The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Ross is a dear old colleague whose newest book, The Deep Places, is a memoir about his long fight against Lyme disease. In this episode we talk about the world of sickness, which we both know something about, and we debate our differing views of Pope Francis and our different levels of panic over Trump and CRT.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 listen to two excerpts from my conversation with Ross — on how chronic pain affects one’s religious faith, and on whether the Vatican should deny Communion to certain groups, such as the rich or the remarried — head over to our YouTube page.A religious reader writes:I listened to the first part of your interview with Johann Hari (whose book Lost Connections is in my library), and I have a small dissent. You said something (at 1:11:00) that I interpreted as a belief that Jesus was not literally resurrected, on the grounds that the resurrection is an accretion: “the Gospels themselves are oral histories written one hundred years later.” This sounds an awful lot like form criticism and is wrong. The Gospel of Mark was written 30-40 years after the crucifixion and the Gospel of John was written about AD 90. I recommend a book called Jesus and The Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham, who explains why this is probably so. It isn’t apologetics; it’s a serious academic study. However, what is even more important is that we know that one of the earliest pieces of oral history, written within months of the resurrection (I can’t explain how the experts know this, but apparently even Bart Ehrman agrees), appears in Corinthians 15:13, “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance [a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scripture” … which apparently scholars date to within a few months of the resurrection. A more detailed explanation is here: The Gospels may be full of accretions, but the resurrection isn’t one of them. It is one of the first things. I think you misinterpreted me. It’s quite clear that the resurrection was believed by the earliest sources. My point is that what the resurrection actually has multiple versions in the New Testament, and what it means specifically — did he retain his body? could he walk through walls? could he disguise himself as someone else? —remains a little obscure. Another reader zooms out:After falling behind on your podcasts, I was able to catch up. While my comments are not timely, I feel the need to share them.Michael Wolff: He had a better understanding of Trump than anyone at the NYT, WaPo, etc. He really exposed the weakness of the coverage of Trump by mainstream media.Michael Moynihan: Very sharp and interesting. Gives you hope that there are sane journalists out there not afraid to expose the deficiencies of the CRT/Woke ideology. It made me wonder if young “woke” poorly paid journalists understand that they will soon be replaced by younger poorly paid journalists — who will criticize them.Michael Schuman: Pivoting to China (away from CRT) shows the breadth of the Dish. China is obviously a present and future problem for our country, and a problem that people (and politicians) know little about. Schuman’s suggestion that we expand our trade partners beyond China (TPP comes to mind) would be a wise course of action. We will never compete with China with American workers.Michael Lewis: As interesting as his books. Listening to him discuss the death of his daughter; and thinking about the difficult situation he faces grieving for her and supporting his family who is also grieving, I thought of those who speak of white privilege and how they should look at Michael’s tragic story as an example of how the world can, at times, cause everyone pain, no matter how white or wealthy.Wesley Yang: No one can say Andrew Sullivan talks over his guest anymore.Peter Beinart: I’m stunned at Beinart’s support for the direction of the media today and enjoyed hearing him challenged on the basis for that support. Did he really say there are examples of great writing from Nikole Hannah Jones? Where? Here’s a followup to the Schuman pod from another reader:I grew up with a foot in each world with a mixed background: father’s side is Irish/Polish from Boston, mother’s side is ethnically Chinese and has been educated in the US since the late 19th century but has called Hong Kong home since the 1970s. All four past generations have essentially split my life between the East and the West.Here is my dissent to the interview: When I hear Westerners talk about East Asia, there is a false parallel that most fail to understand. One must beware of the temptation to equate Christianity’s influence in the West to Confucianism in the East. In the West, we tend to define much of our history in terms of tension based on religion (think: Rome pagan vs. Christian, Crusades, Reformation, persecution of the Jews). Religion in East Asia, in contrast, has never had the same thematic influence. This could partly be traced to the ideology of Daoism, which implies significantly less individual agency and more flexibility. The Chinese are a pragmatic people, who believe in working with the tools they are handed, and are relatively private outside of the family unit. What I think many Westerners fail to understand is that the basic concept of morality and virtue is fundamentally different in countries that don’t have a Judeo-Christian concept of equality/sanctity of life. In many ways, Chinese culture is fundamentally more capitalist than American culture — money and morality are intrinsically linked (Lunar New Year traditions w/r/t prosperity, morality of luck/gambling, etc., no guilt associated with amassing capital). Until one understands this difference in values and ethics, it’s very difficult for a Westerner to understand Chinese culture today.  For example, I think you might be interested in investigating gender relations in China further. While femininity looks constricted to a Western eye, I have also observed women have more professional success in leadership roles in Greater China than in New York City (role of the woman in family, childcare, structure of families, power balances linked to source of familial wealth rather than gender). Also interesting is Shanghai’s tradition as a matriarchal society (the Soong sisters have a fascinating history).My point here is that understanding China today requires a similar approach to learning a new language: one needs to adopt a completely different mentality to understand the rules of play.One more reader keeps the debate going on Afghanistan:I’m disappointed that you’ve succumbed to the mob attacking Joe Biden’s decisions to get us out Afghanistan quickly. The unpleasant truth is that there was never any chance for a “happily ever after” scenario in Afghanistan. President Bush squandered that chance when he ordered most of our troops out of Afghanistan to search for WMDs in Iraq, and Trump cemented it 20 years later when he signed the peace deal with the Taliban handing over Afghanistan to the Taliban and returning thousands of their solders in exchange for their agreement not to target American soldiers. By the time Biden made his decision, there were no good options for an orderly evacuation, especially with the Taliban steadily advancing on Kabul.Biden’s menu for extraction consisted of only two realistic choices. Both required a leap of faith. The one he chose required the Afghan army to be able to hold out for at least three months in order for the US civilian and military bureaucracy to work around the extremely hostile refugee requirements imposed by the Trump administration. A much larger leap required the Afghan army to hold out long enough to negotiate a comprehensive settlement. Given that the Afghan army was three times the size of Taliban’s and better armed, it was reasonable for Biden to believe they could hold out for a couple of months. After all, we spent billions of dollars training them and decades touting their skill and courage. Unfortunately, the Afghan army was even more corrupt and cynical than imagined. Its sudden collapse and the flight of their president forcefully demonstrated that Afghanistan was a house of cards, resting on a phony army and corrupt government, ready to collapse at the first hint we were leaving.  The notion that we could have left secretly is the same type of magical thinking that pervaded our missions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The only other option was to redeploy several thousand American troops, but this violated the terms of Trump’s agreement and triggered a new set of risks.At least for now the Taliban are honoring their end of the bargain. They have not attacked US soldiers and planes. The tragic attack that killed 13 American soldiers was engineered by a branch of Al Qaeda, an enemy of the Taliban. The Taliban have also allowed any Americans wishing to leave to do so, and it is likely all US citizens wishing to leave will be able to return home. The Taliban have also allowed almost 100,000 Afghans to leave, many of whom fought against them in various ways. If American soldiers had reentered the fight, this cooperation would have vanished. If even one plane were shot down, imagine the loss of life and the desire for revenge, leading to more death.Certainly, Afghan women again are not being treated well. The Taliban government is a religious theocracy allowing little dissent, and there continue to be acts of extreme brutality. But are Taliban’s actions any worse than those of our close ally, Saudi Arabia? Worse than some of our own unholy acts in pursuit of the War on Terror?What is particularly tragic is that Biden is taking the hit for our collective failure and guilt, the one president who had the courage to end a failed and costly war. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Wolff, a longtime media critic, and now the author of three Trump tell-alls, talks with me about the 45th president. How politically dangerous is he still? How delusional and mentally unbalanced? Will he run again? We get into it. You can listen to our conversation 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 the episode — on the questions of whether the media confronted Trump appropriately and whether the madman will return to electoral politics — head over to our YouTube page.A reader writes:Your two-week vacation gave me time to listen to the Michael Lewis episode. Since Donald Trump is supposedly responsible for all of the country’s ills, here’s a counterfactual: If he had taken the California approach to controlling Covid, would he have been branded an authoritarian dictator who was denying Americans their basic freedoms? Had he taken that approach, along with Operation Warp Speed, I doubt he would have been hailed as someone who was doing his best to protect the public’s health. He knew how the media would portray an attempted federal shutdown of the country and his only response was to err on the side of less restrictions. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.I don’t disagree. That’s what a tribalized country does: one tribe cannot ever give a president of the other tribe the benefit of the doubt, even in a public health emergency. That applies to Biden now as well, of course. Another reader swung his support to Trump out of a reaction to the media:I come from a Muslim country and I’m a naturalized American. I was a registered Democrat for 10 years. I always voted for the Democrats. But in 2020, I voted for Trump, due to the lies of the leftist MSM after watching all WH press conferences in full. I saw the edited/manipulated sound-bite videos and I couldn’t believe the lies and the distortion. All those “mostly peaceful” protests ... simply disappointing.The left doesn't represent me anymore. I don’t like watching Bill Maher, Steven Colbert, John Oliver, or Trevor Noah anymore. I don’t share the same values with them anymore. I’m a **civil libertarian** before anything else. I'm tired of you guys’ constant Trump Derangement Syndrome cramps day and night. Switching to Afghanistan, a reader sends a view from his wartime:From the reader:The 2014 window view from Afghanistan that you posted prompts me to share this photo, taken through the window of a truck in Khost, Afghanistan in 2004. I was a hardcore neocon when I enlisted after 9/11, and of course I’m much chastened from those days. I enjoyed your writing all along the sad journey. My mom would send several days’ worth of the Dish in letter-format when I was in basic training — when reading anything but letters and religious texts were forbidden — and I continued reading you while in Afghanistan, when I could get to the Internet.Next is a dissent from an “ex British Army soldier who completed two tours of Helmand province and then worked for several more years as a civilian in Afghanistan.” It’s a powerful testimony, and the impact of the chaotic withdrawal on our alliances is something I haven’t fully accounted for:What you have wrong here is that whether to withdraw or not is barely half the question. It is possible to withdraw in a manner that isn’t reckless, petulant, tin-eared, chaotic and certain to inflict pandemonium on your partner nations. It is possible to let your allies and your own military actually plan for the tasks that withdrawal necessitates, whereas here it seems plain that the operation to extract people has not even had time to plan movements from the city to the airport (this in a city whose airport, as most people don’t know, is practically in the city centre). Biden, in short, has absolutely fucked not only Kabulis, but all of the US partner countries in Afghanistan, all of whom are absolutely swamped beneath this task. This is Biden pulling the pin without caring a s**t for America’s allies. Good grief, Andrew, this is very far from “grown-up.” You seem to imply that the only people complaining about the exit’s manner are those who are opposed to it — I think you have that quite, quite wrong. There is no incoherence in the notion that withdrawal is necessary but the manner of it is an embarrassing and shameful episode which will damage enduring partnerships. That damage is worst with the British, who expended more blood and treasure than any other NATO country. What many British officials have internalised over the years is that the special relationship is largely meaningless as far as the Americans are concerned. But for the first time we have incontrovertible proof that first, the US doesn’t care about us, and second, the US is unreliable anyway. This may prompt a wholesale rethinking of British foreign policy. I really don’t think even Trump — even Trump! — could have done anything so spectacularly tacky, so profoundly deleterious to alliances.Thankfully, the Afghan guy who worked for me has happily made good his escape and has been housed in the UK with his family. The euphoria of learning that, set against the horror of what was going on in a city I once knew intimately, has created quite the swirl of dissonance for me.But anyway, thank you for the Weekly Dish (which I do pay for!) — it’s one of the highlights of my week. I’ve been an admirer of yours since I first saw your long CSPAN conversation about post-9/11 America with Hitchens ... who would be incandescent over this withdrawal!The reader is probably right on that last point — here’s Hitch on Afghanistan in late 2010, a year before he died:Many readers have opinions about how Afghanistan should have been handled. The first:When an army leaves, it must leave strong. We should have surged, say, 10K troops with mobile artillery, and as the Taliban melted into the hills in response, we should have set up defensive perimeters around Kabul and other collection points for US citizens and our allies, and withdrawn at our leisure, from a position of strength. And screw Trump’s deadlines and deals.Speaking of deadlines, another reader: Everyone who has followed Afghanistan knows that from roughly October to March, there is no fighting; it is just too damn cold and miserable. A more thoughtful person than Biden would have given a date of November 1 to begin leaving with everyone home by Thanksgiving. It would have sounded great. Another reader thinks we should have stayed:No American servicemember has died in Afghanistan for nearly two years. Less than 3,500 of them are even there, enabling the formerly free Afghans to stiffen what resolve they have, nevermind guaranteeing the equal status of women there, and providing America with an unblinking eye in the sky.That reader is incorrect regarding dead American soldiers (not to mention all the injuries and PTSD). From FactCheck.org:In fact, 11 U.S. service members were killed in Afghanistan last year, including four in combat, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System. Twenty-three service members were killed in Afghanistan in 2019, including 17 in combat. No service members have been killed or wounded in action in Afghanistan in 2021, according to Defense Department reports as of Aug. 23.This next reader also wants the US government to stay in Afghanistan:In my view, keeping a presence there with 3,500 soldiers, a great airbase within minutes of Russia and Eastern China (not to mention Pakistan), an embassy with intelligence capacities (not to mention providing a modicum of rights and some cultural influence on millions of Afghans), seemed like a fantastic deal.Along those lines, another adds:There’s another concern: terrorism in the West and, particularly, in the US. My understanding is that through Afghanistan, we had an intelligence window into the comings and goings of various terrorists, some of whom have been identified as crossing over into the US from our porous Mexican border. That’s now gone.Another reader looks back in history:I agree with you on the failure and need to get out of Afghanistan, but I don’t think it was always a doomed effort. I think Afghanistan was lost the moment President Bush gave his Axis of Evil speech against Iraq, Iran, and North Korean. That speech said clearly that Afghanistan wasn’t really important, nor was eliminating al Qaeda. We have bigger fish to fry. It also said that we will make up stuff to justify invading a country we want to overthrow — by then, UN inspectors had shown our reasons were false. It named the next two nations on our hit list.Is it any surprise North Korea finished developing a nuclear bomb in 2006? They needed it for self-defense. The threat of destroying large parts of South Korea was all they had without relying on China. Iran had been moderating their stance, and there were reports that Iran was providing underground assistance in Afghanistan, since they didn’t want the Taliban in power either. Of course that ended, and in their next election they turned towards the most radical elements in their society. Their best defense is to stir up trouble in the region and keep the dogs snapping at US heels elsewhere by supporting terrorists throughout the region. An act of self-defense.Bush also diverted resources from Afghanistan that might have helped achieve a positive outcome in the early days of the mission. By the time our focus returned to Afghanistan, it was too late.Another reader worries about the future:You quoted Francis Fukuyama, who wonders why the US wanted an Afghan nation with a central government rather than a more logical tribal federation. The answer may lie in the ever-present capitalist influences that pervade our foreign policy goals. Afghanistan is a trove of extractable mineral wealth. Dealing with a central government simplifies the process of attracting the kind of investment necessary to extract that mineral wealth. Of course, now that the US is out of the way, look for Russia and China to try to insert themselves into whatever sort of political jigsaw puzzle evolves from the Taliban takeover. Neither country will have any problem stooping low enough to get under the morality bar that the Taliban has set.This reader is less worried about the future:Sorry, but I can’t get myself to say the withdrawal has been a disaster. This thing has to play out. Shame on Americans who haven’t kept up with events in a war being pursued in our name. We know deals have been made between warlords and the Taliban, tribes, military commanders, etc. We know the country is different today than in 2001, with a majority of the youth under 20 never knowing the Taliban. We know the Taliban faces a typhoon of problems and unruly constituencies. More than one person with knowledge of the situation has said it might be easier for the Afghans to resolve their internal conflicts without a foreign occupier weighing every move.  This is a dynamic situation. It’s easy to feel guilty or badly for the Afghan people, but nobody, including the Taliban, knows what this will look like even a year from now, much less five or ten.A quick question from a reader regarding the other war:I went looking for your book “I Was Wrong” about the Iraq War and it did not come up on Amazon when I searched “andrew sullivan.” Perhaps you might add a page to your substack where you could purchase your books? It would be better than giving Amazon a cut.“I Was Wrong” is actually an ebook available here for free. Lastly, a reader recommends a guest for the Dishcast:Might I suggest (again) Ross Douthat? I’d love to hear you two discuss the goings-on in the Church and the state of Francis’s papacy nine years on. Douthat also has a new book out soon, about his long illness with Lyme disease and his struggles with the medical establishment. Given your own experience with a disease that American medicine spent an awfully long period of time essentially ignoring — and your recent writings on how HIV has shaped your understanding of COVID — I thought this might be an opportunity for a really profitable dialogue during a period where the American medical establishment seems to be hemorrhaging credibility. Our reader has read our mind: Ross is slated for next week. 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

While Andrew and I wrap up our two-week summer vacation (back on September 10), here is the second half of the very personal interview he did with journalist and friend Johann Hari (who wrote the bestselling books Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs and Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope). To recap, the idea to re-air the 2012 conversation all started with this reader: I began reading Andrew in the early 2000s, and even though I’m a huge fan, I’ve never heard him systematically discuss his intellectual origins and development. […] I bet your listeners might enjoy hearing Andrew being interviewed thoroughly and in-depth about how he sees the trajectory of his intellectual life. (I know I would.)That posted email prompted another reader to write in:[Andrew] did an extensive two-parter with Johann Hari a decade ago, which covers most of the areas that your reader mentions. Johann put this out as his own podcast, which is no longer available online, but I have mp3 copies that I’m happy to share.A big thanks to our reader for saving the audio files from oblivion! I vividly remember listening to that interview, almost a decade ago, because it was one of the most riveting and revealing conversations I’ve ever heard from Andrew, publicly or privately. Johann has that effect.You can listen to the second half of the conversation 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. (The first half was posted here.) The second half includes an emotional recounting of Andrew’s best friend Patrick, who perished from AIDS in the middle of the book tour for Virtually Normal, a book he helped edit:Another part of the conversation tackles the nature of religious fundamentalism and natural law, especially when it comes to sexuality:For three more clips of Andrew’s conversation with Johann — about two of the earliest influences that made Andrew a conservative; on the genius of his dissertation subject, Michael Oakeshott; and on why true conservatives should want to save the planet from climate change — head to our YouTube page.In lieu of reader commentary this week, we are trying something different: a transcript of a podcast episode, specifically a July interview that Andrew did on Debra Soh’s podcast, focused on the AIDS crisis and the marriage movement. (We are thinking of making transcripts available for our most popular Dishcast episodes. Unfortunately we we don’t have the staff bandwidth to do every episode, since transcripts are a ton of work, even with auto-transcription tools.) Below is the second half of Andrew’s conversation with Debra, author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society (the first half is here):Andrew: I could take you to a few leather bars, where it’s probably the last place now in America where raw masculinity can be simply celebrated, where it isn’t complicated. I mean, it’s in the presentation more than in the actual reality, but nonetheless it’s like, “Yay! Men like sex, we’re men, sniff my armpit, look at my back hair, and let’s go for it. And in a couple of weeks in Provincetown, where I am, we’re going to have Bear Week, which was the moment when a whole bunch of middle-aged overweight, hairy-back dudes who were able to actually be welcomed as integral to gay culture and gay society — which took a while too — instead of all these perfect little muscle bunnies that show up for circuit party.Debra: When I go to gay bars, it doesn’t matter where I am in the world. Sometimes I’ll go by myself even, just because I’m curious to hang out there — and everyone is always so nice. They’re a little bit concerned. They look at me and think, like, “Why is she here?” But they never ask me, “What are you doing here?” And they never told me to leave. And that’s one thing I love about it.Andrew: The thing that we are getting a little upset is, um, vast numbers of straight women coming in — especially this bachelorette party thing, where gay male spaces are just overwhelmed by women.Debra: Yeah that’s a problem. Because they’re disrespectful too. They get really drunk and they’re all over people — don’t do that. Be respectful.Andrew: We’re like zoo animals to them. And they want their Instagram photos in the cool leather bar. And we’re just like, you’re killing the mood. Like, you know, we don’t want to be mean and tell you to leave, but can’t you see that this is actually a place you might want to respect a little bit? I mean, they had a bachelorette party coming in, they’re playing bareback sex on the screens up there, and they will still sit there with their gin and tonic.Debra: It’s weird. I feel it’s changed, because when I used to go, I’d be the only straight person there. Now when I go out, it’s weird to see — you see a younger generation of straight kids there, and I’m like, this is crazy.Andrew: Well you take the word “queer”, which is now integrated into the LGBTQIA+ thing.Debra: Yeah, like I always say, I don’t like that word.Andrew: You can be definitely be straight and queer, you just dye your hair blue. And then when they do surveys of LGBTQIA+ people, we don’t know if that’s gay people or if it’s straight people in a mood. And my view is that you can call yourself whatever you want. You can have whatever sex you want. I’m a total “live and let live” person. But at some point language must mean something. And if the gay rights movement is essentially a movement of straight people, some gay people, lots of trans people, fighting on around questions of race and gender and deconstructing society and dismantling sexual norms and dismantling the sexual binary, then I don’t have a place in that movement. I’ve left it. I think a lot of gay men are just like, “We’re done.”The left elite that controls the media, that insists and controls the image of homosexuals so that we are always queer, always left, in which none of that diversity is ever explained. I mean, they are brilliant at promoting narratives that are not truth. So for example, we are constantly told that Stonewall was started and led by trans women of color, and that if it weren’t for trans women of color, we would have no rights. This is absolutely untrue. You only have to look at the photos. You only have to read the histories. It’s completely outrageously untrue. And yet now it is repeated ad nauseam.Debra: Well, it’s like you’re saying, because you can’t tell the younger generation, they just rewrite the history and they don’t know.Andrew: They’re going to write white gay men out of the entire history of the gay rights movement. They will not mention people like me. They will not mention anybody who played a part in the marriage movement. For example, we are, I mean, I’m particularly non grata, you know, I’ve never been given a single recognition by the gay community to any of the work I’ve ever done, because I’m not a left-liberal.Debra: That’s sad. That’s wrong. How did you deal with — you’ve gotten abuse from all over the political spectrum since disclosing your status as being HIV positive. What helped you manage and get through that? Because those attacks have been very personal.Andrew: Yeah, well, HIV led me to be subject to deportation for 19 years, which was a very frightening place to be in. And it’s lovely to hear left-wing progressives tell me they wish I’d been deported. The truth is you accept in some ways — and I learned this very early — when I was out as the editor of The New Republic. I was the only out journalist in Washington. I was only 26, but I was the only out one. So I was very prominent at the very beginning. And because of that, and a lot of fuss was made about me, I was supposed to represent everybody gay. Of course I didn’t. I said “I don’t, and I’m not going to, and I’m going to pursue my own view of the world.” And that was just not allowed, because I did not fit in to the existing left-power framework within the gay rights movement. I was basically ignored or attacked. But you get through it because you know what you’re doing is in good faith. You’ve actually made a difference. You can see exactly the arguments that you helped frame and create — they came to win the argument. You can see how in that fight for marriage equality, liberalism worked, in as much as I went and talked to anybody from the fundamentalist right to the crazy left. I talked to anybody. I went to Christian churches, I went to Catholic colleges. I had a policy of never turning down an invite, which is what you do if you really want to get your message out there, if you really want to talk. And that included countless TV and radio stuff. And then when I did an anthology on marriage, I actually included all the major arguments against it, which is unimaginable today. You would have a book that would sell, that would have different views of the same thing. Debra: You’re triggering. Andrew: Yeah, but we knew, I knew, that we had stronger arguments. I wanted them out there in public against the other arguments. I thought we would win if we just kept at it. And because so many other gay people saw this, they also began to come out and they also talked about marriage and they also talked about their own relationships. And the truth is that, when you see that happening and when you know that you played any part in someone’s wedding day, and you can see how healing that is to people, their families, their sense of self-esteem, their integration into culture — who gives a damn if I’m called a white supremacist on an hourly basis, because I’m not. And also the truth is, the gay community, the people I know and love around me, we have a lovely relationship. And your friendships and you — you rely on that. And gay people, most of us, we’re not that political. I come to Provincetown. This is my 26th season here. And all the people I know, know me as me — not as this writer or this other stuff. With that kind of friendship network and support network, you can get through most things.Debra: Yeah, because you know who you are, and people who love you know who you are.Andrew: I think the thing is to believe that you don’t care what anybody says about you, as long as it isn’t true. Now, if it’s true you should listen, to figure out what you’ve done wrong. But if it’s really not true, I mean, if they start calling you a white supremacist, as they do on — you know, literally every other tweet I’m called this — there’s nothing you could do about that. It’s their problem, not yours. I mean, they’re projecting on to you all these insecurities that are pretty obvious. And I learned from the beginning too, when I was the only openly gay person out there, the number of gay people who reached out to me and wanted me to be their idol or their representative, and I couldn’t be — I learned slowly over a few years to erect a boundary so that I wasn’t so emotionally vulnerable to all of that. But it hurts, it has always hurt. Of course it hurts you. I don’t want to get to a point where it doesn’t hurt. I just want to get to resilience. And also the thing about AIDS, and watching, you know, half your friendship network die, and contemplating your own death as you saw them die, because you knew you were going to go through the same thing — it’s liberating. I mean, I thought I would have a few years to live. Why f**k with the b******t when you’re going to die in a few years? Why not tell the truth? The book Virtually Normal? I wrote that because I thought I was going to die and I wanted to write something now, to leave behind, so the arguments for marriage equality, which were otherwise not being made, could be done definitively. And I could leave that behind.And I wrote in the preface — dated it to the date of my seroconversion as a memory to myself — that this is why I wrote this book. So I think when gay people come out, first of all, they risk a lot. Or they think they’re risking a lot, and that’s liberating truth. And I think to face mortality young gives you this sense of perspective. I’ll give you a tiny little anecdote. After I got into all that mess by publishing a symposium on The Bell Curve — which you weren’t supposed to talk about, let alone debate — but I’d published a symposium, a piece from the book and 13 criticisms of it. And it was a huge fuss. And I nearly lost my job. It was besieged within the office. I upset a lot of people. At some point, Charles Murray said, “Well let’s go out and have a dinner, I’ll take you out to dinner to thank you for this.” And at some point he said to me, “This must be a really life-changing moment for you.” And I said to him, “It isn’t. You don’t know this, but let me tell you now: I’m dying of AIDS, and half my friends are. I’m in a crisis. This [the Bell Curve controversy] is not a crisis. This is a tempest of ideas and slurs and stigmas and realities and debates, but it’s not for me a major life event.”So there’s a certain liberation in having survived. And I think Churchill said there’s nothing more exhilarating than being shot at but not being hit. And I think the fact is, I’m still here, I’m still dodging the bullets. I do want to say, though, I hope you don’t mind me doing this: Next month my collection is coming out, which has all those early gay essays. I wrote about AIDS and the early arguments of marriage equality, all chronological. So you can see how the arguments developed over time.Debra: Listeners can’t see that Andrew held up his forthcoming book. So where can they get your book?Andrew: On Amazon, where you can pre-order on Amazon, if you want. It’s called “Out On a Limb: Selected Writing 1989 to 2021.” And it’s basically a greatest hits. Hitchens did his collection then dropped dead within a couple of years. So I hope it’s not going to happen to me.There is something wonderfully liberating about facing mortality when you’re very young and living through it, and the knowledge that that’s always there. And I’m still a Catholic. So for me, the truth matters. And people used to ask me, “Like, how can you be openly gay and Catholic?” And my response was always, “Don’t you understand: I’m openly gay because I’m Catholic, because the church taught me to tell the truth as a core virtue. I am not lying to you. You were asking me to lie about myself. I will not do that. That is not actually the Christian thing to do.”And so the conflicts, they are not as profound as you might otherwise think. And the truth is, actually, from the very get-go, the first time I realized I had this magic stick and it would give me all sorts of … whatever. I hate to say, but it’s true, I, um —Debra: It’s a sex podcast. You can talk about your magic stick all you want.Andrew: Well I’m talking about when I turned 13, 14, and I was like, “This is awesome. This can’t be wrong.” Obviously it’s not wrong. It’s happening spontaneously to me. I mean, I didn’t choose it, obviously. It’s not wrong. And there’s so much of it at the time, that how on earth am I supposed to save this up for one woman every year? I’m like no, it’s not happening. I had real wrestling with the arguments — though I also try to wrestle them to earth — but I’ve never had much sexual shame.Debra: That’s amazing. So before I let you go, what advice would you have for young gay men who may have concerns about how to approach sex and dating?Andrew: The idea that I’m giving advice to people, on dating, is quite bizarre. I’m in no a position to advise anyone. What I would say this is: You are lucky enough to have been born when all the major gay rights have been established. You’re the luckiest generation of gay people ever in the history of mankind. It has never been a better place to be gay than now in America. So live your lives, live them fully. Don’t be obsessed about this subject. Be yourself and also know that finding the right partner, the right person to be with you in that journey, is incredibly important. It doesn’t mean you can’t have sex, or you can’t date and do all sorts of things. But at some point that’s going to matter — choose wisely, if you can.But you don’t have to be political the way we had to be political. You don’t have to be an activist in the way that we had to be an activist — because we had to get to a point of equality. Now we’re there. There is a range of possibilities for you. And do not believe that a gay person is somehow restricted in the areas they can live and act and work in anyway whatsoever. Do not believe that being gay is somehow incompatible with being a construction worker or an airplane pilot or any of the other — don’t buy into any of the sexist stereotypes that want to turn gay men into women, or lesbians into men. Your job is to show what gay people can do. What we can give back to our society. And we have over the centuries done so much in terms of creating educational environments, in creating artistic achievements, and intellectual development — in the arts and the sciences. I mean, you have Alan Turing, who created the computer, as your idol. And he did that while he was being imprisoned for being gay and chemically castrated to prevent him being gay. And he invented the computer while he was doing that. So my point is, you have no excuse. Go out there and forge your own lives, obey no rules — as opposed to what you’re supposed to do. We can create a really wonderful gay future, and we can contribute — as we did to your life, Debra, as those men did for your life. We can be emblems of integrity and we can be emblems of responsibility. And we can be part of giving back, which is the most rewarding thing. So I’m more interested in what we can make of gay culture and of gay existence now, more than constantly worrying about oppression. The truth is — I hate to tell you this — but you’re not really that oppressed. And certainly if you think of any other gay human being who’s ever lived, you are certainly not that oppressed. When I was in my twenties, it was a crime for me to have sex with another dude in my bed, my own bedroom. So don’t talk to me about oppression. You have no idea. A lot of it’s in your own heads. Go be the people you always wanted to be and be proudly gay alongside it. And don’t listen to anybody telling you any rules about what gay people can be or should be.Debra: Alright, Andrew, thank you so much.Andrew: Oh Debra, that was lovely. Thank you so much for asking me. You know, the thing about this, we don’t have our own children. There are many of us in my generation that look to the young now and see them treating us as if we were dinosaurs who really need to be relegated to the past. And they don’t know what we did for them, or the toll it took on so many, and the agony that it created. And sometimes that amnesia hurts a lot. Maybe one of the things we also need to work on as gay men is building more relationships across the generations, so we can make sure that these stories, and this history, and this enormously transformative period can be conveyed. But we are unfortunately very age stratified. And the ability of older men to talk to younger men is not as strong as it might be. You know, we fought for the right for you to piss your life away in a dance club, if you want to. So that’s great! Go ahead, but have a thought for second of the people older than you, who went through the equivalent of a war and are veterans of that war and deserve a little bit of the respect that veterans of such wars tend to get. So thank you, Debra.Debra: Thank you. 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

This fortnight, while Andrew and I are on our annual Dishcation in August, we are airing a two-part interview of Andrew from 2012, conducted by the journalist Johann Hari (author of the bestselling books Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs and Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope). The idea to re-air the interview all started with this reader:I began reading Andrew in the early 2000s, and even though I’m a huge fan, I’ve never heard him systematically discuss his intellectual origins and development. I know bits and pieces of the story — a provincial kid, debated at Oxford, proud Tory and Reagan supporter, came to the States, courted controversy at The New Republic, was a pioneering supporter of gay marriage, supported the Iraq War and lived to regret it, and so on. But I bet your listeners might enjoy hearing Andrew being interviewed thoroughly and in-depth about how he sees the trajectory of his intellectual life. (I know I would.) Another impetus for this suggestion is that I recently enjoyed listening to Glenn Loury do something like this on his own podcast. I loved it and learned a lot.That posted email prompted another reader to write in:One of your readers suggested that Andrew do an in-depth interview about his early life, his intellectual influences, etc. I listened to his interview with Giles Fraser, which was interesting, but he also did a more extensive two-parter with Johann Hari a decade ago, which covers most of the areas that your reader mentions. Johann put this out as his own podcast, which is no longer available online, but I have mp3 copies that I’m happy to share.Even Johann doesn’t have the audio files anymore, so a big thanks to our reader for saving them from oblivion! I vividly remember listening to that interview, almost a decade ago, because it was one of the most revealing conversations I’ve ever heard of Andrew (and I’ve known him a long time). Johann has a real knack for allowing people to reveal themselves.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. (The second half of the interview will air next Friday. Update: here.) For three clips of Andrew’s conversation with Johann — on two of the earliest influences that made Andrew a conservative; on the genius of his dissertation subject, Michael Oakeshott; and on why true conservatives should want to save the planet from climate change — head over to our YouTube page.In lieu of reader commentary this week, we are trying something different: a transcript of a podcast episode, specifically an interview that Andrew did last month on Debra Soh’s podcast, focused on the AIDS crisis and the marriage movement. We may start making transcripts available for our most popular Dishcast episodes, rather than all of the episodes, because we don’t have the staff bandwidth right now, and transcripts are a lot of work. Let us know if you think they would be particularly useful, or if you have any ideas in general about the Dishcast: dish@andrewsullivan.com. For now, we hope you get some value from the transcript below, which gets very personal about Andrew and his friends who suffered during the AIDS crisis.Debra: I want to start by saying thank you so much for agreeing to do this. It’s really an honor for me to get to talk with you, especially about this subject. I guess I’ll explain to listeners what got me interested in wanting to do this episode. So my audience knows I’m straight, but I grew up in the gay community. When I was younger all my friends were gay men, and I really do credit them for helping me become the woman I am. I’m very proud of that. I love them so much, and I don’t feel there’s enough of a discussion about the AIDS crisis and what happened in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I feel like there needs to be more education about it, and I admire how open you’ve been about what you’ve been through. And I get so many questions from my audience, because I have a lot of young gay men in my audience, and they ask me about dating and sex, just like everyone does, but specifically in the context of this history and how to go about safer sex practices. So that’s what brought me to you.Andrew: I’m delighted to answer any questions or engage in various reminiscences, as you please.Debra: I want to start with a bit of a broader question in terms of coming out, because some of my audience, they live in parts of the world where it’s not acceptable to be gay, unfortunately, or they come from families where their families don’t accept them. What was it like for you when you were coming out? And also, what advice would you have for them?Andrew: Well, I came out in the ‘80s, and I was a gay boy entirely surrounded by straight people — the complete inverse of you. And I love them all. I never heard the word “homosexual” ever. I never heard any discussion of it. I never heard anything on the radio. It was never discussed in our house. All I knew: it was so awful that you couldn’t even mention it. And if you brought it up, it would immediately mean that you were gay, because who else would bring up such an appalling subject? I know it’s hard for kids today to understand that this was the atmosphere I grew up in. And it was not that long ago. I’m not that old.And so coming out was terrifying. I didn’t come out until I was in my early twenties and I had left England and arrived in America. I was able to sort of catch some of the extraordinary shifts in gay culture in the ‘80s, in Boston, and then in Washington, DC, and came out like that. I had never really said I was straight, ever, but I was asked outright when I was at Oxford, because I was president of the Oxford Union — the newspaper asked me, in 1981, “are you gay?” And I was like, “I have great relations with the men and women.” That was my only — I couldn’t, I wasn’t going to be drawn. But after that I came out and almost immediately told everybody — except my family. And eventually I had to go back and deal with them. Do you want me to tell you about that process?Debra: Yeah, please do.Andrew: I grew up in a Catholic family, with a strictly Catholic mother and grandmother, so I was brought up very profoundly within that tradition. So obviously that was a big worry for me. And secondly, my dad was the captain of the town rugby team. He was an athlete in school. He was the jockiest jock. He was the guy that all the guys used to hang out with. He was such a stereotypical male, and my brother and sister were like, “Please don’t talk about it, don’t tell Dad,” because they were terrified of his reaction. Apparently they had attempted to raise the possibility once, and my father had said at the time, “If he ever tells that to me, he’ll never be in this house again.” So I was terrified. But at that point, I was sort of part of the ‘80s revival of being proudly gay, even as we were surrounded by the beginnings of this horrible epidemic. And so I was like, I’m going to do it anyway. So I asked both my parents down to sit together in the living room and I was going to tell them something. And they were “What?!” I don’t normally ask them both to sit down. The usual means of communication was I would tell my mother something, she would then tell my father. And then if my father had anything to say, he would come back behind my mother — a fairly traditional kind of household in that respect. Anyway, I sat them down and I said, “I’ve come here to tell you I’m gay.” My mother said, “What?” I said, “I’m gay.” And she said, “What does that mean?” And I said, “I’m a homosexual. I always have been, I always will be. And I’m happy.” And she said, “Oh my God, I better go make a cup of tea” — which is what every English person does when the s**t really does hit the fan.So she disappeared from the room, leaving me with my father. And suddenly he was bent double. I could see his shoulders shaking a little bit. And I realized he was sobbing. And I’d never seen my father cry before. It was basically unknown. I didn’t know what to do. But I said, “Dad, stop crying. There’s no need to cry. I’m okay. I’m okay.” But he kept on. And I said to him, eventually, “Well, can you tell me why you’re crying? And I can address that.” He looked up at that point and said, “I’m crying because of everything you must’ve gone through when you were growing up. And I never did anything to help you.”At that point I broke down. My father totally rose to the occasion. And since then he was rock solid — until he died last year — in my defense, and his pride in me as a gay person. My mother had a lot of issues about it, almost entirely because of the church, and she was never really comfortable. Because she felt it was going to — she had such hopes. I was the first kid in the family to go to college, and I had gotten into Oxford and then Harvard. And then I was going to throw it all away, by being gay? Why would you do that? I remember my first book, Virtually Normal, which was a case for marriage equality. After it came out, I said to my mother, “What did you think?” And she said, “Well, I didn’t really read it. I just want you to write a real book about a real subject, that isn’t stigmatizing to you and peripheral to normal good people.” At which point I kind of sighed and gave up — but she’s still, I mean, she’s still alive. And she loves me enormously. And only a few times did she drive me completely crazy.One of those times was in the epidemic, when my closest friend and I found out six weeks apart from each other that we were both positive. My friend died two years later, in an absolutely grotesque way. And at one point, when I was really, really in the dumps about it, because I’d just come from him, and he was basically a pile of bones, and in so much pain, and he couldn’t keep anything down and shat himself on the floor. This is a 31-year-old man. And I said to my mom, “I don’t know how much more I can do this.” And I was also a volunteer; I was nursing someone else to death at the same time, as a buddy. And my mother said, “Oh, Andrew, I wish you weren’t gay. If you weren’t gay, you wouldn’t have to deal with all of this.”And I said to my mom, “You know what, I’m going to put the phone down. If that’s all you can say — you wish that I weren’t me — at a moment when I need your support, because so many of my friends are in extreme crisis …” She didn’t know at the time that I had it too. I kept it from them. And so I said to her, “When you figure out why that is so horrible, what you just said to me, you can call me back.” It took a few months.That was the worst moment, because I just felt no one was there for me. And no one was. I mean, they didn’t understand. They just didn’t understand. We were living — I said this in an essay I wrote — like medievals among moderns. The COVID fatality rate, I think, is 0.1%, or something like that. Or not quite that low, but somewhere below 1%. HIV back then was a hundred percent fatal. Everyone died. It was not a matter of if; it was just a matter of when and how. And the way people died … it’s very hard to convey to people. It was not an easy death. It was a long, terrible series of nightmares. There was toxoplasmosis. Your immune system collapses. And after it collapses, below a certain point, other kinds of infections can come in, ones that normally your body would easily repel. But when they’re not repelled, they can take over your body. So for example, cryptosporidium, which is a little, little bug in the water that everybody drinks. But with people with AIDS, it just started to take over their gut and their stomachs. And so it ate all the food they tried to eat, before they did. So they started to become like skeletons. Or they would wake up one morning and a bug called toxoplasmosis might’ve gotten into their brain. A friend of mine literally woke up one morning and couldn’t tie his shoelaces, and didn’t know why Or cytomegalovirus — a friend of mine who was a photographer slowly, slowly went blind. At one point he had to have injections directly into his eyeballs. And I said to him, “I couldn’t, I could not look at a needle come right into my eye. How did you do it?” He said — I’ll never forget this — “because I want to see.”And pneumonia, pneumocystis, KS — Kaposi sarcoma — causes lesions all over you. Neuropathy — that was was huge. The man I volunteered for, to help him die, if you so much as brushed his feet with the sheet, he would scream in agony. And he was propped up on a couch day and night with gray liquid spurting uncontrollably out of his butthole. The sheer indignity of people.On top of the physical agony, they were unrecognizable. Their bodies were completely contorted. They were destroyed. They couldn’t see, they couldn’t breathe. They couldn’t eat. And you never knew what next was coming. I went once to a hospital ward and saw — this was the early part of the epidemic — people were still being sequestered into one ward, where the bodies were taken and put into black plastic bags, kept outside, quarantined. This was an AIDS ward. And my buddy who died — he used to be a big bodybuilder, but now he was 90 pounds at most. And next to him was a hospital bed, with the curtain drawn around it. From within it, I heard someone singing a pop song. I said to Joe, my friend, “Well, at least someone here is happy, you know, keeping their spirits up.” And he said, “Oh no, no. He died this morning. That’s his boyfriend singing. They’ve been together for 10 years. And he’s been barred. He’s been thrown out of their apartment. He’s been barred from the funeral. And that’s their song, that they sang. It was the song that was playing when they met, and this is the last place he’ll really be able to feel some physical contact with the husband who had just passed away. And the nurses can’t bring themselves to tell him to leave.”So it was not just the physical agony. It was the horrible stigma, the way in which people were treated, the indignity that they faced. And of course witnessing that, as I did, and many other instances of this, and also witnessing couples whose husbands were just magnificent in terms of sticking with people forever, you realize, I realized, that that must never ever happen again.And so that was the origin of the marriage equality movement. That’s the only thing that will stop this, and we will make sure it happens, and we will do so in honor of the dead. And that’s why we did it. And so the AIDS crisis was also as crucible for action.Debra: Would progress have been quicker, had being gay not been so stigmatized? Because homosexuality had only been taken out of the DSM less than a decade before the crisis began. You talk about the stigmatization. And I was reading about how, even in some cases, families couldn't bury their sons because again, the stigma around it, and also in some cases, funeral homes didn't even want to have the bodies there. So how do you think it might've been different if there was more acceptance of gay people?Andrew: You know, I’ve thought about that. And the truth is, I think it didn’t make that much difference to the trajectory of the epidemic. It made a huge difference to how gay people, gay men, were treated in that epidemic. And it had a huge impact on our radicalization and attempt to rebuild a future that granted us formal equality. But the truth is, the only way to stop the virus — apart from safer sex, which we could do ourselves — it turned out a very sophisticated set of therapies were truly on the cutting edge of research, helped in part by a big leap in computer technology, as well as massive investment by pharmaceutical companies that were attempting to find for the first time in human history a medicine that could stall a retro virus — a very, very smart virus that situated itself into your DNA and replicated there. It was really, I think, all about getting there quickly. And it really was a miracle that we got it by 1996, which is when there first started to be human trials. And so when I asked myself, how could that have been sped up when you look at the way in which technology was evolving to make those breakthroughs possible? I don’t think a huge amount. I think that a better, less brutally homophobic society would have done, would be to — first of all, notice this quickly and see it as huge story — and then develop treatments for the various opportunistic infections that were actually killing people, even as they tried the extraordinarily difficult process of isolating the virus, because we had no idea what it was. It took time. And then of course, to start testing possible combinations of drugs that might prevent it.I wish you could say, “Oh, if we had only been more enlightened, we would have immediately jumped to attention and gotten a cure within five years, and all these people wouldn’t have died. The truth is that the technology wasn’t there, the science wasn’t there yet, the computer graphics that we were able to model the precise shape of proteins that would come into a precise niche in a particular cell to block the transmission. It was a huge medical advance. And as late as 1995, we were being told it wasn’t working. It was a huge shock when suddenly the drugs started to work in combination with, because when the protease inhibitors were tested by themselves, they didn’t do everything they could have done. It turned out it was the added arm of protease inhibitors that rendered the entire combination therapy — the cocktail — viable. And by the time we really knew the disease was at large, it was already too late. It has a 10-year latency period. You don’t notice for about a decade. Of course at the beginning, there was a huge fight in the gay community about shutting the bathhouses, taking this seriously. There was a huge battle and, and men — great man, like Randy Shilts, God rest his soul — really fought that battle and won. But he was targeted as a right-wing fascist by left-wing gays. So that’s the other thing that was true: we weren’t all united. We were fighting each other at the same time as the disease, rather viciously. I’ve never experienced the kind of hostility from other gay men than I did during that period.Debra: Why is it that some gay men were saying that the bath houses shouldn’t be closed? Is it this sense that the virus wasn’t that serious of a thing to be afraid of?Andrew: It was more that the extraordinary trajectory of the gay rights movement. There was the beginning in the 1950s and ‘60s, the real pioneers, people like Frank Kameny, arguing for civil rights for homosexuals, walking in front of the White House in the 1950s, the first person who was fired in a security clearance for being gay and sued the federal government in the 1950s to say, “reinstate me, a real hero.” But then there was this merger with the ‘60s counterculture, and then it exploded with Stonewall. There really was this culture of sexual free expression, which became a symbol of liberation. And people just didn’t want to be told that their liberation was at an end, and the institutions that represented that liberation they clung to — however irrationally, however bizarrely. And it was not yet known for sure how this virus was contracted. Although it seemed pretty obvious you don’t want to be having unprotected anal sex if you don’t want to get this. And so that was the reason: there were political and cultural reasons to resist closing the bathhouses. And once again, it was a battle between the center-right of the gays and the left of the gays. And it’s been a continuing internal battle that is never really explained in the mainstream media, or even detailed.Debra: Yeah, I think that’s something that people don’t realize — that I’ve heard people say they don’t even like using the term “gay community” because it’s not homogeneous. And that you can’t really say that by being gay, everybody thinks the same way. And even for myself, for a long time, I foolishly thought, “If you’re gay, you’re liberal.” And it wasn’t really until I became a journalist that I realized, no, you can be conservative and gay too.Andrew: Almost a third of us voted for Trump last year. Now a third is not the same as the African-American community, or even the Jewish community in terms of Democratic Party support. The Democrats got the lowest-ever share of the gay vote last time around. So that’s interesting, but also it makes sense simply because, you know, as I’ve said before, gay people aren’t invented under a gooseberry bush in San Francisco and then unleashed across the nation to ensure that your interior design is perfect and your dinner parties are very well attended and very amusing to attend. Gay people are born randomly. We’re the only minority that’s born randomly to the majority. So we all grow up in straight contexts, almost all of us. I mean you didn’t, Deborah, but obviously you’re an exception to this. Certainly most gay kids, they're born in Arkansas and Texas — in the reddest of red states — they’re born seeking to be soldiers, doctors, lawyers, construction — there is a vast array of different kinds. And because we just sprinkled randomly through the population, and because we are not with other gays for at least, you know, a good couple of decades, usually there’s no community in that sense. And there’s also because we don’t have our own children. We can’t transmit the historical knowledge of the community to the next generation in a way that, for example, Jewish parents can talk about the Holocaust, or black parents can talk about the experiences of African-Americans in America, or Asian parents can talk about internment, as well as good stories of success. We don’t have kids. We can’t tell them that. They are being born to straight all the time. And some of those straight people are hyper liberal. Some of them are hyper conservative, and their gay sons and daughters can react or can conform or not conform. And that was the first thing I knew. The first time I went into a gay bar — to be honest with you, I was like, Jesus, I was expecting something completely out of RuPaul’s drag race, or some sort of leather festival. But no, there were all these bloody normal people hanging around dancing. They come from all walks of life, seem very straightforward. You’d never guess they were gay outside of this place. And I was like “Blimey! Who’s been lying to me all these years?” It kept me from coming out and it’s still true. Like there’s a way in which, I mean, I've gotten mad and I shouldn’t, because it's pointless, but the mainstream media will distort the reality of gay people in grotesque ways. And you would think, first of all, that there are only trans women of color in the gay rights movement. And you’d also think that we’re all queer, even though a hefty proportion hate that word. That, you know, we’re all obviously lefty and that we’re on board with the new alphabet movement, which is less a gay rights movement than it is at this point a trans movement allied with a racial justice movement, which is utterly unrecognizable as the gay rights movement was in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and even the first decade of the 21st Century. Gay men are no longer really regarded as part of this movement.Debra: Well, you guys are — gay men or just white men now, even if you’re not —Andrew: Well we’re the oppressors, if we’re white. And you know, the number of white gay men that are now allowed to represent, uh, the 2SLGBTIAQ+ community is vanishingly small. And most of these organizations now condemn a white male power, which includes the gays. Meanwhile, financially, a lot of these movements are funded by white gay men. At some point, somebody is going to say, “Why am I spending money to be told I don’t really belong in my own community?” Or we’re told, like lesbians are told, for example, that if those of us who support civil rights for transgender people and are thrilled by Bostock — the decision that basically put transgender people in the Civil Rights Act, and I’m very proud of that and want to support that and believe in transgender rights — nonetheless, if we say that we don’t want to have sex with someone presenting as a man, who has a vagina, we are bigots, we are transphobes. Because the core reality now of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, so to speak, is that the core element is not sex — biological sex — which I think of as foundational to the definition of homosexuality. I mean, it’s the attraction of one sex to the same sex, right? Because we used to call it same-sex marriage. Now it is gender identity, which trumps that. So if you have all the biological capacities of one individual and you’ve transitioned, you are now a male. And if you are gay and not attracted to that male, you’re obviously excluding trans men from your dating or sexual pool. And that is offensive and bigoted. And so we’ve come full circle. I, at the beginning of the movement, was told by lots of right-wing church ladies, “You just haven’t met the right lady yet.” And now I’m being told, “You haven’t met the right person with a vagina yet.” And part of me is like, “No, I do not have to defend my sexual orientation.” The whole point of this movement was not to have to defend my sexual orientation. Now I’m being told I can’t own it. I can’t celebrate it because the trans movement has deconstructed sex into gender. And gender means that I don’t have a biological sex. I’m just gendered.Debra: I have a whole chapter in my book about this — chapter six in The End of Gender — about how lesbians are being told that they should like a penis if someone identifies as female. So you're the perfect person for me to ask this because I've been wondering why is it that these powerful gay men have essentially turned their backs on the movement?Andrew: Well it’s achieved its objectives. What more does a gay rights movement need to do? We have full civil rights. We have the right to marry. We have anti-discrimination laws for every branch of activity and we have the right to serve our country. If I told someone 20 years ago, that all that would be possible, they’d be like, “Oh, well, we’re done now.” And we are done. What else is there to do? What happens is that these groups that have existed to do that, they no longer have a reason to exist. So they come up with new reasons and they generate new controversies and they fixate on other questions. So that essentially, we now have a BIPOC trans movement that is operating in the carcass of a gay rights movement. And I don’t think that trans people really have much more to accomplish. I think once you’re in the Civil Rights Act, and once you can get your transition paid for, what we’re talking about now is a few small areas, such as whether children before puberty, especially gender nonconforming kids, have the capability to knowingly consent to permanent, irreversible changes in their body that will prevent them from fully becoming the sex they were born as. And that is a whole other question. There’s also a whole other question about sports. But these are not big questions, essentially, in terms of how many people they effect. And if you look at the Equality Act, which is what they want to pass, they've been trying to pass this since the 1970s. I mean, I was told I had to wait. I should shut up about marriage until we get that done. Well, if I had, we’d still be waiting. The Equality Act adds two things. It redefines sex as subordinate to gender, and it eviscerates any rights of religious people to exercise their conscience and say that they don’t want to be involved in anything to do with any particularly substantive gay or transgender issue. Which of course I’m against too.Debra: It drives me crazy with the kids, because I would think that these men know that those kids were them when they were young. I don't know how they wouldn't, because the research backs that up. I don’t want to go too much in this because my audience has heard me talk about this a million times already. But that’s what upsets me about it.Andrew: I’ll tell you this from my own experience that I, as a kid, before puberty, I had crushes on other boys. I even had a scrapbook where I would — because there was no porn for us. I didn’t even hear the word “gay”, let alone a picture. And I would cut out of Sunday magazines hot-looking guys and put them in my copy book. And I would draw the men I was attracted to because that’s all I had to go on. And they were dudes, they were definitely dudes. And in fact, they were big hairy dudes, which turned out to be my main predilection in men, as I grew up and grew older. But I didn’t know I was gay. I didn’t know what sex was. You don’t know really what sex was till you go through puberty.So there was some panic in some ways — that I wasn’t like the other boys. But then puberty happened. I couldn’t have been more psyched to be a man. I suddenly got this amazing 24-hour gift in my crotch. That was something that never stopped giving intense pleasure. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I wanted to be more male. I actually, at one point was a kid, I poured my mother’s mascara, and I didn’t do my eyebrows, but I tried to get the little boy hairs on my chest to look black, so I could have a hairy chest. I was obsessed with every chest. Everyone’s different, of course, but I’m concerned that young gay boys who may be gender nonconforming, who may like Barbies, or may have experiments with lots of female activities, I’m concerned they could be pressured into thinking they’re not gay, but that they’re actually girls. And gay men have fought for a long time to be understood as men, not as something other than a man, not as something like a woman. Straight guys sometimes say to me, about me and my husband, “Who’s the girl, who’s the boy?” And I’m like, “You don’t understand. We’re both boys. That’s the point.” That’s more subversive — so much more subversive and so much more shocking to people than the notion that you’ll change your sex and conform to the male/female dynamic. (The interview continues next week with the second half) 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

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

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

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

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

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

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