The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Charles has a new — and probably explosive — book coming out soon, Facing Reality. This conversation is not about that. Instead, I wanted to discuss his last book which received almost no attention, Human Diversity. 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 Charles — on the different career choices that high-IQ women often make; on the “unearned gift” of those with high IQs; and how IQ is irrelevant to the human worth, dignity, and essential equality of all people — head over to our YouTube page.Meanwhile, a reader looks back to last week’s episode:I have long been an avid follower, and I enjoyed your conversation with Niall Ferguson. I write because Niall made a claim during the conversation that I consider dangerously misleading. Indeed there was a serious flu epidemic in 1957-58, and indeed we produced a vaccine very quickly. However, while it is perhaps arguable that one reason for this apparent “remarkable success” compared to Trump’s “Operation WarpSpeed” was lack of bureaucracy, the main factors were not related to that.First, the 1957 vaccine was produced according to well-known and well-understood principles. Flu is a recurrent disease with quite predictable antigenic shifts; once a technique has been developed (which it had ten years earlier), it’s simply a matter of applying exactly the same approach to the new strain. In contrast, today’s mRNA vaccines were entirely novel, produced against a new virus.Second, the 1957 vaccine was only marginally effective, in contrast to the ~95% efficacy of the current mRNA vaccines.Third, the US epidemic in 1957 ended basically independently of the vaccine.Fourth, while a large number of doses were manufactured in 1957, it was nowhere near sufficient to vaccinate the whole population.I realize that this issue is somewhat away from Ferguson’s main point, but I write because I feel there is a trend, especially from a branch of the US Republican party, to discredit a remarkable scientific achievement, and to attribute such success as there may have been exclusively to industry. While complex and inefficient government administration can be a serious problem, I think that citing that as an important factor in delaying production of the mRNA vaccines is factually questionable.Niall responds:There are no footnotes on podcasts! But here are the relevant pages of my book. You can decide for yourself if I have got it wrong. You can also decide if you find the text “glib.” Finally, as you know, the fundamental mRNA breakthroughs that made possible the Moderna and Biontech vaccines were not made last year. I believe mRNA was discovered in 1961.Another reader adds:You briefly mentioned nuclear annihilation on the podcast. An older topic, but there is a hysterical 60-year-old song about it with lyrics like, “There will be no more misery when the world is our rotisserie...” The song is called “We Will All Go Together When We Go” by Tom Lehrer:Tom Lehrer was a genius. Another reader plugs a brilliant book — and conveys a growing sentiment among Dish dissenters:Your conversation with Niall Ferguson would have been much more substantive and enlightening if you both had read Michael Lewis’s new book on the pandemic, Premonition. It explains a great deal about the reasons for US failures in the crisis, especially at the CDC. A gripping must-read. I couldn’t put it down.The discussion also helped me to understand your instinctive contrarianism. I’ve been an avid Dishhead for about 20 years, and I usually appreciate the insights you gain from your prickly vantage point. However, lately I fear that you have become a one-trick pony regarding “woke authoritarianism” and it’s blinkering you to the many positives of Biden’s administration. As far as I can tell, wokeness is confined to fewer than 10 percent of Americans (mostly university educated whites) and will soon be forced into some synthesis with the views of mainstream society.Wokeness may already be at, or past, its peak. The failure to sell “Latinx” usage is one example, along with the real political cost of “defund the police” and the widespread ridicule of San Francisco’s school renaming. (“They” lost me a long time ago; I simply cannot use a plural pronoun with a singular verb; if necessary, get around it with “the individual” or “the person.”) So, while I agree with you in general, I find your obsessive preoccupation with the topic hyperbolic and tedious. My cousin in Texas, also a long-time Dish fan, recently said the same thing. Anti-woke can be a tiresome as woke.I hear you. I hope my column today helps explain my boring obsession with this. There’s a very important principle involved. Another reader: Your dissenter here might be right that it’s a minority of the left nationwide that means genuine police abolition. But in Seattle, it’s a very large minority, and it’s the leftist extremists causing more trouble than the right. People went by my Seattle window this autumn shouting “no cops! no prison! total abolition!” (When they saw me filming from my window, they shined a laser in my eyes.) Over the summer a BLM protest went by the same spot and explained through a megaphone to the Starbucks that people were burning Starbucks down because although they’d given $1M to black causes, that wasn’t enough. In November another mob broke the windows in that same Starbucks. Shops are now writing things like “black lives matter, small business owned” in their windows to protect their property from extremists on the left, not the right:Frustrating, to say the least. I really appreciate your work. It’s a bright spot every week.This next reader generates more Dish debate:One of Dana Beyer’s dissents on the podcast was weird to me, and she’s doubling down on it with this paragraph from her email in your latest post (emphasis added):After you described how trans women know who they are, in line with the scientific evidence, she derided it as a “feeling” and stated categorically that there is no difference between male and female brains. That’s a second-wave feminist trope — globally speaking with regards to the brain, as best we know today, there are many more similarities than differences. But the brain is sexually dimorphic, and the nuclei that drive sexual (what we call gender) identity are grossly different between males and females. There’s no spectrum. And trans women are women by virtue of having that specific female brain sex.She made a similar argument on the podcast, if I recall correctly. She seems to be saying that the ultimate truth on this issue is a biological one, and that if you lifted up the skirts of the brain, maybe with a fancy MRI technology, you’d be able to actually verify “yep, this brain’s a woman’s brain.” This seems like an utterly bizarre position.First, my understanding of the literature is that yes, in general, male/female brains are sexually dimorphic. But the differences are relatively minor and, like almost everything else in human biology, are not completely exclusive — there is some overlap in the distribution of the different characteristics. Is Beyer asserting that in fact this isn’t the case, and brains can be perfectly bucketed into male/female based solely on biological factors? The set of things for which we can do that based solely on morphology (as opposed to genetics) is small. Just like how you couldn't identify all women by height, I don’t believe that morphological brain differences perfectly correlate with sex/gender.Second, it seems like from her assertion it would necessarily follow that we could have some sort of MRI test to determine if someone was a “real trans”. That strikes me as an ugly idea, and if that’s her position I think it would be worth more discussion. If she’s saying something different, it is going over my head.Third, she may be trying to throw some wiggle in there with saying “the nuclei”, as in “genetically I’m a trans person”. I’m not sure. Another possibility is that she’s referring to the brain structures called “nuclei”. However, morphological differences between male and female brains also occur in axon tracts, which are not nuclei. To the best of my knowledge it’s unclear how much these structures change in response to behavior. E.g. it’s possible that if someone transitions and starts doing more stereotypically “female” things, their brain morphology could respond. This too seems like it doesn't jive with Beyer’s “morphology is fixed and proves trans-ness” assertion.Given how thoughtful and pleasant she was on the podcast, this seems like a really weird thing to be so wrong about. If I’m misunderstanding her position I’d love to know. Brain morphological differences between the sexes are an interesting topic in general. Computer science (my current field) is completely captured by gender ideology, and one of the early books on the topic was by a woman talking about how there is no physical difference between male and female brains. I agree with Beyer that the author was wrong about this. But I think Beyer is committing the same intellectual error in thinking that brain morphology is somehow the nail in the coffin for her argument. It’s weirdly phrenological.Dana responds:The data on trans brain sex comes from postmortem neuropathology studies. These have been limited, as you might expect, for good reasons. I believe, as a scientist, that having MRIs of sufficient resolution would be very helpful, if only to collect much more data. I will note that there are those who aren’t interested in such studies, because they believe, rightly so, that civil rights shouldn’t be based on biology. As a scientist I’d like to know. And practically speaking it does matter to many people — “born that way” has had a profound impact on gay acceptance and LGBT self-understanding over the years. Getting to the specific points. The early research in the late '90s-'10s was focused on brain nuclei, primarily the BSTc. These are real brain structures, not some metaphorical use of the word “nuclei.” The differences were significant and striking. In this instance, the sexual dimorphism is real, and there is no spectrum in anatomical terms. Since then, there have been functional studies which have followed the same pattern, and more recently white matter studies with diffusion tensor MRI. One particular study from 2017 focusing on FA (fractional anisotropy) shows trans-specific difference in one fascicle, the IFOF (inferior fronto-temporal fasciculis). Other fascicles showed no difference. Clearly we still know very little about the brain, even three decades into the cognitive science revolution. I look forward to more data, regardless of the outcome. As for genetics, there are examples of a genetic basis in a limited number of cases (based on androgen receptor variation). And if Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome presented with a penis rather than a blind pouch vagina, that would be read as trans, rather than intersex. As I’ve said, trans (classic transsexual) is a form of intersex, in my mind and that of many others. I personally am a product of exposure to an intrauterine endocrine disruptor, DES. No genetic variation of which I am aware. Saying there is no difference between male and female brains, as some do, is absurd, and untrue. One can accept that there are limited yet profound differences and still remain a feminist in good standing. A core function such as one’s understanding of one’s own sex would seem to be a logical candidate for such a difference. Reproduction depends on it. As for his final point, there is growing evidence of brain plasticity. Personally, at nearly 70, I’m very pleased to learn that. How that plays out with respect to sexual and gender identity is anyone’s guess. I’m looking forward to the research. “Blind pouch vagina” would be a good name for a punk band. One more reader:I enjoy listening to the Dishcast, but think it would be much more interesting if more of your interviews were with people with whom you disagree, so that listeners would get the benefit of a serious debate. I was just listening to your conversation with Eric Kaufmann and it was quite boring (I turned it off after about 30 minutes), because you two agreed on virtually everything and simply repeated your standard arguments about systemic racism. Needless to say, it’s extremely easy to score points against an adversary who’s not present and can’t try to explain the basis of their positions. It would have been much more interesting if you’d had someone on the show who is a proponent of the systemic racism view, like Isabel Wilkerson, who would have challenged your views; then listeners would have had the benefit both of hearing the other side of the debate, as well as your responses.  Your interview with Julie Bindel was better, but the one I liked the best was your conversation with Mara Keisling, since the two of you disagreed on quite a bit but were nevertheless able to have a civil, interesting discussion. My only criticism of that interview was that you interrupted so frequently that it was sometimes hard for Keisling to complete her thoughts. For those of us who read the Weekly Dish, we get enough of your thoughts already; the point of the Dishcast should be to have a conversation/debate with someone with differing views.I think you’re very smart and interesting, and I think you sell yourself short when you interview people with whom you basically agree, because that doesn’t cause you to stretch your thinking and leaves listeners wondering, “yes, but what would be the other side’s response?”We are trying and will try harder to get more debate going on the pod, especially with defenders of CRT, who are inherently averse to debate. But Jonathan Rauch and I get into some good disagreement in the episode we’re airing next week, and soon after that we will have Bryan Caplan making the case for open borders, so expect a ton of disagreement there. The in-tray is always open to more suggestions: 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

Niall is one of my oldest and dearest friends, stretching back to our time at Magdalen College. The prolific historian is out with a new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. One of the hardest convos I’ve yet had. Simply because Niall and I go back so far together, and our friendship is deep, it’s tough to interview him without abandoning objectivity — but I hope I did ok.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 Niall — debating how likely we are screwed as a species; on how the US response to Covid19 differed from its response to the 1957 flu; and on the religious nature of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer — head over to our YouTube page. Meanwhile, many readers are sounding off on our episode with radfem journalist Julie Bindel. A dissenter of mine:Bindel was so astute about feminism, society and what needs to change. I hope, actually, that you will go back and carefully listen to her and the nuance of what she says. Like her, I’m not denying biological determinism; I am experiencing it everyday going through perimenopause. However, I felt Bindel expressed these realities with so much more subtlety than you seem to be able to, Andrew, with all due respect. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that what makes humans special is that we tell stories. “Homo Sapiens has been able to revise its behaviour rapidly in accordance with changing needs. This opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution.” Or, as the theorist Joan Scott has written, “It is not about whether difference exists, but the meaning we make of that difference.”Humans tell stories, and those stories adapt to our different circumstances more than our evolution determines them. You seem to believe in this biological determinism in which it is ok for women to work in certain professions because it is “natural”. Hogwash. Then gay men would be relegated to being hairdressers and interior designers, and I’m assuming you would like and expect more options for yourself than those? In such a world, the masters of the universe would not be Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos — wimpy men by biological standards — but Hulk Hogan and Steven Seagal. Our circumstances change, our stories change, we adapt. THIS is what makes us human. Difference will always be there, but the meaning we make of it, what it means for people in our society, can and does change.The reader seems to misunderstand where I was coming from when I spoke of the gender-equality paradox of Scandinavian countries. I certainly don’t believe in “biological determinism”, just realism about some deep differences between most men and most women that will never be fully overcome. I strongly support any individual, male and female, who breaks out of those patterns.Another reader found pros and cons with the episode:Once again, I find myself enjoying a podcast with a person — Julie Bindel — whom I had had no interest in. I found myself agreeing with her on some points, but it was clear that she has little understanding of men and testosterone. Testosterone does not make you violent. But most people committing violence have testosterone. Just because a FTM trans person starts to take testosterone does not mean they will turn violent for the same reason the vast majority of men are not violent. I agreed with her on sex work. I also feel it is exploitation. I feel the same about pornography. But I don’t have the right to limit your choices. I did not understand her statement about the prostitute hating her client. Many people, such as lawyers, hate their clients. She should have gone more deeply into how we can offer sex workers economic alternatives.Laura Agustín goes deeper into that last point here, and Julie has a whole book on the subject, The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth. Another reader’s two cents:All prostitution is not equal. Pimps, drug addiction, violence and intimidation are all abhorrent, and it is right to condemn them. Anyone who abuses women is immoral and a criminal, and women should be protected from them as much as possible. On the other hand, absent any REAL coercion (money is persuasion, not coercion), any adult should have the option to sell their sexual services if they choose to do so. A person might FEEL like they have no other choice, but that is a sad illusion. We should all do our best to help people in bad situations find better solutions, and to see their own potential.That’s where I’m at as well. On the topic of transgenderism, which Julie and I only briefly touched on, Dr. Dana Beyer, who appeared on the Dishcast last year, writes in:As one of the rational and civil trans women to whom you alluded on this podcast, I’d like to reiterate my previous point that Julie Bindel highlighted: much of the dispute is due to confusion about language.After you described how trans women know who they are, in line with the scientific evidence, she derided it as a “feeling” and stated categorically that there is no difference between male and female brains. That’s a second-wave feminist trope — globally speaking with regards to the brain, as best we know today, there are many more similarities than differences. But the brain is sexually dimorphic, and the nuclei that drive sexual (what we call gender) identity are grossly different between males and females. There’s no spectrum. And trans women are women by virtue of having that specific female brain sex. So it’s not about feeling; it’s about knowing. I noticed when she mentioned that she might have transitioned as a kid if it had been available that she never said she knew she was a boy. Because her brain sex is female.She also said categorically again that trans women are not women; they are transwomen. No, we are not a third gender. We are a subset, along with cis women, of the larger set of women. Not the same, but not that different. Saying trans women are not women is grounded in the refusal to recognize the proven existence of gender identity/brain sex, and rightfully engenders a reaction. She prioritizes the phallus, and that does trans women a disservice and leads to conflict.She then made an interesting observation when she distinguished between post-genital reconstruction women and non-op women. That’s better, but she is still mistaken if she infers that having a penis makes a trans woman a threat in prison or the tennis court. You’re correct in focusing on T and not anatomy. No woman with a limp dick and low T is a threat, and the same holds for such men.Same thing in sports, because for the most part there are no problems, as there are rules about hormonal transition. A trans girl still doped up on her natural T does have an unfair advantage, but those circumstances are rare.My only demurral on this is that, even with testosterone suppression, there are some advantages to having grown up with testosterone — bones, muscles, etc. — that will always endure. I would oppose a blanket ban, as some states have pursued. But I do think you can include most trans athletes, who just want to be included, while ensuring that those with obvious, unfair physical advantages do not skew the results. Of course, those kinds of compromise are impossible in our current cultural climate.Lastly, a quick followup from a reader who months ago said she was “kept from subscribing by a troubling lack of women’s voices and a lack of lesbian presence on the Dish”:Thank you for the interview with Julie Bindel. What I appreciate about you is that one can often feel your mind expanding to take in thinking unlike your own. I very much appreciate that. Some of us on the progressive side are feeling very alienated and distraught by what is happening to the left, as you are with what is happening on the right.You’re welcome. I’ve tried to have a decent mix of interviewees — men and women, trans and cis, black and white — without getting too hung up on it. I haven’t been so good at finding people willing to come on who are on the opposite side of politics to me — but I fear that’s because of intense polarization. If you have a creative guest idea that could expand the Dish further, let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.Looking back to my column last week on Trumpism Without Trump, many readers are annoyed at my use of “defund the police” when I wrote: And by “right on culture”, I do not mean some kind of revived Christianism. I mean affirming a critical but undeniable love of country and its flawed but inspiring history, reforming rather than defunding the police, enforcing the nation’s borders with firmness and compassion, embracing color-blind policies on race, and viewing our common humanity and citizenship as deeper principles than the modern left’s and radical right’s obsession with group identity.The best dissent from a reader:When will you stop perpetuating the very thing you’re complaining about with the phrase “defund the police”? Only a narrow sliver of folks on the left think that actually means “get rid of the police” (and they’re wrong). Defunding the police has its roots in something the right should be very familiar with: Defunding education. We cut the budgets of public education all the time and we call it defunding — always under the guise of “trimming the fat” from education.With “defund the police,” the left is suggesting that with ballooning budgets, these police departments are buying tactical warfare gear and hiring more and more armed officers to handle every social problem that exists. “Defund the police” is meant to mean: reduce their budgets and use the money to hire more social workers, more mental health professionals, more (unarmed) traffic cops and make the whole operation less “commando” and more public servant. Surely you know this, yes? Yet you continually turn the phrase into some ludicrous idea that it means the left wants to live in a world without police. We would like to live in a world without police that are armed like a military force, who act as judge, jury, and executioner because their authoritah and egos are challenged for a moment.I understand the phrase is open to attacks such as yours. BLM suffers from this as well — just imagine how deflating it would have been to the right if the left had added from the beginning the unspoken but implicit word “too” to the phrase “black lives matter”.  But I am also aware that Republicans turns every phrase from the left against it. It’s what a party does when they have no good alternatives: just turn everything their opponent says into a game of words. It’s childish. Can we start having a conversation about the issues and not the phrases? The party that does that is the one I hope is the one with the future.I could offer you a plethora of op-eds and columns and articles in every mainstream outlet that argue explicitly, that, yes, they want to defund or abolish the police entirely. They even call themselves “abolitionists”. The New Yorker only this month ran a long essay by yet another critical race theorist, supporting the “abolition” of the police and of prisons! I wish liberals would stop denying the radicalism of the woke left, and fight back. The recent 2020 Democratic autopsy, led by Congressman Sean Maloney, found that “Defund The Police” hurt many Democratic candidates. It’s why House Democrats did so much worse than Biden last year. If I had to guess, given the huge increase in crime and violence in the wake of the “Defund The Police” movement, I’d say that the GOP has a chance of a landslide in the 2022 midterms in the House. In DC, where crime has soared, ending countless black lives, including toddlers, I’ll definitely be voting for anyone opposed to this madness.But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Jim Clyburn: 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

A co-founder of Justice for Women, Julie has a long career campaigning against male violence. She’s the author of many books, and you can pre-order her latest, Feminism for Women, here. I disagree with her on many subjects but found strange agreement on others.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 our conversation — on how Julie distinguishes her own “liberation feminism” from “equality feminism”; on the crucial need to focus more on global feminism; and why she views prostitution as “paid rape” — head over to our YouTube page.Meanwhile, many readers are offering up commentary on my discussion with Eric Kaufmann on race and shifting demographics. But first a quick correction from a reader, who clears up my conflation of two similar men featured on Bari Weiss’s substack:Contrary to your passing comment, Paul Rossi (the teacher at Grace Church School who got fired) didn’t say that about systemic racism (“We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s”). It was Andrew Gutmann — a father of a student at Brearley.Bari spoke to both men over Zoom here. And here she featured six takes — from John McWhorter, Lara Bazelon, Glenn Loury, Kmele Foster, Chloé Valdary and Kenny Xu — on the question of “what is systemic racism?” I’m working on my own attempt to answer that question.Back to the Kaufmann pod, a reader offers firsthand perspective on racism outside the United States:I’m glad you made the point that other countries have worse racial oppression. Whenever a CRT activist says the US is terrible on race, I always wonder, “compared to what?”I lived in Africa for years and study it today, and the racism there is pervasive. Majority-clan Somalis treat the ethnically distinct, minority Somali Bantus (historically slaves in Somalia) horribly, to the point that some scholars believe they have suffered genocide. In Central Africa, pygmy peoples are seen as subhuman and have been nearly wiped out by surrounding people groups. The Khoisan in southern Africa were driven from most of their land by Bantu-speaking groups, and the Portuguese discovered that Khoisan made fabulous counterinsurgent fighters in part because they so hated the Bantu-speaking groups that populated the rebel ranks. In Mauritania, the light-skinned Moors to this day enslave many dark-skinned Africans, as much as 20% of the population. Sec. Blinken recently described what is going on in Ethiopia’s Tigray region as “ethnic cleansing.” And it goes on and on.America is not a racial utopia, but no state ever has been or ever will be. It does, however, treat its minorities much better than does the great majority of countries. That is why it has by far the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, why millions of black Africans line up at US consulates for the remotest chance to get a visa, and why hundreds of thousands of people from Latin America head for the US-Mexican border whenever there is an opportunity to get across.  The idea that the U.S. is uniquely evil on racial issues is analytically indefensible, but also dangerous. I see in Africa every single day how destructive group grievances are to efforts to build unity, stability, and prosperity, and that is where the CRT crowd is trying to take us.Amen. It takes unimaginable levels of historical ignorance to describe the modern West as uniquely racist, or as somehow “creating” racism in the modern era. And yet this very ignorance is now being taught to children as a “responsible” curriculum. Another reader makes an analogy:While I am no astrophysicist, it seems to me “systemic racism” plays the same role in the liberal/progressive view of American society as dark matter (and dark energy) play in cosmology. Simply put, without positing the existence of massive amounts of unseen dark matter, our standard cosmological model — incorporating our very best understanding of “the science” — cannot stand. We cannot explain the Universe while maintaining the current cosmological paradigm unless dark matter exists.Another reader pushes against my views on wokeness and immigration:Excellent podcast with Eric Kaufmann. Lots of interesting stuff here, but I feel like there are two separate topics you sometimes confuse in the conversation.The first topic is to what degree certain ethnicities or races or other demographic groups are disadvantaged in American society. I think a lot of what you call “neo-racism” is just a belief that right now the disparities are too big. Why aren’t 51% of congresspeople women? Why aren’t 18% Hispanic? Of course there are historical reasons for these disparities, and in theory they will slowly correct themselves over time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth proactively trying to help it along. It’s disingenuous to claim that white liberals are looking to entirely invert the disparity, to completely remove all power from white men. They simply want to see the power in society more equitably distributed amongst the demographics of people that already exist in the country. Isn’t that the whole dream of democracy? A government run of the people, by the people, for the people?The second topic relates to immigration, and the idea that people who welcome immigration are doing it as some kind of anti-racist flex. If you believe that most people who resist immigration are not racists, then it’s only fair to extend the same benefit of the doubt to those who welcome it. Couldn’t it be the case that most people who welcome immigration simply believe in extending democratic principles to the whole world? Why should people of one country be favored over people of another country, simply by accident of birth? Why wouldn’t an American want to extend their ideals to people all over the world? Welcoming immigration is fundamentally rooted in a belief that all humans deserve the same chances and the same opportunities, no matter where they were born. That’s not an anti-white or an anti-American belief. On the contrary, it’s a belief in many of the core values on which the country was founded!One of the best points Kaufmann made was that only 8% of people actually fall into this idea of “woke” activism that you push so hard against. I think it’s worth remembering that statistic when you are tempted to make these sweeping comments about “white liberals”, as if the people you meet in newsrooms in DC are representative of all white liberals. The nomination and subsequent election of Joe Biden should make it clear that’s not the case. It doesn’t make it easy to say people are misrepresenting you as a racist, when you often make similarly extreme generalizations about everyone on the left.The question is how you seek greater “equity”. By ensuring that minorities and women have equal opportunity to overcome the burden of the past, and rise according to their abilities? Or to find a way to impose equity by fiat from above on groups of people, in ways designed to undermine merit, and submerge the essence of an individual into the political collectivism of an identity group. I favor the former, believe it has already achieved marvels, and would rather identify actual reasons for minority under-performance — bad family structures, high levels of violence, cultural prejudices against “acting white”, etc — rather than re-engineering society to achieve a completely unfeasible equality of outcome for every population group.On immigration, I don’t doubt the sincerity of many leftists’ beliefs about the arbitrariness of the genetic lottery in privileging all of us born in the modern West. They’re not wrong. But to abandon the nation-state, to see all borders as racist, and to see no need to prioritize your own citizens over non-citizens: this is utopian one-worldism. This next reader comments on my incredulity that so many Republicans deeply loathed Obama as a person — that calm, moderate family man:I first volunteered for Barack Obama the weekend before the 2008 New Hampshire primary and continued to throughout that year. In 2011-13 (continuing a bit with OFA 2.0), I was a core volunteer and was ultimately offered a paid position. In many ways I’m still a fan of Obama. My sense is that residual — and at times paranoid — hysterical racism was at the root of some of the hatred for him on the right. But recall how hysterical and paranoid much of the opposition to Clinton was, too. You citing Obama as sort of a “diverse WASP” actually explains a lot of the resentment, insecurity, and anxiety he inspired among more right-leaning working-class voters. Maybe some believed the birther nonsense. But my sense is more of them were put off by how effortlessly, smoothly arrogant he could sometimes appear — while condescending to downwardly mobile people like them whose ancestors might have been fighting in wars and settling homesteads going back to the early 1700s. To them it’s not that he was alien to America; it’s that he was emblematic of a new upwardly mobile America that was leaving them behind — and sneering at them or condescending to them while doing it.A really helpful insight. As far as the podcast in general, a recommendation from a reader:After reading your recent column on immigration (excellent as usual), I’m wondering if you’ve had a chance to read Bryan Caplan’s book Open Borders. It’s a fun and easy read, so I would recommend doing so if you haven’t. I think Caplan makes a strong case for open borders, and while I would not go as far as to endorse the position, he definitely nudged me in his direction. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.Caplan just agreed to come on the Dishcast, so stay tuned. My old friend Niall Ferguson is up next. Please keep the pod suggestions and commentary coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. And speaking of Caplan and immigration, a reader provides an update on the ever-evolving situation:Have you noticed that Republicans have begun to lose interest in the border crisis? Part of that is due to the gigantic transformational policies Biden has proposed and the (fairly incoherent) Republican response. But it’s also understandable in the context of the facts on the ground, which have shifted quickly. The fact is, the number of unaccompanied migrant minors in US custody has dropped by 84% in a single month, and the average number of hours each child in CBP control has dropped from 115 to 28 hours.Nobody would describe this as some sort of solution to our border and illegal immigration problem — far from it. But it also indicates that the narrative that the initial crisis signaled a permanently increasing influx due to Biden policies which would only get worse and worse ... seems to perhaps be wrong. Right now, it would appear that the surge mostly reflected the usual seasonal upticks of migration PLUS left-over migration “demand” from the pandemic evening out. The Biden administration’s lack of preparation and readiness for the surge warranted heavy coverage, but so does the administration’s apparent ability to wrap its arms around the problem and fairly swiftly get it under much better control. Again, this is still an issue and a liability for Dems. But you can always tell when the facts on the ground are moving away from the GOP once Fox and the right-wing media ecosystem starts generating b******t stories like the Kamala Harris book handout (or in the case of their inability to coherently oppose Biden’s proposals, the nonexistent hamburger ban).It’s taken resources to manage the surge in unaccompanied minors, and the situation is not sustainable. But for now, Biden has handled the situation and done so without the kind of draconian family separation policies of the Trump administration. So the progress should be noted. Well, yes. If you believe that a more efficient way to maximize single-child-immigration is the goal. And let’s see what happens to the surge at the border, which Mexico has partly helped arrest for the moment, especially when Biden lifts the Covid restrictions altogether.One more reader for the week:I appreciate your voice on the enforced narrative around anti-Asian (but often random) violence. If you look deeper into the overwhelming majority of these stories, you’ll find the attacker is a homeless man with mental health issues. There are so many non-Asian victims of these attacks! It can happen to any pedestrian. So the key to these attacks seems to be homelessness, not race.You’ll notice the attacks are also concentrated in cities that have particularly tolerant approaches to homelessness. These cities do not enforce reasonable boundaries against camping in public, using drugs/being intoxicated in public, and even public defecation! Chris Rufo has a particularly clear insight on this and would be worth talking to (though he’s sort of a militant conservative.)I feel really passionate about this topic, as a former young woman and now young mother who doesn’t feel comfortable in many public places (certain public parks, beaches, libraries, and even neighborhoods) because they are dominated by homeless men with obvious mental health and addiction issues who are CLEARLY dangerous to be around. And yet in many circles, expressing this discomfort is forbidden as the worst kind of bigotry. Alas!Indeed. The more you see of this — in videos, at least — the clearer it appears that the culprits are far more likely to be non-white than white and that mental illness and homelessness are very common among them. One reason I despise the woke assumption that every problem in society is a function of a non-existent “white supremacy” is that it obscures the need to be empirical, to infer from the data, to see what is really the problem, rather than to distract from it for cultural or ideological reasons. It ends up compounding problems rather than solving them. 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

Eric is a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and he most recently wrote the book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, which I reviewed here. Be sure to check out his recent report on the social construction of racism in the United States.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 excerpts from my conversation with Eric — on the comparatively little racism of the US compared to other countries; on the anti-immigrant views of new immigrants; and on why Barack Obama would be considered “white supremacist” today — head over to our YouTube page.After listening to last week’s episode with Shawn McCreesh, a reader shares his own family experience with opioids:My mother had terminal cancer when I was in college in the mid 1980s, in a far-ish suburb outside of Boston. After the cancer got to a certain point, and only then, she was prescribed morphine. It is my understanding it was only prescribed in terminal cases. Even after getting a prescription, it wasn’t easy to get. I remember my stepfather had to drive about 30 minutes to the nearest pharmacy that sold it, since it wasn’t available everywhere. He went to a pharmacy close to the hospital and handed over his license, and they logged where every drop went.The question is, how did we go to a strictly controlled substance with very specific indications to a very similar class of drugs that was doled out like candy to high school football players with minor neck injuries? I think the answer is that it was a patented pharma product where the owners could make a lot of money. They spent a lot of money lobbying doctors to write scripts and legislators to make sure the scripts could be written. Everyone made money but the patients. Voila. Here is your crisis. It was entirely manufactured because the healthcare system is not designed to keep the population healthy, but to make money for a certain group of people and companies.  Health care, like so many other vital services in America, including higher education and housing, has been fully monetized.As people like Shawn McCreesh continue to survey the carnage, the person at McKinsey who designed Perdue’s sales strategy probably made partner and is now a wealthy, respected, and an upstanding member of his community — and you can bet it isn’t Shawn’s hometown, Hatboro.Another reader’s two cents:I found the interview with Shawn McCreesh very interesting. Once again, a subject that I had no interest in turned out to be fascinating.I have children around that same age who have dabbled in drugs. From my experience, this gets down to bad parenting. Leaving prescription drugs where they can be stolen. Being unaware that your medication is missing. Your children becoming addicts without you knowing. Another reader lends his expertise to clarify a point about drug treatment meds:Great conversation with Shawn McCreesh, thanks for doing it. I’m a psychiatrist with significant experience treating substance abuse (though not that much treating opioid addiction). Shawn mentions that Suboxone may be even worse than other opioids, and describes his friends having a very bad reaction. However, Suboxone (really the buprenorphine ingredient in Suboxone) is a “partial agonist”, meaning it binds to the opioid receptors very tightly, but does not stimulate them very strongly. This leads to a ceiling effect where once all the receptors are bound, more Suboxone doesn’t make one any more high, and it is extremely hard to overdose on Suboxone. Other opioids bind less tightly, but stimulate the receptor more strongly, so the more one has in his system the more intoxicated/overdosed one gets. What this also means is if one already has other opioids in the body, Suboxone will kick them off the opioid receptors and that person will go into rapid opioid withdrawal, which is I think what happened to his friends.People can still abuse and get addicted to Suboxone, and it can be very hard to discontinue as well so it is often used for long-term maintenance. But it is much safer than other opioids, and people can live normal lives for decades taking this once per day in the morning to block other opioid cravings and abuse. Basically all addiction specialists think it should be much more widely available.Switching gears, this next reader offers her expertise on our immigration episode with Nick Miroff:I love your stuff, but I can’t help but notice that your immigration conclusions fail to grapple with a huge empirical piece — which I report on these days from Mexico/Central America: the reality of war-zone-levels of insecurity on the ground here (not everywhere, but in vast swathes of territory). The discussion up north centers largely on the narrative that most asylum-seekers are mainly cheating economic migrants. I listened to your recent podcast and read your essay on immigration, and while deeply insightful on the US border and the view from Washington et al, they totally failed to acknowledge:1) the clear and present dangers in Mexico to Central Americans. It wasn’t just squalid camps in Mexico that they were returned to — these are parts of Mexico that are so dangerous that most Mexicans avoid them, and you rarely read about that because Mexican journalists who write about those parts tend to be brutally murdered or disappeared and few other journalists take a plane or walk over the bridges of the Rio Grande to see for themselves.2) the expansion of asylum definitions in recent years to encompass the reality that, say, gang control in parts of the Northern Triangle is so extensive, and the corruption or failures of the security services such a known quantity, that civilians in large parts of the country are as good as “persecuted” or harmed by their de facto rulers. It’s not just city-based crime. It’s epidemic violence, compounded by impunity and levels of corruption and complicity all up and down the political and security chains of command at a degree that is hard for Americans or Europeans to fathom.3) It’s hard not to include in that argument the consequences of direct US meddling in causing much of the harm that laid foundations for state failures in the region today, a well-documented history that disappears into the vast oubliette of US self-knowledge.So aside from the inherent absurdities of Trump era policies — including destroying all the effective on-ground USAID and State Department-funded highly targeted, anti-violence and anti-corruption programs the Obama administration had started in Central America to tangibly improve conditions at home so fewer people would leave; or forcing genuine asylum-seekers to seek asylum in “third countries” as crazily dangerous and incapable of offering safety — I’d argue that places an onus on US policy to better adapt to the migrants arriving from down south than those claiming refuge from places like Sudan or Congo. I say this as a foreign correspondent who is deeply immersed in reporting on reality from the ground — weeks in Congo, years in junta-ruled Myanmar, and now here in Mexico/Central America (lately with Reuters, now with a book and some long form-in-progress on the brokenness of Honduras). Viz. on the realities of Honduras, here’s my most recent piece, and here are a couple pieces on the dangers of the Return to Mexico program.I may well be under-estimating the awfulness of the conditions in parts of Central America, and I favor the kind of aid we provided under Obama. But if a criterion for asylum is living in lawless, violent places, then we are going to be getting a whole lot more migration — which, in turn, reduces pressure for failing governments to do better. Another reader looks back at the trans/detrans episode with Buck and Helena:Buck Angel is so refreshing. I appreciate that he is using his trans privilege to criticize current trans activism. What stood out in Helena’s story is how casually she was given testosterone. My son started testosterone treatments for delayed puberty and there was nothing casual about it: blood tests, bone age scans, a pituitary MRI, a thyroid ultrasound … we are on a first name basis with security at the children’s hospital. Our endocrinologist (who coordinated with our pediatrician) has been monitoring my son for several years and it still took three months between when she recommended testosterone and when my son had the first shot. She’s called twice to remind me she has to see him in person before the second shot (not a call from her receptionist, but the doctor herself). And my son was born a biological male, who should at this point have large quantities of testosterone in his system already. So it’s crazy that a biological female can get a same-day testosterone shot.This is my worry: that medicine and activism have become too entwined, and that false diagnoses and bad treatment will come back to haunt us. Lastly, a trans reader tackles my latest essay on the subject:I am writing to express some concerns about your call for compromise and a truce in the trans wars. I actually support both of those things but I find some of the compromise proposals for trans-identified children and adolescents problematic. (By way of full disclosure, I am a trans woman, who is currently transitioning late in life.) There is no recognition of the simple fact that a trans person going through the physical development of their birth sex’s puberty is a devastating experience to them. It is not delaying a decision until adulthood. It is making a decision in adolescence. Indeed, language like “disfigurement,” while hyperbolic, is not far from the mark. Trans people will suffer from going through it and struggle mightily as adults to undo as much of the damage as possible.No one could deny that this involves making significant decisions at an early stage of life, but deferring them carries its own set of harms, and sadly, crystal balls are not available. In my opinion, the compromise solution is puberty blockers. It allows more significant medical treatment to be deferred to a later point without the damage of development in puberty.By all means, psychological counseling should be a part of this process. Standards should be established, however, to strip agendas or preconceptions from such therapy. Therapists should accept transitioning as an acceptable and supported outcome, just as they should accept a decision to not transition. Conversion therapy should have no role.I would also challenge your suggestion of requiring the consent of both parents. A deeply conservative parent should not weld veto power over the child, the other parent, the counselors and medical professionals involved.Admittedly, this is a difficult issue. It involves areas of human development and personality that are not well understood. Is there an innate and immutably sense of gender that forms early in life? My experience suggests the answer is yes, but that is admittedly not dispositive. The trans experience challenges the long-standing and widely understood ontology of gender, and it forces an examination of the extent to which gender and gender roles are socially constructed. These are all hard questions that we are groping to answer as society continues to involve. I obviously have a vested personal interest in them, but I would hope all interested parties would have as the ultimate goal happy, well-adjusted members of a harmonious, just society.Thanks for listening.You’re welcome. Our in-tray is always open: 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

Shawn is a first-generation college grad working at the New York Times and just penned a popular op-ed on his own experience growing up in a culture of opioids in suburban Philly. A more detailed version of his story was published last summer in Liberties. It’s a moving account of a Millennial tragedy.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app” — which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of my conversation with Shawn — on how teen parties became a boring den of zombies; and on how the good intentions of Big Pharma took a reckless deadly turn — head over to our YouTube page.Meanwhile, many readers are responding to last week’s trans/detrans episode with Buck Angel and Helena Kerschner:I thought it was terrific! Buck is a character and Helena is warm and precocious. I had not heard of either of them beforehand, so I nearly skipped the episode. But after I began listening, I quickly appreciated their personalities; they are both open, non-dogmatic, friendly and cheerful. By the end of your discussion, I found myself really rooting for Helena and Buck. It is wonderful that they appear to be thriving despite the difficulties they’ve faced.Another reader was drawn to Buck in particular:Thanks for a particularly good Dishcast! I’m pretty damn close to a Kinsey six or whatever; I may admire women as beautiful and impressive humans, but they do NOTHING for me sexually. I like GUYS: the hairiness, the attitude, the pheromones, the works. Someone like Buck Angel DOES just resonate as a “guy” — the secondary characteristics and attitude matter a lot more than external genitalia. So I guess that’s where I differ from you: the dick, per se, does not make the man — attitude and presentation are far more important.  The problem I’ve run into has been that some super-cute trans otter-or-bear men who appeal immensely on visual/“GUY” terms, will then, almost immediately, if not preemptively, throw up a VERY hostile separatist-lesbian wall of critical theory about “I’m not interested if you’re just objectifying me/I’m not your experiment.” If objectification is oppression, then gay men are all dirty pigs! As a 34-years-out gay man, if someone is purporting to BE a gay man, well, isn’t objectification the whole bloody point?! All my 40-50-60ish cis-male gay pals are ALL about the friendly/brotherly gropey-fun objectification. It makes us all feel seen and appreciated in a low key kind of way.Needless to say, I’ve had little luck with the FTM community, at least the young ‘uns. But it’s the antithesis of truth to say that’s because I’m Transphobic.On the other hand, I do get it: That kind of gropey-fun attitude for either straight/cis women or, apparently, for anyone whose youngest formative years were as equipped with female organs and hormones, is problematic, to say the least. And I’m glad you kinda pointed that out: There is a BIG biological divergence here.All of this just makes me REALLY appreciate a guy like Buck, who’s clearly a guy we would all just like to hang out with, and fool around with, as one of the guys. He did it utterly by himself so long ago, not in any Boomer-parent-coddled cocoon or with any internet echo chambers of satirically Orwellian social theory. He’s just … a GUY.Next up, a cis woman brings to bear her experience with hormone therapy:I had stage III ovarian cancer at age 33 and now don’t have ovaries and have been on hormone replacement for the past seven years. If a trans person told me they had gotten surgery or taken hormones, I would support them because I don’t think it’s my place to tell another adult what to do. However, if they asked my opinion on whether to get surgery or take hormones, my answer would be absolutely not.I know that some people might benefit from hormone treatment, as I do. But I know better than anyone the complexity of dealing with hormone changes. And when it comes to elective surgery, that’s just about the dumbest thing a person could ever do. Celebrating the fact that children are doing this is insanity.Over the years, I’ve found myself  wandering into conversations where people get very angry at me for sharing my opinions. For example, my brother flipped out on me for saying that I think many of these young people would benefit from not having medical interventions and working toward accepting themselves as they are, however they happen to be, even if this isn’t their preferred gender. Yes, they might feel they “are” another gender, but isn’t it an even higher plane of being to just accept whatever you are and try to be healthy? I still feel like a woman even though my female organs have been removed and I have no natural estrogen/progesterone and went into menopause as a young adult, then back out of menopause on hormone treatment. Losing those hormones didn’t change who I am. It did, however, make me appreciate being healthy and being sane. A hormone upheaval makes you feel neither of these things. I take hormone treatment now (as small of doses as possible) to try to reduce the physical symptoms of menopause. I look at parents championing their children’s needless surgeries and experimental hormone treatments in disbelief.Another incident that gave me pause: A colleague had her husband suddenly tell her he was trans and that he was leaving her. Everyone in the community, including at their children’s school, was applauding him for his choice. I would see her at work walking around sadly, like a ghost, no one caring about her. I remarked to someone, “Why is he cheered for leaving his family, but a straight man would be criticized for this? Why is being trans in this special category where you can’t criticize any action a trans person takes?” At the time, I had been married for six months. I said, “Would you applaud my husband if he’d announced today that actually he is trans and he’s leaving me?” They looked momentarily conflicted and then remembered to double-down on their stupid ideology and told me yes, and got still more agitated. Then I got the lecture on how he would be getting to be his “real self”, so I should be happy for him.I fully support anyone doing what is best for them, but does being one gender or another need to define your very existence? Does it belong above every other priority and every other consideration? As someone who has faced cancer and infertility as a young woman, I would say not. I have always wanted to have children. Therefore, I guess you could say that the “real me” is someone who is fertile. But I’m not. The funny thing is, accepting things as they are is a wonderful thing and can be very freeing. After my cancer, I found my husband and this year we had a son. Yes, my baby wasn’t created the natural way, but I wouldn’t change anything now and I accept the way my life has gone. My body is scarred; I have permanent nerve damage; I have no lymph nodes in my torso; my hormone treatments carry unknown risks; and I think I might be getting osteoporosis — and I’m just 41 years old. The “real me” that I feel I am inside wouldn’t have any of these problems. I believe I can say I know what it’s like to feel your body should be different. But yet, cancer has taken that away and I am still completely me, if I’m willing to accept myself.Thank you so much for the Dish. I recently discovered it and am so grateful to you for your work. As my husband says, “We expected the dogma to come from the right, but now it’s coming from the left.” It sometimes feels like everyone has gone crazy, and you have made me feel so much less alone!Here’s a dissent from a “long-time reader since your blog was purple”:I’m a middle-aged bisexual male married to a middle-aged trans woman. We’ve been together for 19 years and I was her boyfriend even before she transitioned (being bisexual comes in handy that way).First I’d like to say that if you’re going to have these big league discussions about trans people, you really should be better informed about all trans adjacent topics. You owe it to your audience to read all the major trans studies and know them by name, talk with endocrinologists, talk to SRS surgeons, understand all about intersex conditions, the SRY gene, the sex organ homologies, the stages of body and mind sex differentiation, and know trans pharmacology and youth impact inside and out. You should know more about these things than a nerdy 17-year-old trans girl with a dozen browser tabs open every night, but the reality is that you don’t. You’re going to tell me you’re trying, but you’re not trying hard enough. (I almost unsubbed forever after the American College of Pediatricians / American Academy of Pediatricians screwup.) Maybe your audience can’t tell that you’re phoning it in, but I can — which pains me to say about someone who’s often moved me to tears about the nuances of the gay experience. You also dug into ALL the messy specific details around abortion, as well as the Arab Spring, on your blog. Do it again for trans people if you’re going to keep doing this.I won’t b******t you: youth trans healthcare is a zero-sum harm reduction/application game. Either you cause some harm to the gay-but-confused-not-trans kid by mistakenly delaying their puberty until 16 and then HRT, or you cause harm to the actually-trans-girl by forcing her to endure permanent masculinizing features (hands, feet, height, frame, hips...) that may cause her to be permanently clocked (and often discriminated against) as a trans woman for the rest of her life. This zero sum is undeniable. The healthcare industry and the WPATH SOC 7 generally has a high bar for determining fitness but obviously lax (and often low-income) clinics with good intentions can pave the road to hell. You go to war against the healthcare system you have, as Rumsfeld never said. The vectors of harm are not the same for MTF vs FTM kids (and those clinically mistaken for them). It may even be the case that the solutions and risks and age determinations for MTF vs FTM should be different. Only the data and the analysis can tell you that. I’ll bring up one point you haven’t touched on, that you should: You can’t keep young trans people from hormones. You act as if many corners of the internet like this one don’t exist: https://www.reddit.com/r/TransDIY. You don’t even need pre-paid debit cards anymore, since many sites that deliver meds will take crypto as payment.The worst case: ubiquitous birth control pills. One trip to Planned Parenthood with a cis girl friend and you have them. This is the standard way that trans women with no resources in poorer parts of the world feminize themselves, in Thailand (katoey), India (hijra/kinnar), Indonesia (waria), Mexico (muxe), etc.Does birth control (ethinylestradiol) have major blood clot health risks if you’re not suppressing T? Yes. Will the desperate-to-transition people give a f**k? Not really. Does it work? So/So, but when you’re a trans girl who hates that you look like a “brick”, it works wonders for taking the edge of dysphoria. Risks be damned. My wife took birth control pills during puberty, because she was trans, poor and desperate, and it was a different time. She’s glad she did. I wish she didn’t have to.As always, I’m grateful for my reader’s insights. I have to say, though, that his conditions for even entering a public debate on a tricky subject — you need to have read everything in the literature cold before you even dare to write a word — is unrealistic in a democracy. We all get to have a say. We can’t all be masters of every subject. And in my defense, I think we’ve covered a huge range of issues connected to the trans debate, both on Substack and the old Dish, before the topic was trendy — and I’m committed to doing more. And I’m always open to readers’ sharing their knowledge and opinions.And one of the first things that reader suggests I do, “talk with endocrinologists”, is happening soon: Carole Hooven, who teaches behavioral endocrinology at Harvard, has agreed to join the Dishcast. And regarding “all about intersex conditions”, we have Alice Dreger on our short list. Julie Bindel is recording next week. Thanks for all the guest recommendations so far — including Natalie Wynn and Justin Vivian Bond — and please keep them coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.Lastly, a reader makes a semantic point:When it comes to your “Trans Proposal In The Trans Wars,” I respectfully suggest you use “reasonable accommodation” rather than “compromise”? It sounds better.When I referred to “the trans question” on Twitter, many people claimed I was comparing it to “the Jewish question” and thus the Final Solution. Oy. For the record, I constantly referred to “the gay question” in all the years I pushed for and debated marriage equality. 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

Buck Angel was a pioneering porn star — the only trans man to ever win Transsexual Performer of the Year at the AVN Awards — and today he’s a sex educator, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur. Helena Kerschner is a 22-year-old woman who lived as a man on hormone therapy for several years before detransitioning. Buck’s transition saved his life, while Helena’s transition was a bit of a calamity, but they share a resistance to the dogma of the trans activist community and speak forcefully and elegantly against it.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. To hear four excerpts from my conversation with Buck and Helena — on the cult-like behavior of many trans activists; on the risks of puberty blockers; on the profound effects of testosterone; on how the hormone caused Buck, a former lesbian, to become attracted to men for the first time — head over to our YouTube page.This episode is part of an ongoing Dishcast series on the lives of transgender people and the debates surrounding one of the most polarizing subjects of today, especially when it comes to kids transitioning. Our previous episodes welcomed two happily transitioned and brilliant women, Dana Beyer and Mara Keisling, both of whom pushed back against my views, with followup debate led by readers here and here. More to come. I have tried to get today’s more typical trans activists on the show, but they won’t respond to my emails. If you know a trans person both committed to the full-on trans position and willing to enter dialogue with a critic, please get in touch: dish@andrewsullivan.com.Here are some pieces we mentioned in this week’s conversation:* Helena’s tweeted photos showing her social worker assessment. “This took less than 30 min and cleared me to take testosterone w/ no blood work or further assessment,” she writes. She also points to “Tweets with my medical records showing that I was prescribed testosterone (at an unusually high dose) with no blood work on the first visit.”* “Gender identity is hard but jumping to medical solutions is worse,” an Economic piece written by Carey Callahan, a detrans woman, about her experience working at a clinic in California (not Chicago, as Helena put it)* A 9-year-old trans kid asking Elizabeth Warren a question at a televised town hall (not a 6 year old, as I mistakenly said)* “When Sons Become Daughters, Part III: Parents of Transitioning Boys Speak Out on Their Own Suffering,” the latest in an ongoing series by Quillette.* “The He Hormone”, my 2000 NYT Magazine piece on testosteroneMentioned in the main Dish today, here’s the full story from the reader who “recently lost my 21-year-old mentally ill, heroin-addicted, trans nephew whom I raised during his teen years”: As a young girl, my niece literally had no friends and couldn’t find her way in the world. Incredibly smart, beautiful, and funny, she was a lost soul and couldn’t make sense of her life. There was so much mental illness in her family, including her parents. In high school, she founded the Equality Alliance Club and became fascinated by the trans kids. Pretty soon, I found boy’s underwear in her laundry. We had a talk and I got her in therapy. From there, things moved way too fast and before I knew it, her mom okayed testosterone treatment — like six months into the process. It just didn’t fit the kid I knew. And he never found happiness and ended up addicted and homeless.I appreciate your thoughtful analysis of this important issue. Anything under the age of 18 needs to be dealt with slowly and carefully and definitely with second opinions.From another parental figure:Thank you so much for “A Truce Proposal in the Trans War.” As the parent of a 20 year old who identifies as trans male, I can say that so much of your piece perfectly resonates with my observations — I may just reference it directly when asked, “What do you think?”  For me, the trans identity, or any feelings of non-alignment with externally defined gender designations, has never been an issue. My wife and I adore our son, as he is, and support him any way we can, no strings attached. We are fully supportive of him constructing his own life, defined as he wishes. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we are required to agree with every one of his decisions. Because of the ideological forces you describe in your article, our thoughts on gender issues are not requested or welcomed. We are always under threat of being lumped in with people who are cruel or indifferent in the type of catch-all thinking you describe — either believe it all or be ostracized to the sideline. Our son is brilliant (quite literally) and has always been extremely independent. However, no amount of raw intelligence or independence can substitute for the wisdom of age and, importantly, the final maturation of the brain. This latter idea — brain maturation — is where I have a minor dissent from your piece.You laudably attempt to distinguish between the experiments we perform on children and those that adults choose to perform on themselves. You follow the societally determined age of adulthood as being the critical line. However, you are also attempting to ground your thinking in real science, and I suspect you have only acquiesced to 18 for convenience. The age of 18 is far from being a useful determinant of adulthood or final maturation. In fact, current research suggests that the human brain finishes maturing somewhere around 25 years old. (Here’s just one popular article.)What’s still happening between the ages of 18 and 25? Critically, it’s the development of the prefrontal cortex which regulates behaviors related to risk and long-term planning, to name two key areas. Those seem sort of important here.So I am primarily concerned with medical interventions, such as hormone therapy and permanent alterations (e.g., breast removal), made prior to final maturation of the brain — and 18 has no actual basis in science. Cultures vary in where they draw these lines, while the biology couldn’t care less.I do not have the expertise to define the “right” age, nor do I even feel like there is a perfect age for all individuals. If we admit that there are both genuine trans and trans curious individuals (even that objectively true statement is begging for a fight), and we acknowledge our extreme ignorance about the long-term impacts of some procedures, isn’t genuine caution warranted here? Don’t we have an adult responsibility to retain some stake in the conversation after our child suddenly and instantly becomes an adult on their 18th birthday?As it stands, my wife and I chose not to fight or attempt to interfere in our “adult” (now 20) child’s health decisions. We were essentially hostages in this non-negotiation, with only two choices: maintain a relationship or not. So instead of being partners in our kid’s heath-care choices, we are sideline observers who can’t help think that one day a host of negative health repercussions will emerge and our son will rightfully ask, “Where the f**k were you?” Good question.Yet another parent is very relunctant to allow their child to seek hormone therapy or more:I am a mid-40s, straight, white, Christian, conservative male with a wife and two children. However, I like to think of myself as fairly open minded and the rest of my extended family would tell you that I’m over-the-edge liberal.My oldest child, a 15 year old who was born female, recently told us that they were self-harming and needed help. We immediately sought crisis intervention, therapy, and psychiatry.  During therapy they let us know that they were trans. They also let us know that their boyfriend was cis female and in the process of transitioning.My wife and I have known our child their entire life and we know them well enough to know they can’t decide whether or not they like hot dogs (true story, it switches every couple months). We know that there is a strong possibility that this is due to influence from a group of friends who all identify as trans but have accepted our child into their circle. We don’t know if our child is truly trans or not, but we do know they are not in a good place to make life-altering decisions. Of course, the counterargument is that if we allow hormone therapy, the depression may go away. It could — or it could get worse. I often wonder if I am being overly Christian conservative with all this, even though we have allowed the name change, clothing style change, hair change, etc.  In years to come, we will know whether or not we have made the correct decision. It may be that our child is truly trans and we have delayed their happiness a few years and will be hated because of it or it may go the other way. Either way we will always love our child and are doing our very best to parent from a position of live and to teach them that no matter what, love others and everything else will work out.Another reader suggests that waiting until early adulthood to transition better enables certain trans people to still have children:I am a post-op transwoman in a second marriage to a woman, and also a parent and grandparent. (I also have a partially completed Master of Research with a focus of transgender health care.) So the question of fertility for trans people has a personal resonance for me because I cannot imagine myself not being a parent. I cannot imagine needing to make a choice between transition and having children, when in my mid twenties and even later. But then I am an older transitioner and an early Boomer, so there was nothing available in the airwaves or in popular print media in the ‘60s about gender identity or transitioning.This next reader also touches on the topic of fertility and makes several other interesting points:Many people ignore a huge elephant in the room as to why some trans people are unable to pass. It isn’t simply because they aren’t allowed to transition early enough; it’s that gender dysphoria, especially for many trans women, doesn’t appear until sometime around puberty when changes are already happening. This is in the DSM — the distinction is drawn between early onset and late onset gender dysphoria, since different people experience dysphoria for different reasons. Trans activists hate this theory, because apparently the characteristics of early onset dysphoria in children assigned male at birth correlates strongly with other kids who are not trans and grow up to be cis gay males, whereas the characteristics of late onset dysphoria in teens assigned male at birth correlates strongly with heterosexual cis men who have an erotic or romantic cross-dressing fantasy. The explosive nature of that “two types” model, and especially the second type, is what led to the harassment of scientists by trans activists that was documented in Alice Dreger’s book, Galileo’s Middle Finger.Accordingly, there isn’t actually any solution where if we “catch” gender dysphoria early enough, everyone is going to be able to transition before puberty and pass. In fact, many people don’t get dysphoria until puberty and it doesn't reach the point when they want to transition until far later in life, when the dysphoria becomes so intense that they decide they need to become the woman that they love so much and fantasize about. In addition to the DSM, you can find the data backing up these claims in the scholarship of Ray Blanchard, Michael Bailey, Debra Soh, and others.The folks who are driving this activist train are mostly late onset gender dysphoria trans women. They are people who (1) identify as women and (2) are themselves unable to bear children. The fact that these people have a very different life story than the teens they are advocating for is a real problem. They are speaking for teenage trans boys who have the capability to bear or breastfeed children and who might very much regret such a sacrifice later in life. If you take reproductive ability away from someone who later wants to bear a child, that has to be traumatic. You think Keira Bell isn’t suffering trauma?When I got a vasectomy, at age 25, I was required to fill out all sorts of forms by the HMO and assure several doctors that I was making an intelligent decision and understood I was giving up my ability to have children. And that’s despite the fact that vasectomies are often reversible!None of that is an argument against medical transition for people who really need it. But it underscores how folks are demanding that teenagers be able to rush into medical transitions that have serious long-term consequences of the sort that doctors traditionally felt required a great deal of guidance even when the patients were adults.Also, I am so sick of the talking point that we don’t debate or compromise people’s human rights. The Civil Rights statutes of the 1960s were filled with compromises — they didn’t apply to the smallest businesses, for instance. Thurgood Marshall NEVER said “I don’t have to debate my human rights.” He did it, all the time, for decades.This isn’t because we’re all a bunch of racists and transphobes. It’s because (1) you have to convince people who don’t agree with you or have doubts; and (2) there are some competing interests involved. There were even competing interests involved in race discrimination — we ultimately, as a society, decided that the freedom to refuse to associate with Blacks had to yield. But the argument was made, and it was defeated on its merits. Sex discrimination laws had to make accommodations for single-sex schools. Masterpiece Cakeshop doesn’t have to bake wedding cakes for gay couples because of the owner’s religious beliefs. We balance these interests.This position of “I don’t have to debate or negotiate” is just a convenient excuse to never have to deal with dissent. And I would argue that it, rather than scientists who study ROGD or pundits like you who try to seek compromises, is a much bigger threat to trans rights. Because if trans activists never debate or negotiate, you get more transphobic legislation like the bathroom bills and sports bills we’ve been seeing. There’s no way any movement can get everything it wants without hearing contrary views and persuading people and, yes, sometimes compromising. The alternative isn’t a clean victory — it’s defeat.Our in-tray is always open for more debate and dialogue and personal stories: 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

Nick is the supremely talented reporter at the Washington Post covering immigration and DHS, and before that he was a foreign correspondent based in Mexico City and Havana. We tried to break down what is actually happening on the Southern border, and how likely it is to get exponentially worse.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. To hear three excerpts from my conversation with Nick — on how the U.S. got to “kids in cages” under Trump; on the cruelty of letting in migrants without any support; and how basically no one who enters the U.S. illegally gets deported — head over to our YouTube page. Here is the full long dissent from our main post today:I think you’re becoming a curmudgeon. In your episode with Emily Yoffe and your post on “queer”, you negate any possibility of conceiving of a group of people who are either L, or G, or B, or T, or any of the other sometimes-associated letters. The notion that this group is nonexistent is silly. Here are the characteristics common to the people you want to say have nothing in common:* We don’t conform to the expectations today’s culture has for persons of our gender, whatever that may be. Men aren’t supposed to be attracted to men. Women aren’t supposed to be attracted to women. No one is supposed to be attracted to more than one gender. Everyone is supposed to feel like the gender of their biological sex. I first heard this described as “gender-nonconformity” by — guess who? — a gay man. * Because of the above, or for other reasons, we experience mental and emotional issues at higher rates than the general population. Maybe we’ve experienced homophobia by others. Worse, most of us have experienced homophobia or transphobia from ourselves. * Our childhoods were generally marked by stresses due to our nonconformity that other children didn’t experience. * Many of us have to make a life’s work of reaffirming our own worth in spite of the fact that we’re different from most of the culture. * We can each potentially find support from other non-conforming individuals, even if they are different from the general culture in different ways than we are. I could think of others, but that’s enough for now. If a group can be said to be a collection of individuals that share common characteristics, of course there’s a group here. So there must be a word of some kind for it. Sure, raise the alarm against CRT if you want. Fine. Personally, I think this also speaks to your own experience more than logic. You (understandably) like the idea of the community that gay men represent to you, so don’t muddy the waters by broadening the group. It’s meant something to you to have that community. But this is both/and. It’s true that the community of gay men, or even the individual experience of gay men, is not the same as other communities. I know that as a bisexual man. Polls indicate that the numbers of bisexuals is higher than the numbers of either lesbians or gay men. And we commonly report that we feel both that we are like and unlike lesbians and gay men. That’s been my experience—gay/not-gay, but most certainly not straight.I do agree with you that straight people should not identify with groups they don’t belong in. It’s trendy to be “queer,” but it’s insincere signaling. But what I’d like to know, Andrew, is what word you’d allow me to use to describe broadly the group I belong in, beyond just bisexual (a word that carries an awful lot of stigma)? I used to say “LGBT” or “LGBTQ,” but now I’m to understand that those aren’t available for use. And God forbid I call myself “queer.” Learning from other “rainbow people” has helped me learn about myself. Being supported by them, and supporting them, has helped me heal. So I do identify as [Andrew-approved word]. Can you please help me out here? This is a great question. I’ll think some more on it, but here’s my instant thought. Many kids feel isolated from their peers because they don’t quite fit in with crude gender stereotypes — and that includes many more straight than gay kids. Feelings of lack of self-worth are universal. Non-conformity is so vast a grouping you could fit countless non-gay and non-trans people in it. And feeling you are the opposite sex is completely different than being comfortable with your sex and gender and seeking similar. When persecution was intense, there was a reason to group similarly challenged groups. I’m not so sure that endures. The vast differences between gay and lesbian culture — vive la difference — are greater than those between men and gay men or between women and lesbians. Why do we need a collective noun at all? After listening to our episode with Emily Yoffe, a reader makes a provocative argument:The Title IX guidelines for sexual harassment use the phrase “unwelcome conduct”. What to make of this? Each victim may have her own idea of what is “unwelcome”, but on the whole it distinguishes the right sort of people from the wrong sort, creating yet another way to punish members of the unfavored group. This is not just the well-known historically persecuted groups — how many black men were lynched for showing “unwanted advances”? — but men who are undesirable in other ways as well: too short, too fat, too ugly, socially inept.The world is already tilted against you if you’re unattractive. You’re less likely to get economic opportunities and more likely to be blamed or accused of wrongdoing. Now with “unwelcome conduct”, the discrimination is written explicitly into the rules. After all, who is unwelcome? If popular handsome guy says “Wow, you look great in that sweater”, that’s a compliment, but if ugly autistic guy says the same thing, he’s a creep. Which one is guilty of sexual harassment?This is what college women want: They want icky guys to not talk to them. This tool is helping them achieve that, so in that sense the system is working. We’ve codified “she’s out of your league”.Another reader conveys the transcendence he has felt as an atheist:The podcast has been a welcome addition to an already crowded slate of content providers. E.g., from where else in the US could I have gotten that perspective on Boris Johnson? Or a difficult but seemingly honest take on campus due process? Kudos.Your latest column on religion, though, provoked more than just the usual mix of agreements and dissents. Simply put, I think atheism can offer people much of what you find in religion — and I say this as a former Catholic.When I was about 6, I would scrawl out homilies and deliver them from the hearth in my parents’ living room, my junior-sized bathrobe belt draped around my neck as a priestly stole … the epic stories of the Bible, the grandeur of the shared ritual, the togetherness of the enterprise. I’m not sure what drew me to the church so strongly, but I was quite enamored with it. And despite the presence of an eventually outed pedophile in my parish, I never saw even a moment of ugliness in my family’s first church.A half-dozen years later, as my Confirmation neared, my perspective differed: I couldn’t shake the nagging worry that for all my sense of wonderment, I was being required to give away something precious. In eighth grade, I was only beginning to realize the power of reading, inquiry, and criticism; and the prescribed nature of Catholicism suddenly felt stifling.When my mom asked who I might want as a Confirmation sponsor, I realized I couldn’t co-opt other people into what had become a charade. The Bible’s interwoven mix of genuine lessons and absurd fairy tales became quaint and laughable. True revelation came from history books, science labs, and even arguing with friends around the lunch table. Atheism brought me a freedom and encouragement to explore. Not only was there no longer a specified viewpoint or answer, it seemed clear there are usually multiple viewpoints and possibly no answers. Any examined life — one that is not necessarily or merely atheistic but intellectually vibrant — is content with a lack of clarity. Much as your Christian faith seems to provide a respite from exigence of daily struggles, so too does the obviousness that many answers won’t come in my lifetime — but that they are nonetheless there, eventually revealed by a mix of inquiry and some good luck.Surely you know that for every Andrew Sullivan who, after reciting the Lord’s Prayer, extols the virtues of the Enlightenment, there are plenty of Christians staring through the altar with dead eyes, executing a series of programmatic religious commands. And for every curious, well-travelled, unorthodox Christopher Hitchens, whom you evoked, there are legions of atheists whose dogma is mined from reflexive cynicism and bad sociology books cycling through the Times best-seller list.You live an examined life, as did Hitchens. Ostensibly, then, you two had far more in common with one another than either of you might have with a Catholic or atheist plucked from a random street corner. Indeed, what percentage of remaining American Christians share your willingness to separate your intellectual life from your spiritual life rather than make the former subservient to the latter?When you say, “I couldn’t say exactly how this counter-rational aspect of my life affects the rest of me, but it definitely stabilizes things,” I deeply hope all people find that same balance. Several friends from my Catholic days continue to find it in their faiths, and I’m glad it’s available to them to pray together when a congregant is ill or to bring a general sense of order to this year’s chaos.Organized religions, however, are difficult to make compatible with pluralism and inquiry, and those are also values we desperately need. Indeed, I think the stabilizing benefits religion brings you personally only extend to society if its members are also willing to live life by the liberal values you also espouse: engagement with differing views, respectful disagreement, open inquiry, respect for empiricism, admitting when one is demonstrably wrong, understanding one’s own ignorance, et cetera. Or put another way, to show wisdom.Speaking on the coalescing of people into political cults, you write, “[These pseudo-religions] lack the one thing that endures in religious practice: something transcendent that makes the failure in our lives redemptive, and sees politics merely as the necessary art of attending to the imperfect.” I know you were not putting atheism and religion in direct contrast, but to my mind, an atheist living an examined life needs a respect for a scientific approach, a step on an imperfect quest toward enlightenment that will stretch far beyond our lifetimes. That sounds quite a bit like what you see in religious practice. One can find transcendence and mystery to remind us of the cosmic insignificance of an average day all around us: In the pages of the Bible, sure, but also in the pages of A Brief History of Time.Perhaps you’re right that we’ll miss religion. But I’m hopeful that many of your non-religious virtues (and Hitchens’) can bring us the same humility and wisdom you see in religion.I’m deeply grateful for this perspective, and respect it intensely. Since Hitch has joined the great Flying Spaghetti Monster in the sky, a reader suggests another atheist for the Dishcast: I’m not sure if this is realistic, but given the relationship over the years between you and Bill Maher, I think there are a series of topics where the two of you are likely to push at each other in a lively manner that would challenge both of you — and be quite enlightening for listeners. As someone who listens to both of you, trusts your independent thought, and appreciates that I will often disagree with you quite strongly, I think exploring the areas where you disagree in a format that is longer than the snippets that his show permits would be interesting. I empathize with both of your views on religion — with him, in the sense of the purposeful suspension of rational thought being at the root of much human harm; with you, in the sense that the lack of direction from a moral compass for people has devolved at times into political fervor that is just as bad as the worst of religion, except without the moral component. There’s probably more agreement than disagreement, but I think you could challenge each other.But regardless, I think that insofar as you’ve gotten some feedback to interrupt less or talk a little bit less, one alternative way of addressing that is to invite someone like Bill on who may push back at you pretty hard on some things. It may not be his cup of tea, but it’s something that I know many mutual fans would cherish and want to hear more than just once.Another good guest — but I’m less sure of your connection here — would be Michael Lewis, who I similarly find to be a thoughtful but independent thinker.Michael is an old friend and that’s a fantastic suggestion. Bill? I imagine he’s pretty busy, but I take your point. I guess it can’t hurt to ask. 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

Emily has been the most fearless reporter on the fraught subject of sexual assault and due process on college campuses, first for Slate and then The Atlantic. She also wrote a hilarious book about a beagle, What the Dog Did.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or just below it you can click “Listen in podcast app” — which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. To listen to three excerpts from my conversation with Emily — on the Democrats’ selective defense of due process; on a culture of fear on the left; and on the need for journalists to be misfits and malcontents — head over to our YouTube page.A reader looks back to last week’s Dishcast:Loved the episode with Tim Shipman — not least because of the effortless switching of your attentions back and forth across the Pond. But only an hour?? I could have listened all afternoon ... Same for this reader:As someone whose grandparents emigrated to the US from Ireland, and one who has no interest in Brexit or Boris Johnson, I was surprised how much I enjoyed your podcast with Tim Shipman and in fact was disappointed it was shorter than your other podcasts. I would have liked to hear more from him, particularly his thoughts on Trump, wokeness, and the future of the US media.What was most refreshing was to hear a man whose success and competency as a newsman is based on his knowledge and experience rather than his intersectionality and his related “story”. I can’t imagine anyone having a political discussion like you two had with Maggie Haberman or Jim Acosta — or anyone in the US White House press corp. And Shipman’s gravitas and dignity stand in stark contrast to our young woke writers. Comparing Shipman’s thoughtfulness to Olivia Nuzzi’s profane snarky tone makes clear how young people in the media today — brought up on Twitter — have a long way to go to develop the type of world-view that will allow them to do the type of quality reporting Shipman does. The most important thing I got out of your discussion was how different Trump and Johnson are. Whatever else Johnson may be, he is obviously a bright, well-educated man — something you cannot say about Trump. You can see how Johnson survives to fight another day and Trump is banished to Mar-a-Lago. It also makes clear that if Trump was just a little smarter and less thin-skinned, we would be in his second term right now.A reader in Ireland found the episode wanting:Great piece with Tim, but I’m really surprised neither of you talked about the Irish Border. This became the thorniest issue in Brexit (because of the hard Brexiteers) and exposed Johnson not just as a liar (ask the DUP — no border in the Irish sea), but also as reckless when dealing with the Good Friday Agreement, the most successful piece of conflict resolution arguably anywhere in many years. I live one mile from the Border with Northern Ireland, so the issue was very real for me and many others on this island. Johnson is devoid of real principle, although he has buckets of charm, which makes him wholly untrustworthy and also, ironically, a real danger to the UK union, having left the European one. Anyway, very few British people “get” Ireland (North or South). But aren’t you, Andrew, Irish?Sorry for that omission. Yes, Boris lied. It’s what he does. And I don’t think he ever really thought through the Irish dimension of Brexit. Another reader remarks, “I really loved this episode, and I hope we get to learn more about non-American politics and personalities.” Always open to suggestions: dish@andrewsullivan.com. Many readers have been recommending Bryan Caplan:After reading your latest column on immigration (which was excellent as usual), I’m wondering if you’ve had a chance to read Caplan’s book Open Borders. It’s a fun and easy read, so I would recommend doing so if you haven’t. I think he makes a strong case for open borders and while I would not go as far as to endorse the position, he definitely nudged me in his direction.This reader recognizes Mickey’s total aversion to b******t:I was gratified to see Mickey Kaus on the podcast. You two were the first bloggers I followed way back when. Oddly, I was about to send a recommendation that you invite him when he magically appeared. Substack has fulfilled my subliminal wish. MK is one of the clearest social welfare policy thinkers around and is incapable of political posturing.I agree. And hilarious. Another reader digs deep into the issues he and I explored:I enjoyed listening to the podcast with Mickey Kaus. You were both so rational and fair that you didn’t piss me off as much as thought you might because I have strong feelings about “welfare”. For the past 25 years, I have worked as a mental health counselor for a community agency in the Cleveland area. All of my clients, most of them women (white, black, and Latino) are low income (or to use Mickey’s term, “on the dole”). I don’t know how many hundreds of people I have worked with over the years, but I have never met a Welfare Queen. Nobody “on the dole” lives comfortably, unless they are lucky enough to have extended family to add to their support, or are also involved in some illegal activity — but that’s not comfortable. If they don’t work, it is not because the government is giving them so much money that they don’t have to.Poverty is a trap that is very difficult, nearly impossible, to escape these days. Only “the fittest survive” and somehow work their way up to a living wage. Mickey and others say that statistics prove that Clinton’s Welfare Reform was a success, but I guess I just saw the people who didn’t succeed. I wonder how many former welfare recipients under Clinton earned a LIVING WAGE.From my perspective on the ground, the “doles” available to those who qualify are: food stamps, Ohio Medicaid (pays my salary!), Section 8 or public housing, reduced rates for utilities, and day care subsidies. You have to work. You can get an earned income tax credit once a year. Your income must be very low to qualify for any of these “benefits”, and it’s as time consuming and stressful as working a full-time job to maneuver the bureaucratic nightmare to quality. In the Cleveland area, the waiting lists to get housing assistance is about five years, and then you have to win in the housing lottery. The average low-rent apartment is $700 to $900 a month, which is very difficult to manage if you have a minimum wage job and are only earning about $1000 a month. If you get behind in rent, you get evicted, and this makes it so much harder to get another apartment unless you can find an unscrupulous landlord who will forgo the credit check, but will never make repairs.Food stamps are rarely enough, so you supplement at food banks. It takes months to get a day care voucher and you have to have a job before you can get one, so you better have child care while you are waiting for the voucher so you can keep the job that you need to get the voucher. Then there’s the problem of getting to work if you have a job. Public transportation in the greater Cleveland area is anything but convenient. I have clients who take several buses and over an hour to get to my office, even if they live only a few miles away. Most try to get cheap cars (usually with their tax refund), but they always have to pay many times what the car is worth because their credit is poor. When the cars die, which they inevitably do, they have to miss work and are likely to lose their job. Often, the car is repossessed before it dies because they can’t afford the ridiculous payments. If you lose your job, you have to start all over again. But your work record looks bad because you can’t keep a job very long. So it is harder to find a job. If you are a single mom with a couple of kids (and it is a rare single mom who has more than two kids, unlike the stereotype that they are having lots of kids so they can get more money “on the dole”), it is very unlikely you are getting any child support because the fathers aren’t faring any better. The men often have children with different mothers and there is no incentive for them to work because their income goes to these women “who are screwing them over.”      So the men work under the table if they can. Many of them have criminal records for minor crimes (drug offenses), which also makes getting employment more difficult. The good factory jobs with union wages for unskilled middle-class men that were plentiful during the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s began to go away in the ‘80s, and Cleveland became part of the Rust Belt. Now, as the Trump base knows well, “all the jobs went to China.”So now Biden’s Recovery Act is going to give families $350 or $250 a month per child with no strings attached. (For a year, anyway.) You may think that these people don’t deserve the help and we can’t afford it (unlike the “job creators” who “needed” tax cuts that were supposed to provide my clients with such great jobs that THEY wouldn’t need government assistance). Or you may think that the money will discourage them from working.  But I see it differently. With that money, maybe they CAN work and be more productive. Maybe they can use it to pay their rent so they don’t end up with their kids in a homeless shelter if they don’t have a supportive family. Maybe they will use it to make payments on a GOOD car that won’t die a month after they buy it. Maybe they will be able to keep a job if they have reliable transportation. Maybe they will use it for child care, or if they are lucky enough to live with a partner who has a “working class” (low paying usually) job, they won’t have to go to work, also, and can care for their young children themselves and give them a good start in life. Yes, some of my clients will blow the money on some immediate gratification luxury. But if you can meet your basic needs month after month, because you can add this child subsidy money to the inadequate amount that you have been able to earn through working your low-paying job, you can begin to understand how to use money more carefully. If you never have enough money and you are always robbing Peter to pay Paul, you can’t learn to spend it wisely.My impressions are “anecdotal,” a compilation of the same stories that I have heard over and over again for 25 years. Poverty keeps my clients and their children depressed, anxious, traumatized, more susceptible to substance abuse, violence, etc. Money would be far more useful than therapy in most cases. It’s about time we started valuing children more than corporations and the wealthy. I’m for any plan that will raise families out of poverty. We need to reform welfare reform. My work has taught me that nothing is black and white, people are extremely complicated. I am not a left-wing socialist, or a bleeding heart “privileged elite” white person trying to assuage my guilt. I have to be a realist. And I applaud Biden’s agenda that is helping the poor and middle class and I think they are doing it the right way.  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

Tim is simply the best political reporter in Britain. He’s their Bob Woodward, but he can also actually write. His two books, Fall Out, and All Out War, are indispensable to understanding the politics of Brexit. He knows the Westminster political class as well as anyone. In this episode, we talk about Boris Johnson’s astonishing luck and charm, as well as the Labour Party’s floundering. For three clips of our conversation — on the Tory leader’s knack for winning over the working class; on his and Brexit’s vindication over the vaccine; and on whether the monarchy might not survive the death of Her Majesty — pop over to our YouTube page. You can listen to the whole episode 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. If you want to understand how the politics of the UK helps us understand the politics of the US right now, have a listen. We had a blast.Looking back to last week’s episode on welfare and immigration in the US, a reader writes:I enjoyed your conversation with Mickey Kaus immensely. I realized I’ve never understood these generational shifts and counter-shifts in government policy emphasis, and that if that’s the case, the vast majority of voters don’t, either. I take issue with one comment, though. Biden has, in fact, harped so incessantly on the “dignity of work” that it invited blowback during his campaign. Do not confuse the activist position with Biden’s. He is the President, and I do not see his acceding to any assistance policy that doesn’t support work. My understanding of even the the child credits argument is that it supports day care, so the parent(s) can work!A sharper dissent comes from this reader:Can you just stop it with the “The Media is monolithically behind Biden” — it’s so lazy and obviously false. Is Fox News behind Biden? NY Post? Washington Examiner? National Review? Townhall.com? Sinclair? Washington Times? Wall Street Journal? Ann Coulter / Hannity in their talk shows? Or are they not part of the media?I get that you had a bad experience with NY Mag and you don’t like Charles Blow, but time to move on and look the world as it is — not some caricature.Over to immigration, another dissent:It’s such a fear-mongering narrative to spin immigration as a conspiracy by shadowy forces on the left to flood the country with non-white racial groups so as to destabilize the structures of white supremacy … you’re sounding like conspiracy theorist! What kind of American politician would invest so much in a strategy that won’t see a pay-off for 20+ years? The waiting list for green cards is backlogged decades, and that’s not even counting the waiting period for becoming a citizen after that. And you even admit that plenty of immigrants don’t automatically vote for one party over the other! This would be the most convoluted conspiracy ever. There are far more effective ways to grow the party than to be pro-immigration.It’s not a conspiracy. It’s out in the open. Almost every argument against mass immigration is instantly stigmatized as racist or “white supremacist.” White liberals have increasingly come to see non-white skin as a sign of moral worth, and opposition to mass or illegal immigration as de facto proof of racism. Another reader on immigration addresses an angle that could divide the left:To your point about there being two primary concerns with mass immigration (the traditional labor concerns Mickey spoke to, and the concerns about social cohesion that you and David Frum share), I would add a third (related) concern: environmental sustainability and quality of life.For the past 50 years, immigration policy has driven the majority of U.S. population growth. Without reductions, the Census Bureau projects the U.S. population to surpass 400 million by 2060. In other words, if current trends (2020 notwithstanding) continue, we will grow by roughly the entire population of France in just a few decades. Biden’s immigration proposal would more than double annual immigration. Some might say that’s a good thing, and others will say it is a bad thing, but either way, immigration-driven population growth will have a profound impact on American life. We are making decisions today for future generations. Not only should we be allowed to talk about it, but we should be encouraged to talk about it.For instance, I don’t know if your environmental concerns extend to biodiversity, natural habitats, or access to open space (I know you are very worried about climate change), but each of these become more difficult to guarantee with Congress mandating population growth through immigration. A quarter century ago, President Clinton’s Task Force on Population and Consumption wrote, “We believe that reducing current immigration levels is a necessary part of working toward sustainability in the United States.”I agree. I have no problem with a stable or declining population. For the planet, it’s a good thing. I think of Japan, and see a country that would rather shrink and remain itself than grow and become unrecognizable. The passion for mass immigration and “diversity” is a very Western one. Circling back to the welfare debate, this next reader digs into the many nuances of the child tax credits under the American Rescue Plan:I had to turn off the episode in the midst of the discussion of the “Biden Dole."  Mr. Kaus’s attitude toward this idea was straight outta 1985. Parents should get the money but “only if they work.” So by that logic, if a couple opts for one parent to stay home and raise the kids, their bonus should be cut in half. What really grinds my gears is Mr. Kaus’s obliviousness to the value added to the economy by the unpaid work that occurs in every household. Domestic work — parenting, cooking, cleaning, taking Granny to her appointments — is the grease that allows the machinery of society to operate efficiently. One of the reasons our society feels like it is disintegrating is that too many people are working too damn much.Do you ever think about why memberships in social and fraternal organizations have been declining for decades? Or that church attendance has collapsed? These declines map pretty closely to the increases in labor force participation by women. Do you know how long the waiting lists are for infant daycare? Do you know how people who work 50 or so hours a week plus commute time manage to get the grocery shopping and laundry done? That is what young families are doing on Sunday mornings, and so things like church get crowded out of the weekly schedule.These government payments are a godsend and a first step toward rebuilding the kind of communities that many of us were lucky to grow up in. Families could get by, if modestly, on one income, leaving one parent free to raise the kids and keep the house going, as well as participate in the community. The old system wasn’t great, in that women were always the ones assigned this role and so many women who wanted to do things differently felt trapped. But that is no longer the default; now each couple can decide how it wants to operate. Both parents can keep working full time and use the extra money to buy services to support their choices — maybe a nanny vs. a daycare center, or a cleaning service, or a caregiver for an aging parent. Or one parent can stay home with the kids and the extra money replaces their contribution to household income minus what would have been paid in extra taxes and in daycare costs. Or maybe the extra income allows them to pay off student loans faster and make a down payment on a house. As to Mr. Kaus’s statement that this will provide incentives for poor people to avoid work: possibly. We don’t know that. It may allow low-wage workers like Dollar Store and Walmart clerks to organize and even strike for predictable schedules and decent benefits because they have a cushion to fall back on. But yes, in every society there are layabouts who milk the system. We have them today and they are milking the disability system. The advantage of a program like child allowances is that since every family benefits, there is less resentment seeing your undeserving neighbor or brother-in-law scamming disability payments while you virtuously work and get nothing. One of the reasons the old welfare system was so toxic was that working-class people who were having trouble making ends meet lived cheek by jowl with those who got welfare payments. The workers at the bottom were hardly better off financially than the non-working welfare recipients. It was also a binary system: If you got a job, no matter how low paying, you got kicked off welfare, so many women were not willing risk an uncertain income (a job they could be fired or laid off from) vs. a certain income.I really hope you will rethink this topic and invite a different guest with a different perspective to talk to you about what it is like in 2020 to be a young family trying to juggle jobs, kids and aging parents, and how this universal child allowance will strengthen families and communities. Senator Mitt Romney comes to mind. I believe it is his experience in the LDS church and his large family that gives him a much better understanding of the conditions on the ground in 2020 for raising families. Or how about Liz Bruenig? She just wrote a great piece in the NYT on this very topic, and could educate you and your audience about what it’s like to have young children today.I’ve asked Bruenig, actually. She didn’t reply to my email. 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

Mickey is an old friend and colleague from way back. His 1992 book, The End of Equality, was hugely influential for welfare reform in the Clinton years. 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. To hear three excerpts from my conversation with Mickey — on the history of how neoliberalism gutted the middle class; on whether Joe Biden’s amnesty policy amounts to “open borders”; and our questioning of what Biden actually believes, if anything — head over to our YouTube page.Mickey in the first ten minutes of the episode touches on a much-forgotten history noted by this reader:You wrote in your column last week that Johnson was a radically progressive president. Actually, I think that Nixon was more radically progressive. He might have been the most left-wing president of my lifetime since 1953. Nixon created the EPA and supported environmental legislation. He tried wage and price controls to combat inflation. Nixon’s 1969 Family Assistance Program included a guaranteed income (what we increasingly call UBI), and it passed the House but not the Senate. Nixon and Senator Ted Kennedy were also in negotiations for a federal universal health coverage plan. These negotiations didn’t get too far because of Watergate distractions and other priorities.Peter Beinart sizes up the LBJ-Biden analogy when it comes to foreign policy.Looking back to last week’s episode with addiction expert Sally Satel, a reader writes:Thank you for your incredibly fair treatment of AA, and 12-step programs generally. I’m 21 months sober and active in AA, and honestly my main issue has always been depression (which I largely see as my feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness in this life). I believe the two are intimately connected for me. And I hear how people speak of the program in popular culture and even people who are in addiction services and they don’t seem to understand it, and I think it serves to actively dissuade people from going, which is a huge disservice to lots of people. I think you really understand it (have you spent some time in 12-step recovery?), and I just want to say thanks for doing it justice, in my mind. I also really appreciated this conversation with Sally generally, and the nuanced treatment of depression and addiction and how they are really social disorders, with biological and psychological and other bases.Never done 12-step myself. But I’ve seen its power in others. Another reader dissents a little:Sally Satel is so close! It’s true that addiction isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom — a symptom of a larger psychological problem, usually trauma of some kind. Something that requires escaping. Dr. Gabor Maté found from working with addicts that every single one of them had some kind of traumatic experience that they seek to escape through chemical means. Check him out:This next reader recommends Gabor Maté for the Dishcast and offers some excellent observations about the opioid crisis — both from a professional perspective and a personal one:Fantastic podcast this week with Sally Satel on a topic that interests me greatly (I edited a book about the opioid crisis). You asked some probing questions that the recovery community hasn’t been able to collectively answer: To what degree should we think of addiction as a brain disease, versus something that a person can control? And where should we assign responsibility for the scourge of addiction that is sweeping our country? Surely, the pharmaceutical companies behave villainously. And as you suggest, there are obvious reasons why addiction epidemics strike hardest where people were already suffering.But there is another issue that your podcast failed to take up, and I fear it is likewise lost in the broader conversation, at least among certain educated, liberal circles. I cannot believe that what I’m about to say should strike anyone as remotely controversial, but people often don’t like hearing it: People should not f**k around with certain dangerous drugs, such as crack, meth, or heroin. Not ever, and even a little bit, not even if they are “responsible grown-ups.” So, I regard Carl Hart, whom Sally mentioned on your show, as a terribly misguided menace.(P.S. I feel differently about MDMA and psilocybin, though that muddles my message.)Studies show that the overwhelming majority of opioid addicts did not, initially, receive narcotics from a careless doctor. They started using opioids recreationally. Furthermore, about 70 percent of opioid addicts started fooling around with other drugs before they got hooked on OxyContin or heroin. When overdose deaths occur, they typically involve combinations of drugs, such as when heroin is laced with fentanyl, or when people mix opioids, cocaine, benzos and booze. That happened about 80,000 times last year. Obviously, this is not an invitation to shame, marginalize, or humiliate drug abusers. No decent person would do these things. But we should have a greater capacity — a better language — for compassionately encouraging addicts to take more responsibility for their lives. Whenever we say people are “slaves” to their addictions (or compare opioid users to “zombies”), we are using metaphors. Even when a person’s compulsion to use a drug seems irresistible, their free will is never entirely extinguished. Everyone who ingests an addictive recreational drug is making a choice (and usually it’s a bad one). Toward the end of your podcast, you spoke wonderfully about the virtues and benefits of AA. That organization has yet another salutary quality that I want to mention: It brings people together from all walks of life, working to solve a common problem. We are so unbelievably fractured these days — by race, region, education, class, sexual and gender orientations and (of course) our degraded political situation. But none of those things matter whatsoever in AA. (I mean, I guess they can come up, if a meeting goes off the rails, but they are not ever supposed to.)I’m certain that some of my old-AA cohorts were rabid, FOX-viewing Trump supporters. But I bet if I asked them for help, in an AA context, they would be there for me, just as I would for them. I cannot think of another institution in American life that fosters these kinds of benevolent interactions with people from opposite ends of the political spectrum.Shifting gears to mental illness, a reader relays some interesting and tragic history:Cost was the main reason that the large mental hospitals (“asylums”) were closed in my state. The hospitals overwhelmed state budgets (see Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine by Thomas Hager), but the conditions of the hospitals were embarrassing when shown (see, the documentary Titicut Follies or Geraldo Rivera’s Willowbrook investigation.) Freeing patients into the community with medications like Thorazine and a promise of support seemed to permit the hospitals to be closed and the patients to enjoy life with fewer restrictions. This was an apparent win-win: state budgets freed from the burden of the mental hospitals and the patients liberated. The first part worked brilliantly; the second part, less so. Not only did promised outpatient services fail to emerge, the patients stopped their meds. And with good reason: Thorazine has permanent and irreversible physical side effects. But there was a second reason that my clients (I was a Legal Aid lawyer in Manhattan) stopped taking their meds: they did not think they needed them. And who could blame them? When properly medicated, they were self-aware and rational. And like you and me, they tended to believe that was who they were and would continue to be. As they experienced it, they had overcome their mental issues and had put them behind them. Just as you were eager to get off steroids for your bronchitis, my clients were eager to get off Thorazine.Insidiously, stopping their meds did not have an immediate effect. This reinforced their belief that they no longer needed them. And when they began to deteriorate, their illness blinded them to it. All of this also applies to the mentally ill homeless today. I have no idea whether jails are cheaper than mental hospitals, but I assume that they must be since there seems to be no political stirring to revive them. And, of course, it seems inhumane to restrain people who, once medicated, seem fine until they are not.Another reader has some gut feelings about the spiritual nature of drug addiction:The most recent podcast episode was great food for thought, as usual. Something was said toward the end about nondenominational churches involved in addiction recovery, and made me think of this:I grew up Pentecostal Protestant, and I’ve had a lot of experience in Pentecostal churches and communities. Pentecostal worship practices, and group behavior in general, is extremely emotionally and viscerally charged to the point that transcendental experiences can be triggered in people open to these experiences. At some point I noticed that a lot of people who have recovered from a substance addiction were drawn to this tradition of Christianity and tended to be most open to intense mystical experiences, and that in certain cases the pattern of addiction carried over into their spiritual practices and beliefs. But I also know people (family members) whose recovery from drug addiction and life stability was directly assisted by charismatic experiences. I mention the fact that these groups were Christian simply for context, because I think that this phenomenon probably also applies to other spiritual traditions where ecstatic experiences are a focus. Lastly, on a very different subject, a reader wants me to go there, again:Thanks so much for the podcast with Michael Anton a few weeks ago. I appreciated that both of you could keep your cool talking about such heated topics, and I thought you both made many good points about issues I am torn on.You should talk to Charles Murray at some point about human biodiversity and the plausibility of genetic bases for disparate outcomes in our society between the sexes or among racial groups. His extensively researched, carefully written book on that subject last year, Human Diversity, was intentionally ignored by most mainstream media outlets and commentators, and he has a timely short follow-up book coming out this summer that will address our current derangement over racial issues.So I think he would be thrilled to talk to you about his recent scholarship. Obviously this subject is incredibly controversial and most people would rather avoid thinking about it entirely, but I think intelligent heterodox adults like your audience should be able to grapple with these issues and their implications for fully understanding the world we live in. I’d understand if you’d rather avoid more notoriety of course. But since you essentially got fired from your last job for refusing to condemn Murray’s work, and you started your own independent outlet to maintain your intellectual freedom, I do think it would be a shame to never touch on those types of taboo ideas in your future work.That’s a good idea. I read Human Diversity carefully, and found it nuanced as well as fascinating. I didn’t review it because, well, the process of getting that through the woke-checkers at New York Magazine would have destroyed what T-cells I have left. But since the elite media won’t touch these subjects, it seems to me that those of us with independent platforms should bear the burden of pursuing the truth, even through the relentless harassment and obloquy. In all honesty, that’s why I’m a writer. I’m interested in the truth about the world. 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