The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

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

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

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

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

Bryan, who teaches economics at George Mason University, is the author of the graphic nonfiction NYT bestseller Open Borders. His views on immigration, nation-states, and democracy are extremely different from my own, so we debate all throughout the episode. Bryan has been the most recommended guest by our readers, who clearly want to see some fireworks on this issue. I had a lot of fun.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app” — which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. To hear three clips of my conversation with Bryan — on whether a country’s citizens should have any say over immigration; on whether adding a billion people to the U.S. is wise or feasible; and on whether voting is irrational “poetry”, as Bryan puts it — head over to our YouTube page.Meanwhile, a wave of reader email came in after our episode with Jonathan Rauch, the most email we have received for any guest. Many of them are below, starting with this reader:This was an excellent podcast. Jonathan Rauch is kind and articulate, a great combination, and your dialogue was a great mixture of respectful conflict between the two of you and time for each of you to make your cases.In light of a new opinion piece in the NYT, “Cancel Culture Works: We Wouldn't Have Marriage Equality Without It,” and throwing in some of Rauch’s ideas, I wonder what you think about this: Democrats and those to the left of center have long been accused of playing too nice. Republicans began by using negative ads — tactics that didn’t begin but coalesced under Trump — and progressed to outright threats and naked power plays used to punish wayward thinkers. Democrats, on the other hand, wouldn’t attack each other and generally held on to the idea of building relationships and playing nice much longer. The problem is the negative ads worked. The threats worked. All of Trump’s disgusting tactics worked. Mind you, I do believe the Republicans may be hurting themselves in the long run, but in the short run, they’ve got loyal politicians, courts and state legislatures packed with like-minded conservatives, voting districts drawn to favor themselves, and an electorate — approximately half the country — that supports them through thick and thin.It seems to me that cancel culture and its wokeists are simply taking on the same cutthroat tactics. They’re tired of losing and being the nice guys. The culture has taught them to be more cynical, that long-term persuasion is too soft, takes too long, is too vulnerable to being undermined in the short term. Case in point is the example of that Times op-ed. I don’t know if the author is right that gay marriage needed to start threatening opponents’ livelihoods and positions in order to win, but it probably didn’t hurt, at least along with the more typical persuasive techniques. If one side continues to use cutthroat, anti-liberal (in the Rauch sense of the word) tactics that tear to shreds the slow, persuasive, long-term techniques of those following a more traditional, liberal model, what are the Democrats then left with?To be quite frank, I think Sasha’s argument was more good op-ed provocation than serious analysis of how marriage equality won. You win by shifting public opinion, which shifts the incentives of politicians. And, more importantly, that makes the advances stick. A reader dissents over my perspective on the pod:First of all, the Jonathan Rauch podcast was excellent. One of the best in a while. But I was gobsmacked that you could not concede that the danger of Donald Trump and the Republican disinformation campaign was a greater threat than what’s going on at the New York Times. You’ve truly lost the forest for the trees and it’s incredible, but sad, to watch. When you started your podcast I couldn’t imagine that I wouldn’t listen to every episode; I’ve been a fan for 20 years. But I don’t because so much of it is just you ranting against CRT and the NYT. I do believe that the Trump insanity and the GOP degeneracy are bigger threats to liberal democracy. But that doesn’t mean I can’t worry about liberal institutions caving to leftism. Another reader turns to Rauch:Dissent incoming!I like Jonathan Rauch and look forward to reading his new book, but he makes two errors in his apology for journalism’s recent missteps. First, mainstream journalism didn’t simply “get it wrong based upon the facts as known at the time.” Journalists called the Wuhan lab theory “debunked” (which it clearly wasn’t) and some characterized it as a racist theory — a NYT Covid reporter even called it racist just two weeks ago. Journalists never “showed their work” in reporting how this theory was “debunked.” Instead, they just cited Fauci and blindly accepted his version because it contradicted Trump.This leads me to my second point: journalists cannot blame Trump for their own mistakes! The NYT, WashPo, Atlantic, and New Yorker are operated by some of the most brilliant and well-educated people in the nation. Trump is a mountebank likely suffering from a mental illness, so what does it say about our so-called elites if Trump can so easily manipulate them? Journalists are the only ones responsible for their emotionally-driven reporting of the last five years. Rauch is giving Trump more power than he deserves and is failing to hold mainstream journalism accountable.From the Wuhan lab story, to the Russian bounty story, to the “Trump is a Russian Mole” story, to the “immigrants in concentration camp” story (remember Maddow crying about “Tender Camps”?), to their biased coverage of last summer’s riots, to their deceptive reporting on police shootings — journalists have nobody to blame for this but themselves. Folks like Taibbi and Greenwald have done a good job covering journalism’s depressing state of affairs, and Rauch is letting them off the hook by blaming Trump. Rauch eventually won over the following reader, who sided with his optimism over my pessimism regarding the state of liberal democracy: I came into the episode agreeing more with you than Jonathan Rauch, but much of what he said towards the end of the episode swayed me. As an elusive under-30 who believes in the constitution of knowledge, I’m still fairly young. (I assure you that we’re out there!) But even I remember the darker days of the gay marriage debate that took place when I was a kid. My parents, both lifelong Democrats, didn’t support gay marriage. My childhood Catholic church had pamphlets reminding parishioners of the Church’s stance on marriage before the 2004 election, when Republicans were putting state constitutional amendments on ballots nationwide to prohibit same-sex marriage in an attempt to drum up votes for Bush. Today even a majority of Republicans support it, and almost everyone I meet takes in stride the news that I have a wife.What’s currently happening in the wokified institutions is what Nassim Taleb calls the “dictatorship of the intolerant minority” (Rauch sort of expressed this idea without naming it as such). The more tolerant majority is expected to adhere to the less tolerant minority’s preferences. For instance, drivers who can drive manual transmissions eventually find mostly automatic cars on the market; once motorists who can only drive automatic vehicles reach a critical mass, companies start selling automatics, since drivers who can drive stick shifts can also drive automatics. However, the intolerant woke minority is extending their preferences so far that they’re actually impinging on the majority in a major way at this point. As you’ve pointed out, the majority who prefer small-l liberalism are getting forced out of major institutions or silenced. Moving from one epistemological system to another is a much greater shift than driving a different type of car, so I suspect that the initial backlash we’re seeing is only the beginning. The success of your Substack, along with the independent publications of many other heterodox thinkers, is highly encouraging. As Rauch said, there’s no guarantee of success, but I think there’s a high enough probability that the fight is worthwhile.This reader is of two minds:Rauch’s optimism was both calming and frustrating. In particular, he seemed to push back on you that the NYT etc were really as lost to liberal values as you claimed. At one point he said you were 10x too concerned. Yet his answer for why liberalism isn’t at risk is that we are making “new institutions.” These new institutions are great, I agree. But how can he simultaneously say “the old institutions aren’t lost” and that “our hope is the new institutions” — isn’t that a contradiction?From a member of Team Pessimism, who zeroes in on the liberal pillar of peer review:Thanks for another terrific podcast. On the question of whether we should be more optimistic or pessimistic on the future of liberalism, I am inclined towards the latter. This is because a central element of the liberal idea of knowledge production is the role of peer review. To be accepted, a new piece of research, or indeed an article presenting an intellectual argument, must be reviewed blind by anonymous peer reviewers.(By way of background, I have published in several of the English-speaking world’s leading peer-reviewed law journals, and according to various metrics, I am amongst the most widely published and frequently cited legal scholars in Australia and beyond. I spent several years as editor of two well-respected Australian law journals. I serve, or have served, on several editorial boards of international journals in my field.)Now there used to be ethical standards about peer review. In the liberal university, the role of a peer reviewer is to determine whether an article is of publishable quality and to advise the editor or editors accordingly. Reviewers must not discriminate based upon the point of view expressed. That is, as a reviewer, it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether I agree with the author’s viewpoint. The question is whether the paper is well-argued, sufficiently original, and supported adequately by evidence to the extent that it relies upon empirical claims. Freedom of speech in the academic community requires that we allow arguments to be aired and debated whether or not we agree with them. It also requires that anonymous peer reviewers do not abuse their positions to stifle legitimate debate.That culture of supporting a diversity of viewpoints and encouraging free academic debate used to be a characteristic of academic law journals. Not so much today.The culture was exemplified for me early in my career by a former professor of law who became an appellate judge. I submitted an article to the Journal he edited that, inter alia, criticised a decision on which I knew he had sat as one of three judges. What I did not know, was that he was the author of that joint decision. He had the article peer-reviewed and subsequently sent me a five-page letter explaining his decision in that particular case. He told me why he thought my analysis of the case was wrong and why he disagreed with the views expressed in my article. However, he ended the letter by saying “of course I would be delighted to publish the article.” He did not ask for any revisions. Nonetheless, I took account of his views and made various amendments, although I was not persuaded enough to change my viewpoint or the overall thrust of the article.That is how it should be.And it still is if your article offers a new and stunning discovery on the sex life of snails or makes a contribution to discussion about some obscure aspect of astrophysics. Peer review sometimes can be of uneven quality, but mostly the system works well in the sciences and even in much of the humanities. But on “social justice” issues, it is proving harder and harder to get work published that presents evidence for a different narrative to the mainstream progressive view. I have experienced the quiet censorship of peer reviewers in a number of instances over recent years. For example, my colleagues and I tried to tell a more complex story about domestic violence than typically appears in the law journals, drawing upon the “lived experience” of some 180 interviewees and many practising lawyers. It was ground-breaking research in certain ways. Eventually we succeeded in getting the articles published, but only with great difficulty.That was nothing compared to trying to publish on issues related to the transgender movement. Some reviewers have not even tried to find sensible reasons for rejection, dismissing the article in a paragraph of condemnation or providing a few sentences of vague nonsense. One reviewer rejected an article, inter alia, because the language was “outdated” and in some instances “offensive”. Here are some of the terms criticised: “sex change”; “sexual reassignment surgery”; “transgenderism”; “transsexual”; “ftm”; “mtf”; “opposite sex”; and “biological females”. I know others with similar experiences.This is the most insidious and hidden aspect of cancel culture. The University remains an important cauldron for ideas, but if dissentient views get censored by anonymous peer reviewers, if different arguments are not heard and evidence not allowed to be presented, then we are indeed in trouble. The social justice activists reject the ethos of liberalism, and peer review is one way in which they silence dissent. In so doing, the whole system of peer review is undermined.So I am pessimistic because I don’t see the activists learning or accepting basic liberal ethical standards. Their worldview justifies silencing dissent. They are the last ones therefore to allow it when they have the power of censorship in their handsThis is my deepest concern. The social justice left does not believe in liberalism. Another dispatch from academia ends things on a hopeful note:I loved your interview with Jonathan Rauch. I guess it struck home with me so strongly because I am, as it were, on the front lines of what you were talking about. I have taught philosophy at a small liberal arts college for 28 years (and am somewhat of a Platonist, to give you a sense of my point of view). And I teach logic every semester.I am sometimes a pessimist and sometimes an optimist about the general hopes for what you, Rauch, and others hope for, but I am ultimately reminded of what I take to be the central message of the Republic, which is that there will be no good society that lasts, but that what matters is the city of the good in the soul.I am optimistic about my individual students, who seem to drink in logic — logic! — like it is some kind of revelation. It is the simplest things that enchant them — while it is profoundly depressing that they have never come across it before. For example, some students almost grow giddy with the idea of something like the difference between validity and soundness! I get emails from them ENTHUSING about it, saying logic changed their life!I always tell my students that Plato gives me hope when he says in the Republic that “evils are many and good things are few.” And they look at me, very puzzled. And I tell them to consider the implication: that goodness is real. And I find it one person at a time. 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

Jon and I go way back to the early days of the marriage movement. In this episode we discuss his important new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, and get into some heated exchanges over Trump, the MSM, and Russiagate — Jon as the optimistic liberal and me as the pessimistic conservative. 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 from my conversation with Jon — on what he calls “the weirdest and craziest social idea ever invented”; on the propaganda of Trump and the NYT; and on the best ways to reform Twitter — head over to our YouTube page.Meanwhile, many readers are responding to my conversation with Charles Murray last week. One quick take:Great to hear Charles Murray! I’m sure Twitter subsequently lost its mind — good. Screw ‘em. Has anyone been more unfairly maligned than this man?Twitter was oddly quiet. Another reader enjoyed the long conversation as well:Oh jeez, Andrew — I can imagine the fun mail you’ll be getting for this one, but it’s the episode I’ve been really looking forward to! I found it both insightful, and emotional. But after one day, what sticks out for me is the section about affirmative action. When Murray says that when he went to Harvard in 1961 there were few Blacks and that you KNEW they absolutely deserved to be there on merit and academic acumen, that rang true. But then … there was no acknowledgement by him or you of the obverse: many of the white kids were there because of legacy or rich parents. I mean, isn’t that how Bush43 ended up at Yale? There MUST be a recognition of that when talking about affirmative action.Absolutely. I don’t want to end affirmative action before ending legacy admissions. They are inextricable acts of unfairness — but the long history of legacy discrimination makes it a higher priority. In the Quotes section of the Dish last week, we cheered the end of legacy preferences in Colorado. A reader dissents over the Murray episode:I find all this talk of race and IQ to be rather insulting to folks I dearly love. I would hope you could find a guest similar to Stephen Jay Gould (who’s dead) to provide a useful counterpoint to Charles Murray. Robert Bieder is still alive — he’s 82 and his book Science Encounters the Indian is a wonderful overview of the racist anthropology of the 19th century. If you’re going to give time to Murray, then you owe it to your readers to give time to the scholars who helped us all understand that intelligence has nothing to do with the melanin content of a person’s skin or how they do on a test.Obviously intelligence has nothing to do with melanin. But it is measurable, and real, and denial of this seems to me to be a denial of science. Another dissent from a reader:First, I’ll lead with my background, which informs my thoughts on this. Brought up by my Ashkenazi Jewish mother with a Yoruba/Nigerian father by blood, though not culturally, I am in an odd space in the race wars.  The motivated reasoning on race and intelligence by the white community is something I’ve often observed but rarely have seen commented on. For example, somehow the difference between black and white is portrayed as profound, and yet somehow the difference between the Ashkenazi Jewish and Gentile communities is portrayed as less profound, even though the gaps are similar. It’s about 1 standard deviation between each set of groups.  Also, in the case of the Jewish community, which has a lopsided verbal-loaded performance (visuospatial is below average from the Jewish community), if you just look at verbal ability, it’s likely a >1.5 standard deviation difference. Yet somehow the white community is fixated more on the black community, but doesn’t seem to really address the implications relative to the Jewish community.More importantly, the discussion of IQ is too unsophisticated. For example, is it possible that “environmental” factors can cause a >1 standard deviation difference in IQ scores? Actually, the answer is “yes”, even obviously so, but due to reasons of motivated reasoning, this is almost never discussed. I refer to the Flynn Effect, a well-documented phenomenon, where psychologists in the industrialized world have noticed that IQ scores have been creeping upwards, to the extent that every 5-10 years they need to “re-center” their scores to keep the average down at 100.  As a result, black Americans in 2020 actually get higher raw IQ scores than white Americans did in 1930. What is the reason that Americans score so much higher today than they did in 1930? Health, education, computers? Who knows, but it is profound enough that if psychologists didn’t recenter scores, today the average IQ score would be something like >120, which is absurd and can’t be right.People like you make life harder for people like me. I am a gifted black American who doesn’t need more bigots wearing the cloak of reasoning from the likes of you or Murray. Are there differences between groups? Possibly. Is there bigotry?  Certainly. Fighting against bigotry is ultimately more useful. It would be nice if you helped on this matter.I agree that the white-Ashkenazi gap and the white-Asian gap are weirdly overlooked as well. There is evidence, for example, of a recent spike in Asian-American performance on SATs, because recent Asian immigrants — self-selected and CSIS-selected by intelligence over the last couple of decades — have pushed the average up. The same study shows SAT scores diving recently for almost everyone else. I wish we had more focus on this than on the white-black gap.Equally, the Flynn Effect is well-known, but it does seem to have petered out over the last couple of decades — meaning that although IQ scores are indeed higher than they were decades ago, the mean differences among population groups hasn’t changed that much. That’s why they’re busy abolishing SATs — because they cannot do the racial engineering they want if objective reality counts. Get rid of the objective measurements and you can pretend we’re doing something real.Speaking of Ashkenazi Jews and IQ, Murray back in 2007 wrote a lengthy piece for Commentary on the historical and cultural roots of “Jewish Genius.”This next dissenter shifts to the subject of religion:Apparently every time you write about Christianity, I’m triggered — even as I listen to you from the safe space of my morning commute or evening neighborhood stroll. So I disagree with your assertion at the end of your episode with Charles Murray that Christianity provides, as I hear you, an irreplaceable societal value. From afar, it reads a bit more as nostalgia than an argument for something constructive. I take less issue with your comparison of religion to wokeism than Murray’s to environmentalism, but either way, in what way are any of these secular self-righteous zealots different than the Christian self-righteous zealots marching out front of the Planned Parenthood clinic across the street from my house, their ghastly, spiteful, judgmental signs thrust rather proudly in front of them? While I’d place my divided opinions on that subject alongside your friend Caitlin Flanagan, they are less divided in wanting me to live life under their rules. And if I did, some in my long-time acquaintance would go so far as to feel pride that they’d saved me from myself.Not only are Christians  — and people of every faith — quite capable of a lack of humility that I think you and Murray describe as, “that sense of frailty and your own sins,” they’re every bit as capable of perpetrating great evil: Dark Ages, Crusades, pedophilia, politicizing abortion, seeking vengeance through the death penalty, and justifications for abhorrent attitudes toward gay people, et cetera.A sense of transcendence, of humility, of cosmic insignificance can be a part of faith. But it can also stand alongside. Or be entirely absent.Referring to a lack of judgement over others, the idea that no one is better or worse than you, you commented to Murray, “I’m so grateful that truth was dinned into me.” Was it dinned into you, or were you born innately receptive to it, even eager to embrace it? You’re likely more educated on this than I, but I thought it was clear that many of the great social scientists (e.g., Steven Pinker) have dispelled the tabula rasa concept, including of human morality.That is to say, we cannot possibly fully understand why we are the way we are — and thus whether your intuitions, morality, and thinking are more a product of a Christian upbringing or the same genetic mix as your intellectual gifts. Perhaps your and Murray’s view of a good society simply comes from a natural ability to see complexity, including humanity, rather than from any dogma.So when you say, “The worry is that they will find other forms of transcendence that mimic religion,” I share your concern — but my concern is about zealotry and illiberalism in all its forms, be it the rabid faith that propels Hamas or far-right Jewish settlers, the savior complex of those abortion protesters marching near my home, or the self-righteousness of any far-left secular nut waving a copy of White Fragility in your face.For all the demurring on the topic of IQ that Murray does in this segment of the conversation, the obvious irony is that you and he are two intelligent, well-credentialed people having an intelligent, thoughtful conversation about religion. How many Christians are so reflective? Is their Christianity the transcendent factor here? Or is it your ability to see complexity, to simultaneously keep your Christian faith while also dissecting it?I have long made a distinction between the certainty of fundamentalism and the humility of faith. Christianity is extremely complex, as is religion, and has manifested itself in countless ways, some quite horrific. But Christianity’s insistence that we are “neither Greek nor Jew, neither male or female, but one in Christ Jesus” was radical at the time, and has transformed human consciousness for the better — and away from tribalism. One more reader:I want to thank you for a brilliant interview with Charles Murray. I find your style of interview very engaging, and I’ve come to rely on the Dish’s podcast for solid conversation. Murray simply brings out the best version of your interview self, and I think we all benefited from this one. I’ve been swimming regularly among podcasts of eclectic topics and guests these past 15 months and this is easily at the top of the list. The discussion about Michael Young and meritocracy was the “ah-ha moment” in this interview. Money quote: “The people on top become more convinced of their superiority than an English aristocrat was, and look down on ordinary people much more harshly than the aristocrats did.” It’s what others have called the “expert class,” or “technocrats” — the truly privileged and overly-educated who shift their morals at the drop of a hat in order to assimilate to the “global elitism” that has taken over our American institutions. The United States has had a massive failure of leadership for 40 years. We replaced the Communist threat of the Cold War with globalization, a synthetic “connectiveness” of first manufacturing and supply-chain dependence that was irreparably enhanced by the internet and the “levelling” of social media after 2006. Consider the disastrous trade policies of Clinton, the foreign policies of Bush and Obama, the blunt reactive candidacy of Trump, and now the asleep-at-the-wheel presidency of Biden. Our elites have calculated, based on their slow rejection of American exceptionalism, that Americans who refuse to bow down to their evolving moral superiority should be punished, whether through trade or tax laws, the judicial system and now institutional capture by neoracism that specifically rejects American “greatness” and denies equal treatment to “white” people because of a warped sense of social justice revenge. China loves all of this and continues to pay off our elite, buy into our economy, steal our intellectual property, and champion surveillance technology that our leaders defend as useful in order to win the inevitable arms race to developing artificial intelligence.Which is to say, it’s a heavy load. We all see it and we all feel it. We, being, We the People. But I remain optimistic that we can right the ship and solve many of these wanting problems. They can be achieved with new leadership who don’t reject America and actually believe in strengthening the people. The current class will fight kicking and screaming “you’re a racist,” all the way until the majority wakes up and says “no more.” 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

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

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

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

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