imagination pose such a threat to the very fabric of liberalism when Trumpian forces in state legislature after state legislature exercise their authoritarian impulses? Then when I heard Rauch’s very clear-eyed estimate, it became clear to me what this really is — a moral panic. You know the nature of a moral panic, of course. The majority sets upon a minority. That minority is a danger to everything the majority stands for. They have infiltrated every aspect of government and culture. They have no empathy or humanity and are hell-bent on their world domination. Of course, they are always in the shadows, hidden behind the levers of power, wielding their destruction by infiltration rather than direct act. They are always a minority both numerically and in terms of race, gender, or sexuality. And the prescription is always to focus on them to the exclusion of more real and obvious threats that actually have guns, ammo, and a plan. And the solution is never anything less than a full-on battle which the panicked warn their audiences they are likely to lose, but which they never do. Because a minority, no matter how well theorized or demonic never can stand against the majority. This is not to say that affirmation of the core principles of liberalism, or the more subtle and helpful approach of critical realism, should be abandoned. There have been excesses in the academy. But compared to the events of January 6, they have been minor. What Rauch did in his comments was make a simple equation: if we fight for the triumph of facts and reality against the right, whose power and influence is really much more frightening and widespread, the re-establishment of facts and argument will be incumbent on the left as well. But a moral panic against a handful of academics is easier and much more likely to be successful. It’s always easier to kill a mouse than an elephant, as Rauch said. The Trump right is much more problematic, and success is far less assured. Additionally, what we see now is that the illiberal right has taken the liberal center’s criticism as license for more authoritarian actions. The result is shown in the passing of laws outlawing the teaching of CRT in 14 Republican legislatures, the Board of Trustee intervention at the University of North Carolina as two examples, has proceeded in predictable fashion for a moral panic. This has led to pearl-clutching among liberals who are shocked — shocked — that this might be the outcome. So let’s review: suppression of free speech, academic freedom, and minority viewpoints — check. No real solving of the problem — check. The increase of the illiberal right — check. Moral Panic Successful!I hardly expect that you will turn over a new leaf. And I’m aware that the CT Twitter warriors affect you personally far more than the gun-toting Proud Boys agitating for a race war. And yet, I’d urge some perspective, as Rauch offered.Moral panics do happen. I’d say the uprising among the elites in the “racial reckoning” of the summer of 2020 against the specter of “white supremacy” would count high among them. Buildings burned, businesses looted, neighborhoods destroyed, centers of cities turned into zones of anarchy, massive spikes in murder, firings of the guilty across countless sectors of industry, mandatory public confessions of fealty to a new movement, public breakdowns and near-religious public acts of self-flagellation — all these qualify as a moral panic, do they not? And I think the mounting evidence of a Kulturkampf is far, far more widespread than a “few academic scholars.” But yes, the shenanigans in state legislatures about future elections is deeply concerning, which is why I referred to them in the same piece. I’m less convinced by Biden’s hyperbolic rhetoric about some of the voter i.d. requirements than I am about giving legislatures more control over election procedures. But I don’t really disagree with you on this, as the last few years of this column would indicate. I’m particularly worried by the enduring cult-like support for Trump among the GOP base — when he has been revealed, especially in reports coming out this past week, as an enemy of our entire constitutional system and the rule of law. Watch this space on that. But I don’t think you have to choose. You can oppose both threats. The difference at the moment is that the successor ideology really is in power. It controls the federal government, almost all of corporate America, every cultural institution, almost every mainstream newspaper and website, and is made compulsory for many just to remain employed. It governs the hiring practices of almost every business now; and to object to it means you will either be fired or not hired. Of course, some are whipping up opposition to CRT for culture war and political reasons. But they are reacting against an act of aggression from the neo-Marxist left in education. In that sense, moral panics generate other moral panics. 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

Amy, who you probably know as the Tiger Mom, is a law professor at Yale and the author of several books, including The Triple Package and Political Tribes. In this episode we discuss the experience of being an immigrant, of being a minority within a minority, and the importance of, in Amy’s words, “turning being an outsider into a source of strength,” not victimhood.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 three clips of my conversation with Amy — on how college kids these days are terrified of debate; on how to be resilient in the face of bigotry; and on the courage of the individual in the face of woke conformity — head over to our YouTube page.Looking back to our Pride pod last week, a reader remarks:What a fun and hilarious episode with Katie and Jamie! It’s also nice to hear you a bit cheerier and self-deprecating, part of what makes absorbing your thinking so much fun. Finally, I’d be concerned if the episode hadn’t included some Sullivanesque “get off my gay-man lawn!” comments ;)Another reader also found the episode “fantastic”:Thank you many times over for reminding us (I came out in 1975) that there are people not in tune with the au courant aspects of the alphabet movement — especially its anti-Semitism and anti-police sentiments. I have friends who are big contributors to the Human Rights Campaign who are clueless, almost recalcitrantly so, about many of the specifics pushed by HRC and the overall movement. And these people are in the Federal Club — or whatever the big donors of HRC are — at the highest levels for over 25 years.By the way, in a Twitter thread I saw that the NYTimes effort to “re-center” Stonewall as black trans-initiated is being called “The 1969 Project”.This next reader sends a moving letter that begins, “Dear Andrew,”I’m a 26-year-old gay man living in San Diego and I’m writing to say Thank You. At the 1:15:00 mark of the podcast, you say “my generation went through an incredible trauma and fought through a ... critical period of civil rights. Two generations below us have no idea we did anything at all except that we’re old transphobes. We did all of it so people could live gay lives which are not political … ”Well today, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m getting ready to drive up to Portland, Oregon for what I hope will be an exciting summer romance with a wonderful guy. Nothing political about it. No shame about the fact that we’re two men — just my latest adventure. And I can’t imagine having gotten here without your writing.At 15, I realized I was gay. It took a while. No one in my family ever even mentioned “gay”, with the exception of Uncle Mike, a grizzled ex-Marine who read books like Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good Catholics? Then, one day watching beautiful Cameron Monaghan in the Showtime series “Shameless”, it sort of hit me all at once: He’s hot. I’m gay. F**k. It was terrifying. I remember brooding in my room, trying to make sense of it. What does it mean to be gay? Where do I fit? I’m supposed to grow up, get a good job, meet a nice girl, and maybe become a CYO [Catholic Youth Organization] basketball coach. All of that suddenly evaporated, and I felt totally lost.I didn’t start to find myself again until I read “What Is a Homosexual?” in junior year English class. (Not so long ago, kids were reading you — not critical theory — in the Norton Anthology.) And as I read you calmly, honestly describe the feelings of growing up gay, I suddenly began to feel human again. I wasn’t a freak. There were others out there. What followed was a two-year journey of coming out that started with that English teacher, progressed to a few close friends, and gradually encompassed my entire family. Most people didn’t care. Some people loved it. Uncle Mike and his whole family hated it. But I got through it. And I have a beautiful life. Your writing was indispensable at each step of that journey. It helped me understand who I was and what I was going through. It introduced me to the politics of homosexuality and, more generally, to your brand of small-c conservatism. It helped me to grasp the fundamentalist psyche of Uncle Mike, and later to question the gender theory of my college’s LGBTQIA++~$% :) student organization.  Beyond me, your voice so convinced our country of the humanity of gay people that by June of 2015 we had marriage equality. And here I am, packing up, getting ready to go see a guy I could maybe someday marry (— not to get ahead of myself!)From reading and listening to you, l know that you’ve been through some of the bitterest suffering imaginable. You watched so many friends you loved die a horrible death, made ever more terrible by the contempt heaped on you by the Uncle Mikes of America. But through it all, you persevered. And you kept telling the truth about who you were — who we are. I can’t find words to express how profoundly grateful I am for that. But I wanted to tell you that there’s at least one Millennial-Gen-Z cusp gay guy out there who doesn’t think you’re an awful old transphobe. Finally, I want you to know that I’m listening. I’ve been listening since I was 15, and I’ll keep on doing it as long as you have something to say or a story to tell.Another reader contemplates a strong undercurrent of the Great Awokening:I feel like you keep dancing around a fundamental truth which you never quite grasp, particularly when you observe that there is “something very sexless about the trans movement.” The movement makes a lot more sense when you get past the idea that it is about gender dysphoria and realize that it’s the beginning of a much larger cultural movement in which humanity is rebelling against the tyranny of sex.As you’re so fond of noting, the trans movement pushes ideas that are in defiance of nature. Yes, they are, and that’s the whole point. As your former colleague Camille Paglia wrote about in great detail, the entire story of all human art and civilization is about defying and overcoming nature. And as Paglia would be the first to note, the most powerful and most cruel way that nature enslaves us is by our sexuality.For most of human history we had no chance against sex. Birth control was an early small victory and it revolutionized society. Now technology is advancing to a point where we can imagine a world where individuals can choose not to be sexual creatures. Today’s trans child is not gender dysphoric in the traditional sense. The trans child is a human who sees what puberty is and puberty does and says “I don’t want that.” I don’t want my brain to be hijacked by chemicals that fill me with a compelling urge to penetrate. I don’t want to grow a body that makes me an object of other people’s lustful desire. If what it means to be “male” or “female” is all this bundle of dysfunctional societal expectations, then I reject that label.Today the technology is only just barely there — far short of what its proponents claim for it, much less the brave new world where every person can choose any sex or no sex at will. But imagine that world. Imagine a miraculous advance of technology so that every human being can choose to be male or female, both or neither, and change their decision at any time with no adverse consequence. Wouldn’t that be a victory for human freedom? The error of the trans movement writ large is not its aspiration, but simply that we aren’t there yet. The unhappy detransitioners that you and Katie Herzog highlight are casualties of the struggle in the same sense as were the men who crashed and burned in early failed attempts to create flying machines.Now I know what you’re thinking: But I like sex! Puberty was awesome! Sex is one of life’s great joys, so why would you want to deny it? I get it. I’m actually on your side: I too think sex is one of life’s great joys. But a hundred years ago there were people who would say the same thing about such evolution-preferred human activities as hunting and killing animals or fighting in battle. Today many of us think of those as gross unpleasantries we thankfully no longer have to do. Is it so hard to imagine that tomorrow a new generation will feel that way about sex?I can simply say I love being part of nature; and I accept its limits, and rejoice in them. That may be my Catholicism speaking. Or it may be my lived experience that sex is integral to being human, and being human is not about transcending our humanity but living with it. I suppose if people want to try and leave nature behind, they can try. But evolution is a powerful force, and nature tends to have the last word. (Along those lines, don’t miss Kate Julian’s big piece for The Atlantic on the “sex recession” of today’s young people. And she wrote that piece before the pandemic, so those trends almost certainly deepened during lockdown.)Speaking of Gen Z, a frustrated father writes, “This is mostly a response to the episode with Jonathan Rauch, but it touches on some other episodes and essays on the trans question”:About this time last year, my 14-year-old daughter came out to me as trans. I was in small state of shock and still am. I responded positively, with support, but also a lot of questions. I support transgender rights, without question. But I have spent a long year trying to understand, what rights do I actually support? What does it mean to be non-binary, FTM, a boy in a girl’s head?There is so much to this, I can’t really figure out where to start. I can start with the fact that I, as a teen going through early puberty, clearly remember having what today has a name: gender dysphoria. I badly wanted to be a female, and I’ll not go into those awkward teen memories of trying to figure out who gets to have a penis, or breasts, or why. I am not ashamed of those memories, but they are irrelevant. I aged some, found my way through those questions, and in middle age, I AM MOST DEFINITELY A MALE. But going back to my daughter, she got into a peer group, and that peer group is obsessed with LBGTQFU activism. And somehow without anyone noticing, she became a little militant about it. We can’t actually talk about what it means, because she goes into a faux state of trauma. Keep in mind that I am in the Deep South, and if this bonkers stuff is in grade schools here, I can only imagine how pervasive it is.And here’s the thing: my daughter is not trans. If she had a single element of her psyche that was masculine in nature, I would believe her. She is a 14-year-old beautiful and quite feminine child who is simply in the throes of the trans activist b******t and the belief that being who she is means not being who she is. Before I carry the conversation back to Rauch, I have to add one more bit of context to reach my point. We have recently added a new swimming pool, and I have offered to my daughter that she should have friends over to swim. Her responses are rather bizarre and contradictory. We live in an old house that has been undergoing restoration for quite a while, and she says that she doesn’t want people to know where she lives because the outside looks trashy. But in the same breath, she says she also doesn’t want people to come over because if they see the inside of the house they will she know she is from a wealthy family. Money quote: “I want to be liked for who I am.” As she perpetuates fraud on everyone that she encounters as to who she really is! I don’t even know what it means other than to call it a deep-seated intent to live in a land of deceit and lies.I think the conversation with Rauch has put this all into a context that had been hidden from me: my teenager is acting out the information warfare the two of you discussed, at a micro level.For the record, I seriously believe there are real trans children in need of care and love. I believe there are likely biological markers for those people. I wish science would catch up and help the debate already.I also think it is a horrible idea to be giving any child under the age of majority hormone treatments, which permanently alter them. This pisses off my daughter, but my belief is that she is going to figure it out when the right time comes and screwing up her anatomy would be her problem, not mine, if it ever were to come to that. Right now, though, it is clear to me that our culture has a wave of young children who are attempting to perpetuate fraud for the sake of fraud.I believe these stories of “social contagion” in many cases of people who say they’re trans suddenly in their teenage years, with no previous signs. I really don’t know how else to account for the stratospheric rise in the number of girls seeking to transition, compared with boys. I can’t see how denying this, as the trans movement does, and suppressing it, as the US MSM does, will help actual trans people. Lastly, a very-longtime reader shares a story from the old days:I’ve been meaning to write you to tell you this story for years, 20 years now, and never did. Sorry about that. I started typing this email about a week ago before listening to your podcast with Dougherty where, of all things, the topics of Midge Decter and a National Review cruise came up. Wasn’t on my Dishcast bingo card. God works in mysterious ways, obviously! When I was a teenager, my parents took me on a National Review cruise. It was one of WFB’s last. I was of course the only person under like 60 years old in the National Review entourage, so I was a bit of a novelty\celebrity on the cruise. This was November 2000 I think, or around then.You came up during a panel that Jay Nordlinger was moderating. The panel was on gay marriage and I don’t remember who all was on it, but the story mainly concerns Midge Decter. I had talked with Jay the night before, at dinner. We still keep in touch. He’s been the nicest guy to me. Anyway, he asked for my take as the only young conservative person in earshot of what he should ask at this gay marriage panel. How does a young conservative think about the issue, he asked. I said — Andrew Sullivan’s Case for Gay Marriage! Ask about that! I was slightly anti-marriage before reading it (I think I was basically for popular sovereignty on the question), but your article completely persuaded me. And I was pretty darn conservative, so why didn’t it persuade others? What’s the counter-argument if there is one? Ask Midge that, I told Jay.So, he did ask Midge about it. Her answer: Andrew is dying of AIDS and has a silly Catholic hangup with wanting to be married to his long-term partner before he dies, or he thinks he’ll go to hell. His article shouldn’t be taken seriously because he’s not making a public policy argument; he just wants to be able to get married himself.To his credit, Jay’s response was essentially: “well, wait a second Midge, isn’t that the most ad hominem of ad hominem responses ever?! If that’s the best counter, maybe gay marriage really is a good conservative thing!” He put it more gently than that, of course, but he got the point across. She didn’t budge and never responded to any of your substantive points. It was all about your motivation as a conservative gay person with AIDS and she really made no sense at all. I tell this story to give you some hope, because even in 2000, when this happened, most of the NR cruisers and authors agreed with me, and with Jay, that she was totally out of line. Even people who didn’t like gay marriage — which was a minority position even on that NR cruise — acknowledged it wasn’t a very helpful defense of their case for her to make such a nakedly ad hominem attack. By the way, WFB made something of a joke out of the thing, saying that he thought you made a convincing case and we should let you and the other 7 or 8 gays who actually want to get married get married and be done with it.Hilarious from Buckley. I suspect that many of the young LGBTQ+ activists who regard me as an evil reactionary, are unaware I was once the only openly gay journalist in Washington and one of the first HIV-positive men to come out publicly, even though it risked my deportation — and the kind of nasty, AIDS-related attacks penned by Midge Decter. So I’m deeply touched by those who remember and those whom I may have helped through my writing to be less afraid, and more powerful. 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

Katie Herzog, one of the last remaining lesbians in America, is the co-host of Blocked and Reported alongside her battered pod-wife, Jesse Singal. Gay neocon Jamie Kirchick is a Brookings fellow and the author of the forthcoming book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. If you’d like to hear a politically incorrect gay and lesbian conversation that would never be aired in the MSM, check it out.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 three clips of my conversation with Jamie and Katie — on the deceitful propaganda surrounding the Stonewall narrative; on the problems with the “Q” in LGBTQRSTUV+; and on the concerns that puberty blockers might be blocking the self-actualization of gay kids — head over to our YouTube page.After listening to last week’s episode, a reader writes:What an amazing conversation with Michael Brendan Dougherty — truly epic! Toward the end of that marathon of a chat, you remarked that, interestingly, many in the anti-woke resistance are gay. From my perspective as a gay man, the wokers annoy the hell out of me because I feel they merely consider us part of what I like to call the Left’s “laundry list”: “people of color, Latinx, LGBTQIA+” … blah, blah, blah. Along with membership on the list comes the assumption of our supposed monolithic thought (from the woke and dominant media) solely based on our identity and biological makeup. I find it presumptive, paternalistic, and condescending, not to mention lazy. Your weekly podcast is a salvation to me against such maddening absurdity! I hope you’re enjoying Ptown, and watch out for the Great White I read is lurking off shore …I hope those sharks can finally reckon with their “whiteness”. This next reader also liked the MBD episode, “especially the last 20 minutes!”:  I also visited Provincetown, inadvertently during Gay Pride week, with my wife and daughter in 2017. I knew nothing of its reputation, so it was quite the eyeopener. Dina had a similar first impression:Another reader has mixed feelings about the MBD episode:Whether it be a sign of the nuanced discussion or my own intellectual hypocrisies, I found myself simultaneously nodding in agreement and wanting to hurl my earbuds at a wall. During your brief tale about a past editor of The New Yorker attempting to manufacture a story about religion out of thin air, you casually delivered some genuine wisdom: “The whole point is to let go of what’s hot and to see what’s true.” Continuing a theme you discussed with Charles Murray, you lamented people’s inability to “transcend the cult of the current.” Throughout the podcast with Michael, and in the past, you seem to mourn what’s lost as American society grows increasingly secular, implying that wokeism is a stand-in for religion in people’s lives. But I find that you haven’t illustrated a causal chain. Rather, you just see similar patterns of faith and of craving meaning, then more or less assume that wokeism is being plugged in after the loss of religion, rather like interchangeable modules for our brains or souls.Perhaps. But I don’t think you’ve made the case, and it feels like your attention is sometimes so captured by the decline of religion that you spend far less time on other, arguably more contributory factors to this religious-like behavior. You seem to be arguing that the cure to this new religion is an old religion, whereas I might say that the cure for this illiberalism is simply more liberalism. The two can absolutely go hand in hand — but counter to your discussion, they need not. It might not be that we ought to resurrect religion, but that we need less certainty and more humility, less pedantry and more inquiry, regardless of where it wells up within us.Michael referred to fewer kids in catechism, among other statistics about a decline in religion. Ignoring that Christianity has a wildly outsized influence on American politics, I’ll grant his basic point. But it’s of equal note that there are also fewer schools requiring civics, teaching rhetoric, exploring philosophy, encouraging debate, or practicing journalism. Today’s worship of STEM and financial management leaves little time for the disciplines that require humility as students iteratively and methodically work (or even just awkwardly stumble) away from “what’s hot” and toward truth.Beautifully put. My worry is that liberalism itself relies on a Christian understanding of the unique individuality and worth of every individual, while CRT believes, as Robin DiAngelo reminds us in her new book, that “the ideology of individualism is foundational to white supremacy.” To adherents of CRT, liberalism is a manifestation of “white supremacy”. I wish more people could see how deeply corrosive that is to the stability and legitimacy of liberal democracy. Merging some themes of the MBD episode with my column on Biden’s Catholicism, a reader writes:Your discussion of abortion and the ability to keep it legal in our pluralist democratic society reminded me of the West Wing episode where the acting Catholic president had to uphold the death penalty but then turned directly to his priest for confession afterward. I expect this kind of multiple capacity viewpoint may enrage many of your readers, but as a lawyer it is something I am very familiar with. With politicians I expect it becomes even more important to keep track of what one does in their personal capacity and official one. As an agnostic, scientific, capitalistic Protestant, I found the direct discussions of Catholic social and dogmatic teaching especially interesting. You discuss at length what I would describe as equality of all before God. Does the existence of Church hierarchy not contradict this, though? One of my main problems with Catholicism is the idea that I cannot talk directly to God but must do so through other humans.  Certainly priests, the pope, and others spend more time thinking about religion than I do and so I pay attention to what they say — but follow without question, this I cannot do. I also think you do not put enough emphasis on the innate sexism of keeping women out of the church hierarchy. What am I missing here?  Catholic Social Teaching also seems very anti-capitalist, almost to the point of being communist. Certainly, Christianity is focused on care of the poor, but there is the Bible verse “those who do not work do not eat” — how does Catholicism balance this? Can one be a capitalist anti-socialist/communist and a Catholic?  I oppose an all-male priesthood, and do regard it as sexist. My aim was to show how a broader Catholic understanding is that men and women are completely equal, but different and complementary. On the other point, a priest’s pastoral advice is not definitive; we do not obey him as much as trust his good faith and believe in his power to represent the Almighty in absolving us of sin. He’s not like a minister in an evangelical church, whose patriarchal word is final. His unique sacramental powers are what put him in a different category. And that Bible verse mentioned by the reader, written by Saint Paul, is usually taken out of context.Another reader takes issue with my use of “pagan” to describe Trump:First, thank you for the lovely words last week about President Biden. You are at your best when your arguments and observations are grounded in the morality and compassion of your faith. I am sure someone has already thrown the rhetorical kitchen sink, couch, and all the bedroom furniture at you for your comments about how the Catholic church treats women. I need not throw more at you. But, I ask that you please reconsider how you use the word “pagan.” You wrote, “I see something of God’s providence in the emergence of this unlikely and rather ordinary man, in the wake of an unhinged pagan who violated every single Christian commandment and concept every single day.” Our 45th President is no pagan. Pagan is not the opposite of Christian. Pagan is another form of religion based on old spiritual concepts, many derived from nature. Wiccans have a moral foundation based in their spiritual practice. For example, Wiccans value nature and believe we should tread lightly. We value putting good into the world, believing it returns to us three fold in this lifetime. In that way, Wiccan practice is more immediate than Christianity; I won’t be judged in the afterlife, so the wheel of the Universe will turn and judge me right now!You have written eloquently about what it is like to be a man. You have helped me understand how being male is different from being female. Humans are all the same yet at the same time we are all different. May I suggest you explore how being female is different from being male?Wicca is centered around the divine feminine. I don’t think you have a lot of experience with that, so maybe that’s why it eludes you? You might be surprised by the number of lapsed Catholics and Anglicans who find a home among the Wiccans. There’s a lot of spiritual overlap.Our 45th President thinks that having and using a moral compass is for losers. He embraces the list of deadly sins, and eschews the list of divine virtues. He is immoral and a lost soul and mentally unwell — not a pagan.The church I was brought up in treated “Our Lady” as often indistinguishable from God the Father. Heresy of course, but the commanding role of Mary, the Mother of God, in the Catholic imagination is indeed a reflection on the divine feminine. So is devotion to Mary Magdalen, the first person to discover the Resurrection. And Jesus was wildly out of line with the patriarchy of his day: his friendship with Martha and Mary, for example, and his staying with those two unmarried women, was an outrage in his time. The importance of women in early Christianity is one of its unique characteristics for a monotheism.This next reader takes some shots at the all-too-human Roman Catholic Church, currently engulfed in a horrific historical scandal in Canada, alongside other churches:Over the years (decades?) of consuming the Dish, I have learned that once in a while I need to coast through a few paragraphs where the Church occupies your thoughts.  But I couldn’t coast this week. Up here in Canada, we are dealing with a genocide reckoning. The Catholic Church is deeply implicated in this state-sanctioned destruction, and in the unmarked burial of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of indigenous children. From infant tombs under monasteries through mother and baby homes and various pogroms over the centuries, I can think of no better institution to aid and abet this crime. And as of June 2021, the dioceses involved refused to open their records to scrutiny.There are other recent headlines. Here in Calgary in 2012, the Bishop said that offering Gardisil in Catholic schools would “compromise the Church’s teachings on chastity.” Don’t have sex or you might get this preventable cancer. Nice. So forgive me for not going into your essay with a generous assessment of Catholicism’s institutional morality.In my defense, I have not stinted over the years in holding the church to account for its malfeasance, past and present. This next reader, turning to the woke religious wars, doesn’t seem too worried by the anti-CRT legislation in many states:I thought you might be interested in the language of the bill that was just passed by the Arizona Legislature related to critical race theory (page 86 here; relevant text is pasted below). I would be curious to know whether you think it is objectionable or not:A. A TEACHER [et al.] MAY NOT USE PUBLIC MONIES FOR INSTRUCTION THAT PRESENTS ANY FORM OF BLAME OR JUDGMENT ON THE BASIS OF RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX.B. A TEACHER [et al.] MAY NOT ALLOW INSTRUCTION IN OR MAKE PART OF A COURSE THE FOLLOWING CONCEPTS:1. ONE RACE, ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX IS INHERENTLY MORALLY OR INTELLECTUALLY SUPERIOR TO ANOTHER RACE, ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX.2. AN INDIVIDUAL, BY VIRTUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX, IS INHERENTLY RACIST, SEXIST OR OPPRESSIVE, WHETHER CONSCIOUSLY OR UNCONSCIOUSLY.3. AN INDIVIDUAL SHOULD BE INVIDIOUSLY DISCRIMINATED AGAINST OR RECEIVE ADVERSE TREATMENT SOLELY OR PARTLY BECAUSE OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX.4. AN INDIVIDUAL'S MORAL CHARACTER IS DETERMINED BY THE INDIVIDUAL'S RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX.5. AN INDIVIDUAL, BY VIRTUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX, BEARS RESPONSIBILITY FOR ACTIONS COMMITTED BY OTHER MEMBERS OF THE SAME RACE, ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX.6. AN INDIVIDUAL SHOULD FEEL DISCOMFORT, GUILT, ANGUISH OR ANY OTHER FORM OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS BECAUSE OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S RACE, ETHNICITY OR SEX.7. ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT, MERITOCRACY OR TRAITS SUCH AS A HARD WORK ETHIC ARE RACIST OR SEXIST OR WERE CREATED BY MEMBERS OF A PARTICULAR RACE, ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX TO OPPRESS MEMBERS OF ANOTHER RACE, ETHNIC GROUP OR SEX.Say there's a public school teacher or admin who is both a) sympathetic to your viewpoints on CRT, and b) too afraid of being labeled “racist” to push back against an effort to implement an objectionable CRT-styled program. The law might provide that person cover to push back against CRT: “I’m just concerned about following the letter of this law.” That person could even claim disagreement with the law or feign agreement with a CRT program … but still use the law as justification to push back against efforts to implement the program. I agree with you that banning a type of curriculum is problematic — but I was wondering if you think this AZ law is doing that, or if it sticks enough to the “non-discrimination” framework as to actually be productive. I’m just wary of the precedents and giving away the liberal high-ground in this way. I’d prefer non-woke teachers to sue the various schools and colleges for violating the Civil Rights Act. In fiat, CRT argues that the CRA made no difference to white supremacy at all. Another reader sends a CRT example from a K-12 public school system in Seattle:Upon entering 6th grade, my daughter tested into advanced math, which meant she was doing 7th grade math that year and 8th grade math in 7th grade. So when she got to 8th grade, the assumption was that she and her cohort would be taking high-school level algebra.That was until the principal declared they wouldn’t be offering algebra, so my daughter and others would be retaking 8th grade math. The muddled reasoning was articulated in edu-speak as part of the district’s “mission” to dismantle systems of racism. In this case, the “system” in need of dismantling was an advanced learning program, since these tended to be predominantly “white”.So this was no longer conveying theory via copy-and-paste, Kendi-style PowerPoints; this was the real deal of putting theory into “practice” — operationalizing the dismantling of white supremacy via the racist “system” of accelerated learning.After organizing the parents, and months of pressure and escalation to the district, the principal did relent and provide an algebra class for my daughter and others — with the very clear directive that they were not to use any additional time from the teacher outside of class time, since that was reserved for BIPOC students. Sue them for violating the CRA. I hope to write about the war on testing by the CRT left soon. Testing represents objectivity; its allows for accountability; it tells us something real. That’s why CRT needs to destroy it. The point is to remove any objective measurement so as to hide the big gap in achievement between, say, black kids and Asian kids — and then to drag the Asian kids’ achievements down, or punish them for being the wrong race. One more reader email this week, from “An Anonymous (Scared Shitless) Academic”:I am a long-time fan and a subscriber, as well as a tenured faculty member at a university in your general neighborhood. I was pained to read in this week’s Dish about the pushback you are receiving for your “obsession" with CRT. Andrew, your efforts to uncover the distinctly illiberal tenets of CRT have been so welcome. One of the most chilling effects of CRT on college campuses is that everyone is scared shitless to be caught wrong-footed. There is no discussion of its weaknesses, nor of its costs. Those of us who have been bothered by CRT have been afraid to discuss it outside a narrow circle of friends and family. I break out in a sweat just thinking of trying to have an open conversation about my concerns in a faculty meeting. So I cannot tell you how refreshing it has been to read the Dish after years of seeing CRT pushing forward and conquering all the (admittedly low) high ground on campus. You are right to call out CRT as a threat to liberalism, and it is especially threatening in higher education. It is a potentially fatal challenge to any claims to objective truth in the social sciences. Objectivity is simply impossible when everything can be seen and evaluated primarily through the lens of group identity.We must never forget that CRT is at its core also a power play. However, my sense is that because the pipeline of African-Americans in academia is very small, even in doctoral programs, this power play doesn’t seem to empower the group it should most benefit: African-Americans who have actually suffered from the malignant legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and lingering racism. Meanwhile, good thinking, good debate, and intellectual honesty are shoved aside. I have seen faculty colleagues thrown under the bus by a university administration so scared to be accused of causing offense that it surrenders good sense. Allegations of microaggressions throw any pretense of administrative neutrality out the window. Required training programs for faculty are thinly camouflaged indoctrination produced by a supremely well-paid cadre of diversity, equity and inclusion consultants and administrators. New hires and administrative promotions are made primarily on the basis of racial and gender categories. All the while, the campus media and the Chronicle of Higher Education, like the mainstream media, uncritically push the line that CRT is just a Trump/Fox/GOP creation. Please please please do not listen to the Dish’s dissenters. Continue to find ways to expose the dangers posed by CRT and to encourage debate about its costs. Most of all, thank you for standing up, and for helping those of us who were too blind to put a name to what we are seeing: illiberalism masquerading as progressive truth.I’ll keep on. We’ll air other topics. But the war on liberal democracy requires a vigilant defense. You can’t defend it any more in the mainstream media, which is now captured by CRT-believers. That’s really why I was fired by New York Magazine. So that makes this Substack more, not less, vital for airing a debate smothered elsewhere by tribal loyalties and the terror of being called a “racist.” 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

Michael is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a prolific writer, primarily for National Review. His first book is My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search for Home, a beautiful memoir I reviewed here.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 three clips of my conversation with Michael — on the countercultural rebellion of teen churchgoers; on the iconoclasm of the Great Awokening; and on a potential conflict with China strengthening US liberalism — head over to our YouTube page. In the last 25 minutes of the episode we go into overtime mode by riffing on gay culture and Ptown.Our latest episode with evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was a big hit with listeners. Here’s one:I expected Hooven to be interesting, but I was curious why you called her a teaching “star” at Harvard. After listening to her, I understand why. I taught for 35 years. To be a great teacher you need to be passionate about your subject and care about your students. This certainly describes Prof. Hooven. It was also nice to see someone passionate about a subject and not obsessed with the response she will get on social media. As she said, follow the data.Hopefully you will have her back, since I would like to hear more about how society benefits from people with high testosterone, especially those doing dangerous jobs. I’m also interested in how Hooven believes women would respond if men acted more feminine. Many women complain that their husbands don’t do enough housework and help with the children. But how many would really be sexually attracted to men who perform traditional female roles?Her own story is inspiring. She didn’t focus on her GPA, AP classes and test prep to get into Harvard, but just found something she was passionate about. To Harvard’s credit, they recognized her value.The reader adds, “Hooven was also excellent on Joe Rogan’s show.” She got teary-eyed on both podcasts, and Rogan got emotional back:Another reader who liked Hooven:It was refreshing to hear a conversation with someone who wanted to talk real science and didn’t just cherry-pick scientific research to support some partisan angle. I especially liked that she called out some of the talking points as unproven hypotheses, at best. The political sphere would be so much less toxic if more people engaged in this way.What I found the most surprising was the assertion that it’s “mainstream” or common opinion that men are somehow being marginalized in modern society, which I see as utterly absurd. Perhaps I am completely out of touch, but I really don’t see anyone trying to force men to be ashamed of their masculinity. It seems to me that this is a phantasm that certain insecure men have conjured up for themselves. I don’t think anyone has a problem with men being men, they just have a problem with men abusing women, or men taking advantage of their superior strength and more competitive nature to keep women out of positions for which they are qualified, or men expecting to be owed sexual gratification as a matter of course. Checking these behaviors doesn’t mean depriving men of their masculinity, it just means expecting men to process their masculinity in ways that don’t harm women.I agree. But there is also burgeoning misandry on the CT left, which denies any role for biology in society at all. Another reader’s two cents:I agree that some people are uncomfortable with the fact that all fetuses start out as female and then repurpose tissue to transform to male in the womb. Some men especially take offense to the reality of their early gender fluidity, and that their male bits used to be lady parts. To all those who have trouble accepting it, just ask them: why do men have nipples? It is a vestige of our having started out as female — there is nothing that tissue needed to be repurposed for.Ah, yes, the nipple point. It’s true! Another reader has a dissent for me:I enjoy reading and listening to your work even though I don’t always agree with you. Some disagreements come down to a matter of opinion, but you repeated a factual claim I’ve heard you make many times about men wanting more sex than women — across the board, no caveats. I’m a youngish married straight woman with many youngish and oldish married and long-partnered female friends, and my anecdata begs to differ. The number one complaint I hear from female friends about their long-term partners is that the men are not interested in having sex with their female partners as much as the female partners would like. I’ve heard this enough times that I have come to consider it a cliche, and my friends and I have all frequently wondered why the media depiction is so contrary. I don’t have hard data, but I would suggest that either you put forward some data to back up your frequent claim or stop making it. This question seems much more nuanced to me.The reader seems to assume that because “men are not interested in having sex with their female partners as much as the female partners would like,” it means they don’t want to have sex — but what if they just want to have sex with other women, even if they never act on it? One piece that tackles the nuance of the question is this Atlantic book review of What Do Women Want: “Women may be more sexually omnivorous than men, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re as hungry.”Email is still pouring in over the episode with Bryan Caplan, the open borders advocate. This reader wants more like it:Please please please have more people on who you disagree with. I am not a huge fan of your podcasts when it is with someone who you just explore an area you are already in agreement with. I hung on every word of the Caplan podcast, loved it!Several more readers continue the debate:My fiancé’s from Israel, so we got a laugh out of the idea that cultures can mix indefinitely without major existential conflict. It just seems like Caplan believes in his ideas with this religious naïveté but hasn’t actually thought about them too carefully in terms other than economics. It was nice to hear him think through some of the real issues during your debate.Another reader “found two major flaws in Bryan’s logic”:The first was that he bases much of his conclusions on economic evidence derived from personal actions. Unfortunately, his examples are hardly controlled studies where the only variable is economic consideration. When he observes that an individual will not pack up and move from a neighborhood with large numbers of immigrants, he concludes this decision is based solely on monetary considerations and an unwillingness to pay for an immigrant-free experience. However, he neglects to consider the multitude of other factors that might be keeping this person in place — job, family, tradition, and other assets of the community. It is far too complex to assume that simply because someone doesn’t take the significant step of moving her home, the number of immigrants in her community is not really important to her. On that note, another reader quips, “If people had had to pay £100 to have voted for Brexit, how many would have?” Back to the previous reader:The other leap of his that I have serious trouble with is that he consistently argues his case by observing phenomena that occur in environments of low to moderate immigration and assumes it can be applied under an environment of open borders, where overwhelming numbers of people immigrate. For instance, the idea that there is plenty of unskilled jobs available might hold true if we are talking about numbers of immigrants we have today. It is quite another matter to suggest that this will hold true when the billion people that Caplan envisions moves into this country of 350 million.That said, I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Caplan’s perspective on open borders, even though I disagreed with almost all of it. This kind of dialogue is one reason I subscribe to The Dish. Another adds:I have one word for Caplan: WATER. As in, where are you going to get the water for a billion + people? Most of the United States is arid or desert, in the best of times. The American West is now in a mega drought — the driest conditions in probably 1200 years. If this keeps up, or heaven forbid gets worse, half of the landmass (or more?) of the US won’t have enough water to support the existing population, let alone a billion more people.But another reader “liked Caplan’s point that the US has increased 100x in 200 years, so increasing 10x in another 100 years isn’t that big of a deal.” Related to the Caplan pod, another reader offers “an alternative narrative to Brexit which I do not believe gets much air time”:Co-opting some modern parlance, I think that Britain historically (and psychologically) considers itself “European-adjacent” but not really a formal part of Europe.  From the beginnings of their recorded history with the arrival of Julius Caesar; through their recovery from the Norman invasion of 1066; to modern times, I think that what drives the British psychology is being on the fringes. They have a romantic attachment to being the home of the little blue barbarians who largely kept to themselves (from a European perspective) while grinding out an empire “the hard way” (to take a phrase from the thoroughly hilarious and insightful boomer bible). Even the successive waves of colonization and conquering eventually just leave rulers that become part of the new push for independent sovereignty after a generation or two.From the very beginnings of the EU project, the UK has been a willing, even eager participant … as long as they were only toeing the line of membership. When the EU declared that the UK needed to get off the fence and adopt the Euro and acknowledge the primacy of EU law over their national sovereignty, the backlash was immediate.  While Brexit has been marred by accusations of xenophobia, I don’t think that the fear of outsiders alone is what drove their divorce from the EU. The UK would have been perfectly happy to maintain the status quo: their own currency, their own immigration and foreign policy, their own trade agreements, etc — all influenced by the EU (they consider themselves compatible with European morality and history) but not necessarily taking orders from it. Simple stories like “we don’t want immigrants” probably appeal to some, but it has never come across as a majority feeling, from my observations. The UK sees the EU as a dysfunctional family, and they want to support it, but they don’t want to be it.  I agree. There are deep currents to an island nation unconquered for a thousand years that were always incompatible with being just a member of a massive Euro-super-state. Another reader turns to the episode with Jonathan Rauch and thinks through the implications of CRT:I really liked this episode. It’s very hard for me to reconcile the principle that liberal democracy depends solely on everyone agreeing to an epistemology based on objectively verifiable facts — which I generally agree with — with what I hear from minorities about their experiences with racism. You can search for “what’s it like to be a black american” or similar words on YouTube and find any number of first-person accounts of experiences that I, at least, am completely blind to. Here’s my understanding of your concerns about critical race theory and cancel culture:* Our culture and system of government depend on everyone agreeing to evaluate claims of truth through empiricism and objective verification. No one has special knowledge that trumps the process of empiricism and objective verification of facts. In particular, “subjective” or “lived” experience may be powerful for the individual, but subjectivity cannot be the basis for truth claims in a liberal democracy. * The “progressive left,” or whatever we’re calling it, is engaged in a power play that includes completely destroying that formerly shared epistemology, and in the process may replace liberal democracy with a kind of cultural authoritarianism.* One of the tools the CRT people use is shouting down dissenting viewpoints through accusations of racism. The racism at issue doesn’t even need to be explicit; it’s now the case that alleged racism can be implicit or structural and not proven to be enough to impose severe penalties on anyone who steps out of the ideological lines of CRT. In particular, if you’re not an oppressed minority, you have no claim to truth, because all truth is subjective — “lived experience.”* I don’t know if you’ve said this directly, but let’s go ahead and point out that cultures and governments that have in the past abandoned empirical epistemologies have descended into madness. We’re talking about the same usual suspects whenever we speak in defense of liberal democracy. If I have this right, I share your concerns. You’ve also made a point of saying that, for example, the Black experience in America has truly been unjust. When you get into a discussion like the one you had with Jonathan Rauch, it isn’t fair to expect you to issue all those kinds of usual caveats. But the fact is that people haven’t always listened closely to you over time, and I feel you get accused of a point of view that you don’t really hold without qualification.So you likely agree that, for example, a Black person’s explanation of their experience of racism in America is true. How can we fit that into our project of empiricism? Would a place to start be in the therapist’s office? Do millions of clinical observations of pain and dysfunction caused by social ills like bigotry add up over time to objective knowledge? If so, what can we do about that within our preferred framework of knowledge, short of Ibram Kendi’s “Maoist” (I love how you used that last week) Department of Anti-racism?One more reader:There’s an angle that I hope you’ll consider with regard to the debate over the effects of CRT in classrooms, and the general message. I’ll express it imperfectly below and you can do as you please with it. You get close to it here: This rubric achieves several things at once. It denies that there is anything really radical or new about CRT; it flatters the half-educated; it blames the controversy entirely on Republican opportunism; and it urges all fair-minded people to defend intellectual freedom and racial sensitivity against these ugly white supremacists.I would venture a guess that the two sides depicted in that paragraph are both almost entirely white. With some notable individual exceptions, the debate is white vs. white, about blacks. The blacks in the middle, as portrayed by the MSM, have about as much voice as cows in an NPR segment on vegetarianism. The prevailing view casts blacks as helpless, beholden to the charitable engineering of wise white elites. The black man with two medical degrees (in the video clip you retweeted) is on to this and takes offense. Kendi himself may be but a token cudgel, useful in beating down the uneducated masses who are too stupid to know that they are racists. It’s as if some of these new high priests are not under the influence of a slippery new ideology but have maybe seen the movie Trading Places one too many times. Some of the currently dominant ideas inadvertently reveal a low opinion of underclass whites, yes, but also blacks. 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

Prof. Hooven is an evolutionary biologist and the author of the awesome new book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. She’s a teaching star at Harvard and it’s easy to see why.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 three clips of my conversation with Carole — on how male horniness is increasingly shamed; on testosterone’s effect on crying; and on the ways in which T needs to be contained and channeled toward noble ends — head over to our YouTube page. We had a ton of reader response to last week’s episode with Bryan Caplan, the cheerleader for open borders. But first, here’s a reader reflection on our episode with feminist Julie Bindel, since it’s so relevant to the new episode with Carole Hooven:This American Life had an episode many years ago called “Testosterone”, partly about the story of a lesbian who once railed against the entire suite of male failings, including the sexualization of the male gaze. Then she transitioned to a man. Awash in testosterone, he recalled an incident walking past a hot woman on the sidewalk. A pitched battle erupted in his head: to look, or not to look. Unable to stop himself, he turned around to check out her cute ass. “I’m a pig, too!”, he wailed to himself.It’s an incredible TAL episode overall, also telling the story of a man who lost the ability to produce T and became deeply spiritual after the loss of all desire. Another reader recently recommended a book by Hooven’s mentor at Harvard:I just read a book by British primatologist Richard Wrangham, titled “The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution.” While the overall message of the book surrounds reductions in violence among humans, Wrangham discusses the roots of this reduction and how it ties to Domestication Syndrome. Part of this “syndrome” has the impact of making men less masculine — and more anatomically similar to females. As soon as I read that, I thought of the Dishcast. I’d love to hear Wrangham and you discuss the science behind this, and how it factors in to the gender identity issues we are grappling with as a society. His protégé, Hooven, unpacks those themes brilliantly in this week’s episode. Shifting over to Caplan, the reader reviews for his episode were the most mixed of any we’ve had yet. One reader appreciated the fiery debate as “a fulfilled promise to engage with radically different viewpoints than your own.” Another reader “enjoyed listening to your viewpoint as well as Bryan’s, and while I can’t say I agree completely with either of you, it was good to hear a civilized debate.” Another:I applaud your interest in engaging people with views the opposite of yours on a given issue, but I was just wholly unimpressed by Bryan Caplan. I am surprised he was so oft-requested by readers, as he just never once came across as a serious thinker on the matter. From start to finish, he just reminded me of that guy in your freshman dorm who’d endlessly (and unprovoked) argue on behalf of communism by regurgitating one-liners he’d committed to memory. On the other hand:I absolutely loved your episode with Bryan Caplan. It’s rare to have someone like him who gives his unvarnished viewed, backed by research, in plainspoken terms, no matter what. Easily my favorite conversation of yours. Thanks!A constructive bit of dissent:Professor Caplan seems to assume that the only people who would try to make use of open borders are those who are desperate to come to the United States and partake in and embrace our way of life. That may be true in a large number of cases, but the good professor, in his desire to provoke, remains oblivious to the idea that some may come in with a view toward doing the country great harm. Does 9/11 not ring a bell for him? To say nothing of the scope for espionage, industrial or otherwise.Another reader reflects a point I made in the pod:I have no idea how anyone can claim they’re concerned about climate change, deforestation, mass extinction, air and water pollution, zoonotic and other diseases — let alone ending factory farms — and favor open borders and admission of essentially any economic migrants who can pay someone, criminal or otherwise, to make their way here. The difference in intensity of resource consumption, required extraction and use, between someone in virtually all places from which migrants would emigrate to the US is mind-boggling. The “almost empty” country would be laid waste (in large part literally) as forests were replaced by more intensive cultivation and grazing; massive slaughterhouses filled with these largely low-wage, low-skill migrants would cover the land. Have any of these open-borders advocates spent real time in portions of North Carolina or Ohio covered with flies, unbreathable air and leaking cesspools?A dissent toward me:I have to say that Mr. Caplan brought out a different Andrew Sullivan. Your animosity toward his argument, with your mocking chuckles, was much different from your other podcasts. You refused to try to see any value to his argument, although you did end on a more friendly note.But rather than taking away from the podcast, it worked because Mr. Caplan rose to the challenge. Few will agree with all that he said, but his argument has value. For example, I had to agree with Mr. Caplan on culture. People will complain about China and trade — but they’ll complain more when they can’t buy a Chinese-made TV for $300. Follow the money to find out what people really think.As Mr. Caplan hoped, he did not come off as crazy. He was making credible arguments, even if you were rejecting them outright. Another reader’s criticism was harsher: “You were making no attempt to understand his perspective, or what truth there might be in it, and you were so sure that you’re correct that you were constantly misrepresenting his position, catastrophizing, and arguing in bad faith.” Another dissenter gets specific: I mean, look at the Brexit vote. Bryan hits it exactly on the nose when he says it’s just people voting for a poem — for an idea that sounds good in theory, because they have a romantic notion of what they think their country should look like. It’s not a position based on any experience of actual hardship faced at the hands of immigrants. Bryan didn’t want to say it in so many words, but I will: that’s a completely irrational position. I respect that some people hold this irrational sentiment very deeply, and in a free country that’s their prerogative, but let’s be serious here. If one of these apparent xenophobes were point-blank asked, “Would you rather ban foreigners from living in a city halfway across the country, or would you rather have better social services in your own city,” which do you think they would choose?Political rhetoric might be nationalized, and there might be some social pressure to perform a particular ideology amongst an in-group. But when it comes down to actual, concrete impact on people’s lives, are there really hundreds of millions of Americans (i.e. a majority) who believe in “build the wall” so sincerely that they’d give up even a half hour of their day, once in four years, to vote for it? The evidence shows that not to be the case. In 2016, 63 million Americans, at best, voted for a politician who made “build the wall” his catchphrase. Hundreds of millions of Americans did not. And then he didn’t build a wall, and it turned out people didn’t care that much anyway. Because at the end of the day building a wall was actually very low on people’s list of priorities in life.Another dissenter ties in a previous episode:This Caplan episode brought to the fore some puzzling contradictions in your overall thinking. It wasn’t long ago — your episode with Charles Murray — that you so perceptively agreed to the idea that it is low-skilled workers (drivers, plumbers, construction workers, housewives) who are of vital importance to communities, enjoy more sense of meaningful effort and would be more sorely missed if suddenly removed. You implied they are even more vital than, say, journalists or pundits, who basically leech off a surplus in any society’s symbolic capital.What you repeatedly showed in your talk with Bryan Caplan, though, is your fear that allowing too many uneducated immigrants into a country will more or less unravel its national identity. And you said all that even as you surely know the pull of American identity as a preferred personal project to be undertaken, tended to and cherished, since you are an immigrant to the US yourself, and the kind of work you do could be done just as effectively from London — unlike the work of the supermarket cashier who packs your groceries in Provincetown.Oof. Let me address some of these points. I agree I wasn’t at my best with Bryan, and that’s on me. I should have reached for more areas of agreement, and not been so surprised at the positions Bryan took. (I was also a bit testy because it was a very hot day and my A/C broke an hour before the taping.)As to unskilled workers, let me say this. I do value their crucial role in the economy, and want to see this better paid. But if you create a vast pool of unskilled labor, by opening borders or enabling mass immigration, all of them will see their wages sink. A golden era for the unskilled worker in America was the era between 1924 and 1965, when immigration all but halted. One more reader on the Caplan convo:I enjoyed your feisty and bewildering (not your fault) conversation with Bryan Caplan. However, I noticed a hint of contempt in your description of Open Borders as a mere “comic book.” If you’ve never delved seriously into the world of graphic novels, you are missing out on a creative storytelling medium as rich and poetic as any we have. Try Jon McNaught’s measured, wistful stories of the English countryside. Or the gleeful camp of Maurice Vellekoop. Or the odd, quasi-mystical art of Chester Brown. There’s far more to comics than men in tights … not that there’s anything wrong with that.Lastly, we keep getting emails over our popular episode with Jonathan Rauch, so here’s one of the best ones, to keep the debate going:I had to write in because of the unexpected mixture of feelings I experienced when listening to your back and forth with Rauch. I rate Jonathan very highly and I consider Kindly Inquisitors to be among the three most important books I have ever read. I have recommended it for years, and I consider his quality of thought such that I always return to his writing. I have been looking forward to hearing this episode since I first saw the podcast in my feed — two people whose brains I really enjoy, hashing it out.In terms of higher wisdom, Jonathan certainly didn’t disappoint, and I am very much looking forward to buying and reading his new book. I was struck, however, by two aspects of the interview I hadn’t experienced.The first is what I thought was an irreconcilable defence of Rauch’s “constitution of knowledge” coupled with his completely bizarre double-standard about that most culpable of bad-faith actors: the corporate media in the modern era. Somehow, the legacy media who have done so much to polarize and dispirit the public, whose activism affects a phony “moral clarity” as a form of claiming special authority, who deals an ad-hom to anyone saying anything counter-narrative, who essentially revolted against one half of the country, and whose behavior has led to a crisis of authority in the news business, simply gets a pass for ... erm... not being as bad as Donald Trump. Or is it for being opposed to Trump? Or for being victims of Trump? It felt like a tribal judgment, not one arrived at through the processes and institutions Rauch espouses, and his logic here was thoroughly unconvincing. I found Taibbi’s Hate, Inc. to be much more clear in understanding the perverse incentives that lead to the media we have now.Despite such misgivings, Rauch also acted as a sort of “check and balance” on my own thinking, particularly in the places I have allowed cynicism to sometimes take hold, and I was once again reminded why I love his writing so much. Even if I don’t always share his optimism, his faith in what he would term “liberal science” as a force for good is an appeal to both our transcendence as a species and our intellectual honesty, and I will move forward with that always in mind. To be both challenged and yet exercised to this extent in the same episode is why I’m glad for the opportunity to support the Weekly Dish. And we’re so grateful for your support. But keep the strong dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. 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