Caitlin Flanagan, Pulitzer-shortlisted Atlantic writer battling cancer, dissects how left-wing ideology distorts truth—from her 2013 "sex obligation" backlash to October 7’s Hamas atrocities (burned infants, executed parents) ignored by pro-Palestinian students treating Jewish lives as "numbers." Tracing roots to Foucault’s "power over reality," she links campus Title IX hypocrisy and gender theory to historical bloodshed, now supporting "canceling" Hamas supporters over gender-ideology critics. Her book On Thinking for Yourself urges high schoolers to reject dogma, crediting her WWII-veteran father’s lessons in rigorous debate over ideological purity. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to this week's interview with Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan.
One of the most mysterious things about American literature is that I am related to every good writer in the country.
Writing well in America without being related to me is like working in musical theory, in musical theater without being Jewish.
It's allowed to happen on occasion, but it's frowned on as a general rule.
My daughter, Faith Moore, has an absolutely delightful novel coming out for Christmas called Christmas Carol.
You should be pre-ordering that as I speak.
Spencer Clavin is no relation, but he is my son, and he's the author of the powerful How to Save the West.
The far-left Basilan girls over at the New York Times, Emily and Lara are my cousins.
My three brothers have all written terrific stuff.
I could go on and on.
But while I'm proud of all these relations, I'm not prouder of any of them than I am of Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic.
She is my little sister.
Technically, she's my sister-in-law, but over the course of 45 years, we've managed to annoy each other so much that we're now recognized as blood siblings in the eye of God.
Aside from being a writer of infinite skill and grace, Kate has also had an amazing career speaking truth in mainstream or so to speak, left-wing venues, which is, of course, a Class A felony punishable by a car chase through Los Angeles, ending in gunfire and bloodshed.
Yet she's not only survived, she has thrived.
She's celebrated.
She's been shortlisted for the Pulitzer.
She makes regular appearances on Bill Maher and other prestigious places, all of which while waging a superhero-level battle against cancer that was supposed to kill her 20 years ago.
And plus, she's a delightful person, and everyone who knows her loves her, including me.
And she continues to puckishly challenge mainstream sensibilities, as she did recently with an Atlantic piece on heroic masculinity.
Plus, she has graciously agreed to end her career and destroy her reputation by coming on the Daily Wire to talk to me.
Kate, it is always wonderful to see you.
Yeah, I guess my Kate Flanagan no-relation line is kind of like possible to not find villains.
Yeah, nice try.
Nice try.
So 20 years ago, you were, I remember you were a villain.
I think you had written an article suggesting that women had some sort of obligation to occasionally have sex with their husbands.
Cultural References and Partisan Challenges00:03:06
And I remember.
Oh, yes, that felony.
Yes.
In fact, I got cancer three weeks literally to the day after that came out.
So I don't know.
They got you.
They got you.
There was literally a website that was just cursing you.
The URL was just a curse against your name.
Everybody hated you.
And I remember I called you up.
I cannot, I think I was in some train station.
It might have been in D.C. or Boston.
I called you up and I said, because I couldn't stand it.
I mean, they were just ripping you to pieces.
And I said, Kate, I will introduce you to every single conservative editor in the country.
You will work forever.
You'll never have a problem.
And you said to me, I'll never forget this.
You said to me, no, I've always depended on the kindness of people who hate me.
Which I have refined now to the kindness of sadists.
Oh, all right.
Yes, well, that's everybody.
I just want to know, how has that worked out?
I mean, you've done so well.
You're well respected, but you keep saying things that you'd think would be unsayable.
Well, as I say, I think I've been kosherd in because I speak the language.
I have the cultural references.
I've seen the movies.
I have, that is still my world, that world of culture, literature, art, popular culture.
It's my world.
And when I'm with very, very few, I mean, you're the main one, but I know others, some young people, that I can talk with this way about things that matter to me that are separate from politics.
So I don't fit in.
And I, you know, and I think when I was growing up, when we were all growing up in that era, post-boomers, I guess, were like the ones who brought you the environment, the EPA.
Anyways, the idea, I think, you don't realize at the time, but you're a young child and you're figuring out, who am I?
Okay, this is my family.
Okay, the Flanagans.
It's the four of us.
And this is the town, Berkeley.
And then if you had a religion, we didn't have any religion.
Okay, I'm a Catholic.
I go to St. Mary Magdalen.
And right on top of that is the party you belong to.
And if you don't have any religion at all, that party affiliation is even more important.
It's something that this family that pulls us together and that combines us with our friends.
And we're Democrats.
And if you'd asked me as a kid, what are the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, I would have said, well, we're the good ones.
I was, of course, you're very moved.
You see these photos of, you know, John Kennedy was killed when I was a baby and Bobby, when Ellen and I were school in Ireland, I guess I was like six.
And you don't, you know, you're not going to go like, well, let me look this up.
Like, what's this guy actually like?
All Connected: Crimes and War00:15:24
My God, he almost got us all nuked.
Maybe not the best statesman, but you see the pictures and you feel, you feel pride.
And you, as a child, the Vietnam War is going on.
And I think that was absolutely a correct position that my family and all of our friends took that, you know, we're dropping, as it turned out, more.
Have you ever heard the statistic that we dropped more bombs or bomb power on that tiny country than we did in all of World War II?
I guess separate from the big ones.
Like this little impoverished country that, and just killing civilians in great number in horrible ways and unwinnable by the sort of code that we were following.
Like, I think that was a very terrible thing.
I respect now a lot of things that Richard Nixon did.
And compared to the Peanut Gallery, and that's the other thing is like, I'm finally open, if not to a great sea change, but like, maybe it's those guys.
Maybe I have to confess that I am more of a Republican.
I'm not a Democrat.
I have to say that.
In the last two weeks, I've realized I'm not.
In the last two weeks or so since the attack, the attack in Israel.
Yeah, it's been, I just think more than any event in my life.
First place, just, I think it came through the news in California at night, the night it had happened.
And I'm just in bed and these images are scrolling by of, and these reports that people have been tortured to death.
Infants have been burned in their cribs and machine gunned to death.
And they've taken these, you know, babies and put them on the backs of motorcycles between two people and driven them to the labyrinth of hell.
And it has not escaped my attention at all that the young women they take all seem to have been very beautiful.
Every picture I've seen, they're especially beautiful young girls.
I don't think that's an accident at all.
And more and more specifics, families bailed and wired, burned alive.
And children forced to watch their parents executed.
You know, the kind of crimes that when you try to go, I know you're able to imagine crimes and write about, I can't even, like when the things come on 48 hours about like some suburban lady is about to get murdered.
Like I, you know, I don't want to see that.
But you have to look at it.
And then the number, when that number hit me that more Jews were killed than in the Holocaust, that just caught me up.
That just, oh, well, we're at war.
That's what I thought.
So anyways, I'm still holding on to like just absorbing it.
And then the next, and I didn't even spend a fractional second thinking, I wonder what the response of pro-Palestinian Americans will be.
If you had asked me, I said, well, I'm sure they're going to put a statement strongly disavowing this, saying that while we stand with Palestine, we have no part in this.
We abhor it.
We disavow it.
Anything that it is, we are not.
And then I see college students, I think in the first quarter second, I'm thinking they're marching in a different way towards a different cause.
Maybe these are peace marches and like in the 60s and 70s.
And I'm like, they consider these particular hellish crimes to be just more numbers to put in a spreadsheet.
And they feel, well, we've got more deaths in our column in the spreadsheet.
And Israel is directly responsible for torturing its infants.
And it's not like I was a liberal who got mugged.
You know, it's not like I was ignorant.
It's not like I was naive.
I know a lot about the intellectual history of the past 50 years.
I know how we got here.
I know about the long march through the institutions, which my friend Yasha Monk calls the short march through the institutions.
Hugely recommend his book, The Identity Trap.
It just came out.
I knew all these things, but I didn't imagine that you'd see college kids celebrating in some respects babies burned alive and machine gunned and this.
And when I was a girl, I was just telling you this in a text the other day, you know, 1981 or two, you know, all I wanted is what all the other girls in my dorm wanted.
We wanted to, well, we wanted to get our degrees.
You know, we wanted to get, you know, we wanted to be educated and we wanted to live a lifetime in which our educations would inform it in all kinds of ways, including employment at certain times.
What we want to do is get married and have babies and have a household.
That's, it's like, no matter how crazy I was when I was young, I didn't even realize I had a master plan that was the winner, you know?
Like I just, there was never one second, no matter how off track I was and how uncertain I was and schools that I'm dropping out of.
Oh, it goes without saying, I'm going to fall in love.
I'm going to get married.
We're going to set up housekeeping and probably an apartment or something.
I read all these books about this one book about this young couple that got married in this really cool apartment that was they rented over like the garage of someone's house and how the wife decorated.
I was like, that's really cool.
And I'll have a baby.
And then my husband will make enough money and we'll have a house.
Like it was just like, you know, well, my plan for the course of my life is to breathe in and out.
That is my life plan.
And if you had come to us in my dorm at the University of Virginia in 1981, a girl's dorm and said, my God, babies have been machine gunned and burned alive and children bailed up and wired with their parents, we would have fallen to the floor.
We would have fallen to the floor.
And what about your friends?
What about your copious liberal friends and the people you write for and with?
Where are they?
Well, the editor of The Atlantic, Jeff Goldberg, was in the IDF.
I would think he would be the first person.
We haven't published anything off the last since this assassination.
And I presume that every possible kind of thing has been attempted to be published in there.
We don't have any quarter to this.
So this is a war.
But does he see, I don't want you to speak for him, but I mean, does anybody else see a connection between, say, the hatred of Jews and believing that men can magically turn into women?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
That's my beat.
Okay.
That's your beat.
I'm the one who understands.
And I hate to talk about it because it sounds like I'm advancing a conspiracy theory.
And I'm, I, you know, I'll go to my grave saying Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Buzz Aldrin walked on the actual moon, brought a little rock back.
Gene and I waited two and a half hours in the blistering sun to see it at the Lawrence Hall of Science.
You know, and the COVID vaccines, I was willing to roll the dice on them.
You know, I wasn't like, well, this is a no-problem vaccine, but not the moment in my life I'm going to stop taking experimental medicines, you know, 22 years out of cancer.
But one thing I just wanted to say on this episode of the podcast is these are all connected.
Things that seem disparate.
The attack on masculinity is connected to post-colonial studies and action is connected to gender theory, is connected to queer theory.
All of these things emanate from the same source of bad ideas.
And they all, when you talk to a young person about them, they're going to drain back very quickly into those ideas.
And the most fundamental to remember of them is that, and if we were to say, let's just say the starting point is Foucault, truth is subordinate to power is what he wrote.
And gaining power is what's important.
And truth is relative.
And, you know, everything is up for grabs.
And I sometimes, I think, and this is the hard part I'm going to have going forward because I never want to be anti-intellectual.
I never want to have someone bring in an idea and say, you are retarded.
Whatever.
No, but I mean, but I mean, intellectuals are responsible to reality.
They are supposed to be thinking about reality.
They're not.
No more.
That's not true.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I don't know what I was thinking.
No.
That's, see, that's where we, like, even you, we're so wanting to believe in a country, a nation that freed the death camps of Europe, among other things, created to the extent that any one of these idiotic, blue-haired, queer, marching girls is free.
The founders did that for her.
The founders did that.
And that girl, you know, these rapes, I don't really want to go into them.
We don't, it's like, we know what happened to the Ya Cidi women.
We know that.
And we know that, I mean, I know a lot thanks to my job and my work.
I know a lot of experts in this field.
Graham Woods, I respect hugely.
And he wrote his famous book about ISIS.
And he's saying there's not much sunlight between these crimes and the Islamic State crimes, you know.
And I see these things happening and I think, you know, so once this little blonde or little blue-haired queer girl on campus, if she gets all her little special dreams come true, as they should, and Palestine is liberated and the Jews are eliminated, let's say the quiet part out loud, and she says, alas, I'm going to go to visit free Palestine.
I'm going to visit.
Oh, I'm going to have a cultural immersion and excitement in the freedom.
And she's not going to make it to baggage clean because the coalition Hamas Hezbollah government will have men waiting there to throw her into a van and to drive her to the sex market from whence, whence, rather, not from whence, whence.
She will spend the rest of her years, maybe 10 if she can live them, praying to be dead.
So I have to ask you.
Back to you.
You have made a profession brilliantly of writing on the very edge of the acceptable of magazines like The Atlantic, of the New Yorker, places where some ideas, I mean, the ideas that I would espouse, which you've just been espousing for the last 20 minutes, that would not be allowed.
I mean, I would never be allowed to even speak there.
What do you do now?
Well, the one thing I truly trust, The Atlantic, I truly trust, I've been there a long time and I know the people.
And I know that I will be able, you know, that the things that I haven't written yet, such as a big trans piece, oh, it was cowardice.
It wasn't, I mean, there was initial, like, are you sure?
And someone said to me in a very compassionate way, are you sure you want to get into this?
Meaning, not here at the magazine in American life.
And I thought about it.
I'm like, I got cancer.
I got this.
I got that.
Let me hold back.
And I know that they will let me publish if it's well reasoned, you know, if it checks, if the facts check.
Yeah, I won't have a problem with that.
And I don't want my kind of thinking to become a kind of thinking that's not fit for a magazine like that.
I mean, I'm already in there.
I don't think I could ever get in there with these ideas.
Although funny is money.
If you're a writer and you're funny, you'll always work.
Like that's never a problem.
I think, I don't know.
When am I 61?
What am I even working for?
I mean, I'd be going to Brooklyn visiting my grandbaby nephews.
But I truly feel supported there and I'm going to start this writing.
And the first piece has already been approved, which is a piece on Hamas and Me Too, which is, okay, Trudy, that's fine with me.
But next time you get felt up, you're not going to march over to the special victims unit on campus and demand that you have all this trauma supported, informed care, and also extreme revenge taken to destroy this boy's life and marks that he needs to be on the, what do they call it, sexual offender list when he moves from town to town.
No more.
You stand in league with people who have broken children's bodies by the rape that they committed.
There's no more.
Those 40 Title IX officers at Harvard, your work is done.
Go off into the sunset.
And don't tell me that you, oh no, but I still need to be here to help our valorous trans students on the whatever, swimming, anything.
No, no, no.
They stand in league with people who behead homosexual men.
I can't imagine quite what they would do to a trans woman.
I can't imagine.
Maybe it has to be something that happens before the beheading.
I don't want to imagine.
But no, no, you don't have to worry about that, Title IX.
Done.
Are you aware that Harvard has now a program to help the supporters of the community?
Yes, I tweeted about it.
Thank you.
It's true.
This is something else I need to write about.
What do we know about the modern college student?
We're told this relentlessly.
Modern College Students' Challenges00:12:59
They call mom a lot because they're just a lot of stuff they don't know.
Like, mom, these are real things.
Mom, is student health the pediatrician?
Mom, but how do I get the wash out of the washer to put it in the dryer?
And they're also very fragile.
They have a lot of problems.
And maybe if you listed them out, as I would say, well, let's take an objective look at the size of this problem.
Might be small, but they have a lot of issues.
They have ADHD.
They have OCD.
They have body dysmorphia.
Some of these little shavers think they're the other sex.
You know, they got a lot going on.
And so when finals come around, I mean, this is true.
And on elite universities, that's so stressful that they need to have a special, all kinds of special rooms where like literally there's puppies to play with the puppies because everyone feels a little better with the puppy, a warm puppy.
And they can color with crayons.
They have coloring books with the big old, not with like my little fine point when someone was on chemo, Ellen would come over and sit with me and I do these little, you know, she put one on that wall in a bulletin board in your other house.
You know, she'd sit with me so kindly on so kind and we'd fill out our coloring books.
That's all I was really up to.
No, they got their Crayolas out.
And this is the kind of support they need to take their colonial, what am I saying, Colombian, I don't know, ceramics final, you know?
It's probably a pretty hard final.
Like, got me, I can't tell this one from the other one.
But they're that fragile and they're that sensitive.
And this is the big lie.
The big lie is that all these things emanate from kindness and sensitivity.
And they don't.
And this has just shown that this hall project has ended in pretty good speed.
We're all project, let's just call it Marxist.
That's a big, it's a specific term, but they always end in bloodlust every single time.
And if you want to break a college student's heart, you know, you see the Shea post, you're like, hey, let's just Google him and learn more.
I just love Shake of Hera.
I've got the Hawk Collection.
What?
What?
Torture?
What?
How many men did he murder?
Not without charges, habeas carpus, corpus.
And what, by the end of his life, it seems on many scholars' account that the force he was most in love with, separate from any goal or aim, was violence itself.
Our friends at Genucell have launched a new product.
It's called Genucell 3, which works fast on your under eye bags and puffiness.
Genucell 3 is smoother, more luxurious, and it uses advanced technology to deliver complex vitamins and minerals directly to your face for instant hydration.
It's like Gatorade for your skin.
My producer, Lisa, loves using the Genucell under eye cream.
We have the new Genucell 3 product on the way so she can add this to her skincare routine.
This new Genucell technology keeps your skin looking young and healthy for years to come.
The Genucell Fall Classics package also includes a jawline treatment for a firmer neck and jawline.
It also includes Genucell's anti-wrinkle moisturizer and deep firming serum.
Go to genucelle.com slash Claven for extra discounts on this amazing fall package.
Get your skin ready for the cold and dry weather.
If you don't look and feel your absolute best, you'll get your money back.
No questions asked.
That's genuicel.com slash Claven.
And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, sure, great.
That sounds fantastic.
But how?
Oh, how?
Please tell me how.
Do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So, but, but they seem to be able to eradicate the actual violence from their mind and replace it with their ideology.
I mean, aren't they, haven't they?
But they're not.
At this point, this is when it's been revealed to us that at this point, they love the violence.
They love the violence.
They love, you know, that guy at Cornell, the professor, whom I hope and pray is at least on the terrorist watch list.
Like, I'm not into like naming names on these college campuses, but I hope to God that the people who run that list are like, I hope to see some of these kids having a hard time getting home for Thanksgiving in one day because I think the flights should be a little bit screwed up for them.
But they have the bloodlust now and they're willing to admit it.
And they're now willing.
Yes.
You know, I have to be honest with you, as somebody who's always been a free speech absolutist, when they compare the cancel culture, where if a guy says a man can't become a woman, he's thrown off YouTube for life, to the cancel culture where you can't get a job because you want to kill 6 million Jews.
I kind of like that second cancel culture.
I'm not so big on allowing communists and Nazis to have a lot of people.
But you know what?
The people who created cancel culture, that term and its advocacy, when they are challenged by it, they say, it's not cancel culture.
It's accountability culture.
I'm willing to be held accountable for speaking the truth, but these guys are actually.
You can tell the truth that you'd wildly support Hamas that has murdered babies.
But just first place, like, what kind of dumbasses are they?
Like, you want to support Hamas, but you also want to go into major law firms and finance?
Read the room, you idiots.
That's going to be the first they're going to jump at.
All right.
Now, I really have to, I really have to ask you this because I've watched your career, obviously.
I'm incredibly proud of you, as you know.
But I don't know how you continue.
I mean, you say that the Atlantic will publish these things, but the idea that they will stand against Hamas, I get your editor, as you say, was in the IDF.
But the idea that they can see the way these things are working.
I'm going to say this.
He's a stand-up guy.
He's a great journalist.
And I have seen him take stands and just in work that I have done where it's minor, it's not related to this, but just I felt that a source needed to be really protected from possibly being abused.
My favorite thing is like getting work optioned and then shutting down the option.
I'm really good at that.
But he's fine with that.
If I say these people are just going to exploit that source, I don't want anything to do with it.
He's like that.
But you know, the other thing is, I want to be able, I want to be able to maintain a tone of voice, a respect for truth, a reasoned argument, a logical position to the point where that kind of work belongs in the magazine that I believe in.
And we have, we've got Ann Applebaum, we've got David From, we've got so many people that write in for us, you know, on one-offs.
There's a lot of that.
And everybody will say to me, well, I'm sure they say, I know they say to the bosses all the time, what are you doing publishing Caitlin Flanagan?
Because I always hear, what are you doing working at a place that publishes and they'll say some leftist thing?
And I'm like, I'm all for it.
Also, I'm 61 and I'm not, you know, like, I mean, you told me the New Yorker was going to like destroy me and they did.
I mean, it got away after two years.
Like, thank God I wasn't literally in the Mazdub tunnel.
It felt like it.
And maybe that would be, no, I trust these people so much.
I'll be like, oh, that's a bummer if, you know, I can't do it for sure.
But I mean, I'll land on my feet.
I mean, I get offers all the time.
I mean, I get offers, all good offers, all the time.
Like, people come out here and they want to meet me.
And I'm always like, I can't do it.
I've got, you know, I don't have a ton of energy, this podcast, notwithstanding.
I don't take them.
It's like, ah, starting a whole new thing.
But, you know, my movies, my ideas, you know, they have a place.
They will have always have a place.
Well, I think you're going to end up working here, but I have to stop.
No, I just want to have a shameless pitch.
I have my copy of Passive Love and Death ordered.
I didn't order it yet, but it's on its way now.
I have ordered it.
This is a short little book.
It's $12.
It's reprinted essays, but it's called On Thinking for Yourself.
It's for high school kids going to college.
It's about, I chose essays that would be meaningful to them.
And I said every single college on your college tour this fall and this spring, at some point in the tour, that tour guide is going to turn around and say, what's special about my college is our professors don't tell us what to think.
They teach us how to think.
And you might be like, oh, that's kind of different.
The next college, they're going to say that, the next college.
And then one of the things I say is you need to go through the departments and just look at the signs.
What do the professors have up on their office doors?
Who are the lecturers who are coming?
What's acceptable on that campus?
And, you know, it may be that you end up, if you have a talent in math and science, like you probably better be an engineer instead of a humanities major, because those are largely gone.
And, but it also proceeds from like, why am I able to, like, I've had such a crazy past, but do this work, is that my father, who art in Santa Barbara, what a thing to do to him.
It's like, it's three years of his life trying not to like die in the Pacific from a kamikaze and then we throw him back in the drink, but I'm right in the Pacific.
But he would say to me, I would go on on one of my rants and he'd listen.
He was an old, he was an old professor.
Is trained by Lionel Trilling.
And when I was totally tuckered out, and I thought that I, you know, he, I thought he was nodding because I was making good points.
And when I was totally tuckered out, he goes, huh, what's the best argument of the other side?
And it's like, that's how you learn to think.
That's how you learn to think.
The book is called On Thinking for Yourself.
You know, I'm sorry.
I did not realize you actually had a book out.
I'm sorry.
I'm really sorry about that.
Caitlin Flanagan Thinking for Yourself.
I didn't do any press.
It came out this month and I was like, oh my God, with Israel no.
But now I'm like, when I saw these college folks, I'm like, we got to help our high schoolers.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I can't wait to read that.
I have expertise in helping kids choose colleges.
And right now, the list I have is pretty small, but I really want to help high schoolers and to find a way to navigate their life and to tell them what to look for.
Start in the philosophy department.
Nobody wants to go there.
They're not even it up because nobody even wants to go there.
Find someone there.
Find the introductory course.
The one where you get your Socrates, you get your Aristotle on the introductory level.
Make a point of visiting that professor in his office and saying, I'm interested in these things.
They're kind of over my head.
They're not as exciting as some of the other stuff.
But when you, the books are hard to read, but when you explain it, that's really resonating with me.
What can you advise me on my path here?
Kate, I got to stop you, but it's always wonderful to see you.
And I'm, and I can't wait to have you visit.
It's so nice to like talk to you at my kitchen table where I usually serve you dinner right now.
Yes, this has been the worst thing about this conversation: there's nothing to eat.
But Caitlin Flanagan, you can find her in The Atlantic.
She is one of the many great writers who is related to me, but one of the greatest of the writers who is related to me.
And her book is On Thinking for Yourself.
It's great to talk to you, Kate.
And you left out Ellen as a writer.
You're not really.
I know she hates.
She doesn't want me to mention.
She doesn't want to be associated with me.
She's that relation, too.
Okay.
All right.
I'll see you soon.
All right.
Okay.
She's spelling it with an E, not an A.
Okay.
Again, Caitlin Flanagan at The Atlantic.
You've probably read her stuff.
She's just terrific.
And her book is On Thinking for Yourself.
My book is The House of Love and Death.
You should order that as well.
And it is now out and open, and you can get it immediately from Amazon or wherever you get your books.
And come to the show, The Andrew Clavin Show, on Friday.