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Dec. 4, 2020 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:25:32
20201204_andrew-sullivan-on-america-the-media-and-fighting-
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Custom Window Coverings 00:03:35
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Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Today on the program, we've got Andrew Sullivan, journalist, commentator, and all around brilliant guy.
He is a Brit by birth, but has made this his adopted country.
He's become a U.S. citizen and He has been writing for publications like the New Republic and New York Magazine for years, even though he's a conservative and may have some unorthodox conservative views, but has been sort of fighting some culture wars for a long, long time and is just brilliant in the way he approaches tough issues.
He was pushed out of New York Magazine not long ago, is having similar problems to those I'd say experienced by Glenn Greenwald, by Matt Taibbi, and others, Barry Weiss, where his views. Didn't necessarily align with the wokesters at his company, and he effectively got pushed out.
And now, in a happy end of the rainbow story, he's killing it on Substack.
So if you want to subscribe to him directly and help make him uncancelable, which he pretty much already is, you can check him out there.
But I think you're going to appreciate the interview because he's at the place now where he really can say anything about anything, and he wants you to be there too.
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Biden's Surprising Narrative Shift 00:15:38
And now, a man with whom I have had some public battles in the past, but with whom I have much more in common than I do not in common.
He is the founding editor and co owner.
Of the weekly dish on Substack and also host of the Dish Cast, Andrew Sullivan.
Thank you so much for being here.
You're so welcome, Megan.
It's a great pleasure.
Okay, so let's start with this.
We are about a week out.
From Thanksgiving.
And I don't know about you, but I've been thinking about our country a lot lately, just through this podcast, through the election, and always at Thanksgiving when you think about what you're thankful for.
I know that you became an American citizen in 2016.
You were born in England.
So, what are you thankful for when it comes to this country?
Like, what do you still love about America?
Oh, so much, Megan.
And I think that's partly why I'm a little resistant.
To people's desire to totally transform it and also a really protective of what makes it unique.
I mean, I came here in 1984, a very long time ago, as a student, and I fell in love within weeks.
I remember telling my folks that I know this sounds strange, but I feel like I finally come home.
And I think many Americans don't realize how special this place is, how the freedom, especially, to be who you are.
Or want to be, to express yourself without constraints was always for me the most thrilling part of it.
Now, Britain has a lively culture of free speech, but nothing like the United States.
And it also had a structure of class and of assignment of people to various categories upper, middle, lower, lower, middle, upper, middle, upper, lower.
It went on like that, in which everybody wanted to ask you, where are you from when you first arrived?
They needed to put you somewhere.
And especially someone like me who came from a pretty modest, lower middle class kind of background and Got myself into Oxford, that was a constant theme.
One always felt one had to justify oneself.
And I got here and I didn't feel I had to justify myself at all.
In fact, people back in Britain would always ask me when I was doing something particularly enthusiastic or ambitious, who do you think you are?
And in America, they just said, good for you.
And I know that sounds very simple, but that energy, that individualism, that dynamism, That's what I love about this country.
And also, I came to understand its constitution, its separation of church and state, its brilliant dispersal of power.
It struck me as an incredibly vital political model.
And I fell in love with it and tried to become a citizen for a long time.
And HIV prevented me for quite a while.
And then eventually, they lifted that, and I was able to become an American.
Is that right?
There was a restriction on folks who are HIV positive from becoming American citizens?
Yes.
I didn't know that.
For many years.
No, people didn't.
1993 to 2011, I think, is the time.
Yes.
And of course, people with HIV didn't want to protest it because they were kind of private about their health.
And it was invented by Jesse Helms.
It's the only disease actually to be legislatively put into immigration law to prevent anyone with it.
And of course, it was not enforceable.
How do you.
Test everybody come off a plane from anywhere in the country.
You can't.
But it acted as a kind of threat to people with HIV who weren't citizens.
And I lived in considerable tension and nerves and worry that they might attempt to get rid of me.
And so finally making it was a real achievement for me.
And it took a long time.
But I love this place a lot and I wanted to belong to it fully.
Wow.
Well, thank God those days are past when Jesse Elms was issuing his.
Policy on gay rights and what it takes to be and make an American.
And to his credit, George W. ended the ban.
He didn't, I mean, it was the end of his term.
But he put it in the PEPFAR legislation.
And so Bush himself actually ended that immigration restriction, for which I'm immensely grateful.
You know, I wanted to start with that because I think you and I are very similar on this, in that we love America.
And one of the things we love about it, as you mentioned, is the ability to say what you want here, to have the opinions and viewpoints you want, and to express them freely, both as an individual and as a member of the press.
The truth is there are people fighting against that right now.
There are people pushing the country toward what I consider to be a very dark turn.
You know, the woke left, the people who are trying to silence marginalized voices or heterodox voices or any voice that's not a far left progressive.
I mean, liberals, moderates, conservatives, they're all being silenced.
Most people don't feel comfortable expressing their views.
The only ones who do are the progressives.
I know you've pointed that out and like sort of the left, left progressives.
But I know you think that.
You wrote that you felt they were dealt an astonishing rebuke in the last election.
How so?
The striking thing for me, Megan, I don't know whether this is true for you, but the election results really surprised me in the way that they seem to have surprised the president, which is that we were expecting a big wave of some sort.
That's what the polling suggested.
An eight point lead for Biden in most cases, which ended up being something like four.
But what was also interesting was that.
The Republicans did pretty well, actually.
I mean, they gained in the House.
They're probably almost certainly going to retain the Senate.
That people turned out to be actually quite supportive of the police, not least minorities who need the police to be protected.
That the notion that this country, right now, this multicultural, chaotic, amazing, diverse place, is somehow the equivalent of a KKK run white supremacy, which is now.
Literally, the words used by people to describe America in 2020, most people don't buy it.
And when they were actually given a chance to affirm some of those left ideas, such as in California, where there was a proposal to enable the government to discriminate on the basis of race, it went down in flames.
You saw, after four years of what we were told was white supremacy, that non white votes for Republicans actually increased.
What you found was that.
People, believe it or not, despite their or whatever their identity, have ideas of their own and they have views, and they're not all identical.
That Latinos as a block is a kind of dumb idea.
It's, in fact, very diverse, rather like the old immigrants from Italy or Ireland or Poland or Germany.
Yes, they have similarities, but they're also extremely different in their backgrounds.
And we see in many Latino voters a wide variety of opinions.
Including those who really don't like illegal immigration, including those who want to assimilate, want to integrate, want to succeed in America, and have quite traditional American ideas, want to actually be part of this melting pot, as I want to be.
And so there was really, you realize that a lot of this notion that we live in this oppressive, racist society is entirely something concocted in the heads of very wealthy left liberals.
And in reality, although obviously in every society, Prejudice exists, bias exists, racism exists.
But America actually is a story of overcoming of that rather than the entrenchment of it.
And as someone who, you know, in my Lifetime here, my adult lifetime here.
I went from a country where I was barred for HIV, where I was, if I had a relationship, it would actually be criminal in the District of Columbia when I came in here.
When you came in as an immigrant in the 80s until 91, you had to declare that you were neither a communist nor a homosexual.
And through campaigning and writing and talking and thinking and persuading, within a quarter of a century, we have a revolution in civil rights for gay people and the centering of gay people once again into our own.
Families and our communities.
And a country that can do that in a quarter of a century, that could go at that speed and also arrive at a settlement about it, including marriage equality, I mean, that is not a country that is a function of bigotry.
It just isn't.
It's not a country that's white supremacist.
It's not a country that's homophobic.
It's a diverse and open country that has resistance to change and also support for it.
So I can't personally, in my own experience, Coming here and seeing that change, believe in intransigence and intolerance that the left wants to argue is the reality of America.
And so, when I see things like the 1619 Project, or I see things, the rhetoric that we now hear among critical theorists of the permanence of oppression in America, my feeling is of course there's elements of discrimination, there's elements of challenge for particular minorities.
You'll always feel a little out of it if you're a tiny minority.
But The story is the success, not the failure.
And I think that implicit argument that America is failing you, that America is systemically racist and bigoted, was just something people didn't buy.
And people among the minorities themselves didn't buy.
And they were willing to think about other issues and get out of their identity trap.
I know you wrote that the election revealed the New York Times woke narrative of America, the centuries long suffocating oppression of minorities and women by cis, white, straight men.
Is simply a niche elite belief invented at a bubble academy imposed by bullying, shaming, and if possible, firing dissenters.
And I do think it's a problem, though, when you have these groups like the New York Times repeatedly pushing that narrative.
And when I saw those results, too, of the Republican Party, Trump of all people, increasing his share of minority votes beyond what any Republican has gotten, it really did feel like them.
The voters themselves having the last say.
They may not get on the pages of the New York Times or on CNN.
That CNN won't put on people like Coleman Hughes, who's a liberal, but he's not woke.
But he's been speaking out against BLM as a black man in America.
He doesn't buy their narrative about cops.
So, anyway, folks had their say at the ballot box, which is really the best way to have it.
No, Trump didn't win, but they kept divided government.
He increased his share.
And the question now is really.
Will they listen?
I know what I think.
I suspect that they're not listening.
Although there has been a little bit of a sort of withdrawal since.
There hasn't been many aggressive attempts to defend that position since, given the results of the election.
I mean, some of us have taken a certain amount of, I wouldn't quite call it glee, but certain satisfaction in seeing their vision of the world kind of just fracture upon reality.
But, you know, the conservative, the proper conservative, is always waiting for reality to assert itself.
And the reality of America is that we don't live in a brutal, oppressive country.
We did, however, I think for four years, and this is important to note, Have a president who really didn't believe in, didn't have a real understanding of what liberal constitutional democracy is, and is currently proving that he still has no idea and has done immense damage to a whole variety of democratic norms that required, I believe, as a conservative, strong pushback.
Conservatism is not populism.
Conservatism does not want to destroy our institutions.
Conservatism doesn't want to uproot.
Everything we have long believed in.
It believes actually in continuity, in gradual change, in moving in tune with the times, but never ahead of them, always slightly, little bit behind, in case we make mistakes and we do things that turn out to be completely foolish, as we have done and as humans always will.
So I do feel that there needed to be a conservative resistance to Trumpism.
And I was happy and proud to do that.
I didn't vote for him.
I never could.
I never would.
But I voted for Biden with a sort of queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach about the people who might come in with him.
But Biden, I wonder whether anybody else in the Democratic Party would have won that election.
I really do.
There's something almost uniquely fitting about Biden right now.
And he has changed himself.
He is not the Biden I remember, the garrulous, constantly blathering, somewhat incoherent, overly passionate, gaff prone man with loggeria.
Um, diarrhea of the mouth most of the time, and now he's become this sort of like, this sort of rather statuesque elderly figure.
Oh boy, who represents.
That's what he's come to represent, statuesque.
He's polite here, but yes, he's kind of come on he's.
He's for someone, his age, he's really.
He's amazingly fit and lean um and and quiet.
I mean, that's that's because they stuffed him in this basement, wouldn't let him out.
For a year he was saying things that just no one was listening because he was down in on the bean bag in the basement with his diet coke No, I'm joking because he was gaff prone.
I couldn't understand half of what the guy said in the race.
And I don't think you're wrong that he's probably the only Democrat who could have gotten it done.
I know my friend Crystal Ball would yell at me and say, Bernie could have gotten it done.
I don't think so, given the way we saw the left vote on socialism.
They're not in favor of it, and he's open about his policies there.
So I don't disagree with you that Biden was the right man for the time on the Democratic side.
But calf prone.
And, you know, I couldn't understand half of what he said.
He was, I think it's pretty clear he's having some age issues, some old age issues.
And it's scary.
It's a little scary to have him at the helm at the moment.
I don't, to be honest with you, I can't really tell if that's going on or if he was always a bit like this.
I mean, if you try and follow him in the past, just following the syntax is a little hard.
And he's rambling.
I mean, there is a certain Abraham Simpson quality to him at this point.
Tribalism on Social Media 00:14:54
But what I was saying really is that not that he's necessarily changed, but whoever is around him, whoever he has chosen to be around him, have really been shrewd in keeping him away from the public.
I mean, COVID helped a lot, preventing his tendency to go off on tangents, and also for him to assume this rather stolid old establishment demeanor, which I think is reassuring to people right now.
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You call yourself a conservative.
You're not obviously pro Trump.
But what did you think of the Lincoln Project guys who are unleashing all those?
Vicious ads on Trump, and it seems to have morphed into vicious ads on Republicans writ large.
I don't know what they stand for, to be honest, but I know they loathe him.
What do you think of them?
Well, I kind of enjoyed it at the beginning.
I think a certain amount of tweaking this absurd person is definitely worth doing.
And I also felt they had a sort of killer instinct that often Democrats and lefties don't really have in terms of political advertising.
But over time, I don't know, it felt like they were running it a little thin and they seemed to miss, I think, the challenge, which is that if you are a traditional conservative, if you believe in limited government, if you believe in prudence, if you believe in liberal democracy and its norms and procedures, if you believe in gradual change, then you're not eventually going to become a cheerleader for the left, which is what the Lincoln Project, I think, eventually became.
And it's a kind of weird moment where people who who were on the right, who reacted to Trump, I think, in the right way, in the instinctually right way, over time, found it impossible to stay where they were as moderate conservatives and were pulled by the sheer power of tribal loyalty into somewhat parodic left wing ideas and left wing language.
I mean, I'm thinking now, I don't want to really be rude to people, but Jen Rubin, for example, I find almost indistinguishable now from a hardcore lefty.
Max Boot just seemed to, didn't just.
Chuck some things, but chuck everything that he once believed.
And look at all of this.
Yes, they just flip.
They go to MSNBC and become part of that propaganda, the task.
And I don't, it's hard.
It has been hard because you tend to be without friends and without support to stick to a rather moderate conservative position, which I feel I've always held.
I don't think I've changed that much except on foreign policy, and yet not be tempted to become a resistance crazy.
Right.
And I tried to do that.
I think I, in some ways, overreacted to some of Trump's seemingly authoritarian moves because I didn't realize that he was actually, even though he might want to, he was kind of incapable of being an effective authoritarian simply by virtue of his haphazard management style, which is really not a management style at all.
But I didn't jump into wokeness like a lot of these other people did.
I didn't jump into support of the Democratic Party.
I found it important to double down.
On resistance to the way the left was exploiting the polarization that Trump represented.
And I'm not patting myself on the back, but I think the truth is that.
Retain a nuanced position in a tribal world means that you're subjected, especially with social media now, to vilification of such constancy and viciousness that you're tempted to say, Oh, screw it.
I will just utter these tribal slogans or the other.
And I've managed to piss off all the Trumpies.
And I've also obviously seemed to be a figure of real hatred by the woke left, especially the younger generation that regards me as some kind of Nazi.
And, you know, that's hard.
It's hard to wake up every day and be who you think you are and write arguments and be called a white supremacist or a racist or a misogynist, as if these were terms you just tossed off in the wind.
And they're not true.
But I think the weapon of broadcasting calumny against individuals across social media has been a very effective bullying tool.
Not just on the left, but also on the right, in which people who are Republicans or conservatives have stood up or at some point disagreed with Trump and been torn apart instantly by the right-wing machines.
And I think it just requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to resist that.
It's hard to explain what it's like to write columns every week and have them constantly have to fight for every word.
To have them say what you want them really to say.
Because your peers, often not your editors, because the editors are often kind of sane and great people.
Certainly at New York Magazine, they are.
But the staffers and the social media armies, they have one goal to destroy you.
And I understand why that can become incredibly difficult to tolerate.
Yeah.
I think you're right that there's, I know you've pointed out that there's sort of this crude moral binary that. the woke left has created where, you know, you're either a good person or a bad person.
You're either a racist or an anti-racist.
There's really no, there's no room for the complicated nature of human beings and the different value placed on different, I don't know, things in your life.
You know, we were talking about this last week when, or right before the election when Sonny Hosted in The View was suggesting, how could anybody not, not vote against Trump?
If you vote, if you vote for Trump, It means you don't care about his bigotry, his racism, his sexism, his transphobic nature, all that stuff.
And I was sort of laughing about it on the show, saying, that's so absurd.
Why can't it just be that, you know, some guy who works in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania is worried about putting food on the table?
Why does he have to have exactly the same values and the exact same priorities as Sonny Hostin does?
Especially when their view, their core view is that this whole place is a function of bigotry.
Right.
The whole place is.
Most people know that's not true.
Or you were.
You know, you were a first generation Honduran immigrant who's legal, who really doesn't want all this massive illegal competition for your job.
That's a completely legitimate and eternal view of first generation immigrants.
People want to also create your identity in such a crude way.
I mean, so I'm slotted into, at this point, the white cis.
Gay men, by the way, at this point, are certainly not the oppressed, according to these people.
We are part of the oppressors, especially if we are, God help us, white.
But I'm not just that.
You know, I have a religious faith which might make me think about moral issues that are slightly different than people on the left.
I might.
Have an economic view of the world which isn't that compatible with Bernie leftism.
I might have a whole range of personal experience unique to me that make me vote a certain way.
I still believe in the old liberal, classical liberal idea that in a democracy you make your arguments for your case and you back it up with evidence and you see if those arguments work.
And if they don't, you change your mind.
Whereas this current view is that you're permanently placed.
You have what they call positionality, which is that whether you like it or not, whatever's in your head, you are defined by one salient aspect of your identity.
And that is then what is inferred from that is a completely monolithic political view.
This is just not reality.
And as you point out, now there's a hierarchy of whose views matter the most.
So, in an attempt to sort of reposition the powers, the structure of power in the country, they've they've morphed into a new kind of racism, a new kind of sexism, as you point out, where the last thing you want to be is a white male.
Now, I remember talking to a guy at my school, a great guy, and we were talking about some of the problems that we were seeing there with sort of this far left ideology being pushed on kids.
And I was making my points and he was making his points and they were all the same points.
And he said, well, you know, you're lucky.
At least you're a woman.
I thought, oh my God, that's so crazy that he feels accurately, by the way, that his viewpoint Will be valued less by, in this case, school administrators because he happens to be a white guy.
It's absurd.
No, when you think of our notion of the far right, they have these odious notions that people who are white men are at the top of this racial hierarchy and have been empowered to rule over other races and other genders.
And there's a hierarchy of white men, white women, and blah, blah, blah.
It goes all the way down.
Well, what is wokeness except exactly that, but just turned on its head?
Yep.
And wokeness is in which white males are always the bottom, the people most despised.
And on the far right, it's there always at the top.
You just reverse it.
They don't even begin to see that they are copying the worst kinds of bigotry that they claim to be opposing.
If you are woke, you have to, first of all, whenever you encounter someone, immediately view them as black, white, Male, female, cis, trans, gay, straight, or LGBTQ, RST, UVW, XYZ, or whatever number of consonants we've added.
Never a vowel, always a consonant.
So many.
And, you know, no, absolutely no.
There is an individual human being there who may or may not be typical of their various characteristics.
You don't know their life.
You don't know their story.
You don't know their struggles.
You don't know their pain.
You don't know their happiness or their success.
And treating people as individuals is for me a moral, non negotiable.
I mean, it's what a Christian is demanded to do, not to see the surface identity, but to see the individual soul.
And to feel compassion and solidarity with that person as another human being.
So these things are very important.
People tell me all the time you know, you're just worrying about these bunch of loopy and loony students and their.
Wonky professors.
It really doesn't matter.
And I'm like, well, it does matter when all major corporations have internalized this as part of their human resources.
When When the media is run by people who believe that, in fact, this free discourse of ideas is bullshit, that it's all a mask for the power of the white males, et cetera, to control others, and therefore must write everything with a view to dismantling and deconstructing that power.
And there is no time out from that.
That is a core assumption of this ideology.
And it is completely soaking our culture.
I mean, you know, News Corp. Rupert Murdoch's corporation is having throughout its entire, the place you used to work for, Megan, is having struggle sessions around race.
There's no conservative institution that is immune from this, certainly no liberal.
And we all, in that sense, as I said a few years ago, live on campus now.
Well, I don't want to live on that campus.
No.
I want to live in America.
That's right.
And the inability to see human beings, as my therapist always says, When we talk about these issues, whether it's sexuality or gender or race, people are complicated.
They're complicated.
And he's right.
Honestly, that sums up whatever I'm paying this guy per hour.
That's pretty much what he says in response to a lot of the stuff.
And it's exactly right, though.
It is.
You can't, the knee jerked, jerk willingness to demonize people for having, quote, the wrong views, as opposed to embracing different viewpoints and debating them, which is Inherently American.
No, it's you're terrible.
And not only that, for people who actually do misstep, you know, somebody who says something bad, who uses a bad word, who, you know, sort of has an offensive moment, there's no forgiveness.
And I know you're Catholic, I'm Catholic.
Most Christians, they believe in forgiveness.
You know, our Jewish friends believe in forgiveness.
And yet, the woke left, the religion of the wokesters, there's no such thing as forgiveness.
One sin and it's over.
Forgiveness and Moral Binary 00:08:39
And they want us to sit back and be quiet about it.
But meanwhile, it's like, well, I might sit here and be quiet if you didn't just, you know, I got back to New York City after quarantine and they took a billion dollars away from the police department that's supposed to protect my family and my neighborhood based on a lie that was pushed by the BLM folks that cops are hunting black men in the streets, which isn't true.
Not to say that no reform would be welcome, but they're the whole purpose of their movement, which is to defund police is based on a lie.
And if you're going to take a billion dollars away from the police department that's meant to protect my community, My friends, my children, I get a say.
I get to speak up and it doesn't make me a bad person.
No, it doesn't.
And by the way, I think that I would be okay if people demonized my ideas.
That's fine.
I mean, I don't want them to demonize them.
I want them to engage them and rebut them or something else.
What I don't like is demonizing me as a human being.
I don't like being demonized because I hold these, not because I hold these views, because I'm a white person.
Male, cis, gay man who is expressing these views.
If I were someone else in a different identity, it would be okay.
And that is, you know, Ayanna Presley had this awful quote which said We don't want any black faces without black voices.
We don't want any Muslim faces without Muslim voices.
We don't want anyone in these minority communities to think for themselves or to dispute this ideology.
And they're able to intimidate people a lot.
They're able to bully us because they're claiming the high ground, but in fact, they don't really persuade.
And that's their weakness.
They're not interested in persuasion.
In bullying, and that in the end prompts the kind of resistance and the resilience that you saw in the last election when you saw these people still didn't buy this and wouldn't buy this, including members of these minority groups.
Now, we don't know the exit polls aren't perfect and they're bound to be revised, so we take this with a certain amount of skepticism.
But I think of the gay community, which rallied to the right in the last election, this election, and No one would have predicted that.
Have you seen anywhere any piece that explored that?
Have you seen any articles that help you understand the diversity of views among gay, lesbian, transgender people?
Do you know any of this stuff?
In fact, it is complicated, as your therapist puts it.
And the gay world is just as politically diverse well, not quite as politically diverse as outside, but definitely has a whole range of opinion, much of which really is quite.
Resistant to wokeness, and especially the gay white men who have pioneered, ran, and funded a lot of this movement, being told that you're evil by the people you're paying gets to be a little much after a while.
And there's also a sense that you can't ever accept success.
You can't ever take yes for an answer.
I mean, gay people have had an astonishing ride the last quarter of a century for incredible pain and suffering, but also extraordinary redemption and success.
We just had.
This summer, a Trump nominated Supreme Court justice gave and right gays and transgender people into the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Well, no wonder some gays decided that we weren't that oppressed anymore.
Maybe they could take their eyes off that ball and think about other things like their personal well being or their views of foreign policy or their understanding of immigration or these other issues.
Well, but no, as that happens, as you gain power, I mean, it's true for women too, it's true for Asians.
You get kicked out of the, you know, quote unquote minority club, and you're really just a traitor.
You're a traitor to your sexuality, to your gender, to your race.
You know, the white women, they're adjacent to power because they're with the white men.
Asians, same, they're white adjacent.
Gay men, well, you've gotten so powerful, you're out of the minority club.
And if you don't continue to fight for other minority groups, then you're a traitor and you're now a big.
I mean, it's like at some point the argument falls apart that maybe people just have different priorities and maybe they don't see the country in as awful terms as you do.
Yeah, and the truth is, it's not like gay men who have not fought for other people's rights.
Again, what more do you want?
We have the Civil Rights Act applying to everybody.
We have marriage equality.
There are a few small issues around transgender people that we need to flick around, but we've come a long way in that.
I mean, who are they to call us not progressive?
I mean, I probably, I mean, I don't want to toot my own horn, but I was working for marriage equality since the 1980s and 90s, and marriage equality is not for gay white men.
In many ways, gay white men were the people with the resources and the means to come up with elaborate legal documents that could protect their relationships.
It was poor black women.
It was poor Latino women.
It was women who had custody of their children that wanted this and benefited from it.
And so I'm just, again, sick of being told that because of the color of my skin, I don't care about people from other minorities or that I suddenly got mine and now I don't want anybody else.
Not true.
Absolutely not true.
Well, unless you believe America's awful and systemically awful, then they see you as continuously bigoted yourself.
I know that, by the way, the audience should know that you were calling for marriage equality long before anybody was seriously calling for it.
I mean, you were writing about it and pioneering it at a time when people were like, haha, that's cute or crazy.
And so, yeah.
I was also out as a gay man before anybody was out in the media.
I mean, from the very get go.
Do I get any credit for that?
Absolutely not.
I've been openly HIV positive since 1996.
You know, again, There's only the people are complicated putting me in the position of some oppressor who's never done anything or cared about anyone other than myself, which is the general line.
It's just you get used to it, and I know, but you shouldn't have to, but I it it wears you down, Megan.
I mean, it has to in the end, uh, and the the derision and the and then, of course, the the the actual machinations to get rid of you to.
Put pressure on your editors wherever you're working to fire you, not for anything you've done wrong, insofar as you haven't made a huge mistake in your work, you haven't written something crappy, you can't get your pieces read, but because you're simply unacceptable.
And, you know, I was asked to leave New York Magazine.
The following week, they ran an 8,000 word piece for me about plagues through history.
So it wasn't about the quality of my work.
It was about their desire, not the editors again, but other people, it's their desire to just simply say, I don't want to be associated with this person, that he's morally awful.
And, you know, America's weird like this.
It's a part of American history that Americans have tended to enforce orthodoxy through civil society, not through government.
So this is the country that gave us the Salem witch trials.
It's the country that gave us the Hollywood blacklist.
It's the country that gave us the scarlet letter.
It's the country that gave us McCarthyism.
And it's the country that's given us wokeness.
These are attempts to enforce morality upon people in every part of their life the language they use, the mannerisms they have, the places they work.
This is a deep puritanical strain within American history, which is not equivalent in many other countries.
This moralizing attempt to persuade and coerce and to save your fellow citizens.
If America were as bad as the establishment left now believes, why would all these people want to come here?
Mailing Surge with Stamps.com 00:06:01
Why would all this 86% of our immigration is non white at this point?
That's a huge.
I mean, what white supremacy invites 86% of its immigrants to be non white?
Right.
I mean, it's completely bonkers.
We're so bad at it.
It doesn't make any sense.
We're so bad at our white supremacy.
We got to.
Apparently, they need to try our best.
The most incompetent white supremacists.
In the history of the world.
More with Andrew Sullivan in just one minute.
He and I get into it over Donald Trump.
You're going to want to hear that.
And also, we're going to talk about solutions to this nonsense when it comes to the wokesters and how regular folks can fight back, folks without a microphone, because there are meaningful things you can do as well.
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And now, before we get back to Andrew, I want to do a feature that we call Asked and Answered here on The Megan Kelly Show where we take your questions and our executive producer Steve Krakauer will tee them up and I'll Do my best to answer.
Steve, what's the story?
Hey, Megan.
Yeah, this one is a great question.
We've been getting a lot of great questions at questions at devilmaycaremedia.com.
Also, guest suggestions being sent in there and love to see those and hear those.
So keep those coming as well.
This one is a question that comes from someone who calls himself G.
And he has a question about vaccines and coronavirus and really use it as the Pfizer news.
And now we have a Moderna news and getting FDA approval and getting these vaccines over to people.
He wants to know what's the FDA doing?
Are they taking their time because he says every dose helps and every day.
Counts in terms of cost to our economy and standard of living.
So his question is, what gives?
Isn't this worth pulling an all nighter for?
What's taking so long?
I think it's actually going pretty quickly, all things considered.
These, I know like Moderna and Pfizer, they submitted their request to the FDA for approval back on November 20th.
And both of them are scheduled for possible distribution and approval for December 21st.
So that's pretty good.
It's going to happen.
I guess Pfizer's.
December 10th and Moderna's December 21st.
Anyway, pretty fast.
It can't go much faster because you've got all these scientists at the FDA who will take a look at it.
They'll have these boards meet.
It's kind of complicated.
And what they said is that they're using this expedited process for the coronavirus vaccine so that it can be given to hundreds of millions of people.
And normally they wouldn't do the expedited process for something that's going to go to that many people, but they're doing it given the pandemic and how much.
Damage it's causing to our country.
So, look, the director of the FDA says it's going to be roughly equivalent, this review, to what's needed for a full licensure, but they are putting the pedal to the metal so they can get it out there as fast as possible.
Some people get it, the first responders and sort of people who are at risk, they're going to start getting it in December.
And they're saying it could be a couple hundred million people who are going to get it in December, January, February.
And then the rest of us, folks who are not in the high risk group, are going to have to wait until spring.
Fauci says maybe April, May, June.
That will be, you know, if you don't have an underlying condition or Something that makes you a priority that you could get the shot.
So, look, to me, it's good news.
Seems like next summer should be pretty normal.
And I think the country's ready to get back to normal.
And I'm really hoping well before next summer, we're going to see.
The ability to go around without constantly wearing these masks and staying six feet away and not hugging our loved ones who happen to be in their senior years.
And it's just, it's been a lot.
And I think the vaccines, they got to them pretty quickly, but the sooner the better, right?
So we can get back out there.
One of the questions we have though is A, are they safe, the vaccines, right?
And are they going to work?
They're saying 90 to 95% effective.
And B, will people take off the masks?
Is that going to be okay to do?
And C, What the hell do we do the next time this happens?
Have we learned anything?
Well, on Monday, we're going to be joined by a group of doctors.
They call themselves the Great Barrington Doctors.
And these are the folks who've been saying we got to hope for herd immunity.
We got to just protect the elderly and the most at risk and get people back to real life ASAP, even without a vaccine.
Vaccine Safety Concerns 00:15:35
So we're going to ask them and one of their opponents, somebody who doesn't see it their way, who's more in favor of what we've been doing and shutdowns and so on.
Going to have a full threaded debate on all of it.
COVID and what's next next week in the program.
So I'm looking forward to that.
In the meantime, back to Andrew Sullivan.
Let me ask you about the New York Magazine thing.
Let's talk about that for a minute, if you don't mind.
Because, you know, you were one of, I think you were the most respected writer at that magazine.
And you were read by people on the left and the right, even though New York Magazine is a left leaning publication.
And it wasn't anything you did.
It's normally not something you did.
Normally they just use something you did or said as an excuse.
To eject you based on your larger views.
But in this case they just ejected you.
They didn't have even have an excuse and you wrote very openly about it after you left.
Saying what has happened, I think, is relatively simple.
A critical mass of the staff and management at NEW YORK Magazine and BOX Media no longer want to associate with me.
They seem to believe that any writer not actively committed to critical theory and questions of race gender, sexual orientation and gender identity is actively physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same Virtual space.
How did that feel?
Because you'd been there for a long time, and I know you're doing well now without them, but in the moment, it can be very destabilizing.
Well, of course.
If they have every right to do what they did, I'm not denying that.
I don't have a right to a job.
And they're in a free society, magazine can hire or fire whoever it wants.
So, I'm not really, I don't know.
I feel also that I have enough of an audience that it doesn't matter.
What I find, and I'm reaching as many people now with the Weekly Dish, which is my weekly newsletter, and earning more money because of it than I was before.
But, you know, I just miss the idea of a liberal order where a magazine can have differing views within it, in which writers can actually argue with each other.
Take different stats.
And in so doing, the magazine itself says something.
It says we're open to debate and argument.
Now, I grew up at the New Republic magazine under Michael Kinsley, Marty Peretz, Rick Hertzberg, Leon Wieseltier, some of the really great editors and writers.
And I had an incredible time there.
You know, you have people like Leon Wieseltier fighting with Charles Krauthammer every week.
That's fun.
And at the New Republic, I tried to broaden it even more to have a really roiling free debate within its pages.
And I was editor there, as you know, for the bulk of the 90s.
I love that.
I don't want to read people I already agree with.
I don't want to see a magazine that feels as if it's just preaching at me.
I want to read institutions that can have internal diversity of view, not just eternal identity, a diversity of superficial identities.
And, you know, you can feel that when you read a lot of media now, especially online.
It's just, it all reads the same because it's all coming out of the same worldview.
And that worldview was partly.
The change happened so quickly, partly for economics.
I mean, the media was dying and it was expensive, and writing became, because supply became almost infinite with the internet, how did you pay for it?
And what happened is that a lot of these magazines decided to go online by hiring lots of young, cheap writers that could keep them afloat, but in so doing, imported a disproportionate number of people just recently indoctrinated in the Ivy League with critical theory.
And in that period, the entire culture was.
Upended.
And old liberal editors, when I say liberal, I mean conservative and lefty, but liberal types, just were besieged.
And sooner or later, the other thing that happens is that liberals, I mean good liberals, are just too wussy to stand up to this and to say, no, we're going to run this.
Now, wait, I want to get to that.
I do think talking about the solution to this is important.
I don't know that anybody's got it exactly.
But before I get to that, can I ask you to respond to.
The New York Magazine, the editor in chief, David Haskell, I thought it was crazy what he said because there was pushback on him.
People were mad that New York Magazine lost you.
And he said, look, we will continue to publish work that challenges liberal assumptions, the liberal assumptions of much of our readership.
But, this is a quote, publishing conservative commentary or critiques of liberalism and the left in 2020 is difficult to get right.
It's so absurd and so naked in its partisanship.
You can do it, but you really have to do it under the moniker Jen Rubin or Steve Schmidt.
You can criticize liberalism just as long as you do it with kid gloves in a way that pleases the woke left and doesn't cross any boundaries.
I mean, Andrew, when you heard that, what did you think?
I really don't want to get into a fight with people whom I've worked with in the past.
I'd make it personal.
But I will say a more general point is, If you're a writer and you want to write something, I'm just talking about the act of writing, whatever your political view, you have to be able to start by wanting to write whatever you want to write.
Now, eventually, when you write it out, you'll see, oh, that's kind of crap, or I need to change that, or that went on a bit, or that was good.
Let's, let's, let's.
But if you start from thinking, well, I can't say that, and I can't say this, and if I say that, I have to say it in this particular way, you just cripple yourself as a writer.
You can't write that way.
You have to have freedom to write.
I think this core thing of this completely unchallengeable freedom is so central to what the West has always believed in, what the West really specializes in, what we fought the fucking Cold War to defend.
Almost no civilizations have championed freedom of speech the way the West has historically.
It's just rare and it's happened for a very short period of time in human history.
It's fragile.
It can be broken.
It's against human nature.
We don't want to hear things we don't want to hear.
We don't like to be dissuaded.
You have an emotional response to it to begin with.
But If you don't fight against that, you lose a free society.
And it's precious.
And I just feel that, to some extent, those of us who grew up in the knowledge of the Cold War, compared with those who didn't, is that we actually saw this kind of atmosphere being perpetrated by the state.
To have it perpetrated by our society seems to me to be a terrible misreading of history and of what makes the West strong.
That's one of the things I've been saying is that as people start to whisper their viewpoints, It feels like East Germany.
I mean, it feels like what I imagine East Germany felt like.
And let's not let the ride off the hook.
I mean, if you, what you certainly notice here is in Washington, the distinction between the public conversation and the private conversation is massive.
Yes.
That Republicans knew and know what a maniac, what a crazy person this president is and has been.
And they will talk openly about it, but publicly they won't challenge him even when he's trying to.
Bring down our electoral system.
Well, let me ask you about Trump.
Let me just ask you a question.
Yeah.
Because as you were talking about how important it is to say what you feel and be able to offer viewpoints that may not align with what certain people want them to align with, I was thinking about Trump because I do think this is a big reason a lot of people voted for him.
I mean, yes, like Glenn Lowry said, Trump's an avatar, right?
Like, people voted for Trump because they didn't want to see oil and gas and the industry ruined, right?
They were pro life, they wanted limited government.
Wanted a more isolationist foreign policy, whatever it was.
He doesn't see it all in terms of these identity politics wars.
But I do think a lot of people, what they liked about him is something I would think you would like about him, which is, as he famously said to me on a debate stage, what I say is what I say, right?
Like we have fun, we say things, that's the way it's going to be.
And even I understand that very, very much in my own life, you know, even before the Trump.
Debate and my experiences with him, I almost wrote a book called Cupcake Nation because I was so concerned about what was happening to the country when it came to viewpoints and positions that various people held that didn't conform with what the wokesters back then wanted.
But I see Trump and his fighting on this, and I like it.
And I think a lot of people like it, even though he's an imperfect messenger.
So can't, like, can you see that?
Yes, he busted institutions and he doesn't push any norms.
He busts norms that we might otherwise want in place.
Some we don't, some we do.
But what about his willingness to fight these wars?
Look, I think Trump was a kind of middle finger to a certain kind of elite that most people recognized was condescending to them and ignoring them and in some ways despising them.
And Trump's manner of speaking freely without fear or favor felt refreshing.
It felt like a blast of fresh air.
He talked.
in language that most people could recognize in their everyday lives.
A lot of politicians don't.
For all of Obama's strengths and abilities, most people in the world don't deliver their thoughts in perfectly crafted paragraphs and sentences with lots of long words.
Trump was just the spirit of it felt as if it was a rebuke to a lot of the complacency, smugness, elitism, and failure of those elites.
In that, it is completely understandable why that sensibility would be so attractive.
When that person says, I just won the election by a landslide and attempts to delegitimize our democratic system with no evidence, that becomes dangerous.
When someone like that uses that freedom to enforce lies from the very get go, like from insisting that what we saw with our own eyes, his inauguration crowd, was bigger than what we saw with our own eyes with Obama, and insisting that you believe that.
That's not freedom of speech.
That is a form of mental illness.
That is a form of power mongering.
That is a way in which you get people to obey you by repeating what is untrue as a form of loyalty.
Now, that is a deeply, deeply illiberal and profoundly wrong viewpoint.
So I think that people were right about the manner, the refreshing nature of it, and the importance of pricking that bubble.
I agree with them.
I think they were right to do that, especially when it was represented by Hillary Clinton.
Probably the worst example of the kind of elitism that has rightly come into disrepute.
But at the same time, no, you can't just say anything.
You can't lie.
You can't deny reality.
You can't abuse people.
You can't denigrate people on the basis of their identity, which is exactly what the left does in reverse.
He was terrible, a terrible model.
A terrible human being and a terrible president.
And I'm sorry, but you're not going to push me off that, however sympathetic I am.
I have no desire to push you off of that.
I think, in the way that you want a diversity of viewpoints in your column and whatever publication you may be working for, I feel the same here.
All viewpoints are welcome.
And to pretend Trump is not an incredibly controversial figure is to deny reality.
But I do think, you know, I read in one of your pieces something similar to what you're saying now.
And the way you wrote it there was that.
That Trump is guilty of an unprecedented assault on American democratic legitimacy.
You said he's threatening to create a new normal.
Don't concede a loss.
Claim without proof that there's massive fraud.
Resist a transfer of power.
Try to overturn results.
Delegitimize the winner.
Sabotage the victor's ability to govern.
And I was like, I feel like I'm reading about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, right?
She claimed he was an illegitimate president.
She and the Democrats focused on the popular vote as though that meant anything in terms of winning or losing.
And it Don't claim without proof there's a massive fraud.
That's what they did in the whole Russia Gate conspiracy for a year.
Try to overturn the results.
Well, how many times did they threaten to or actually try to impeach Trump, delegitimize him, like sabotage his ability to govern?
Oh my God, that's what they did his entire four years.
I'm not saying that it was right in either case, but it's not unprecedented.
He's coming off four years of having this done to him.
Yes, it is unprecedented.
And I'll tell you why, because there is a distinction between those two things.
There are several, there are commonalities.
You're absolutely right.
Hillary and, for example, someone like Stacey Abrams, who continue to say that they were really elected or they were the real president or that they really won the governorship of Georgia.
But Hillary Clinton conceded the election a day later.
Barack Obama invited Trump into the White House for the transition that week.
Hillary Clinton showed up at the inauguration.
No one actually attempted to deny Trump the legitimate powers that he had.
When they were challenged, like on immigration with the courts, the courts eventually were slapped down.
He and the investigation of a genuine question and worry about foreign intervention in election is a legitimate process.
That impeachment attempt.
And it's legitimate.
The impeachment attempt was not.
So, I mean, what my so Trump is going to go begrudgingly is how it looks now.
And he's going to sort of be his normal self on the way out, right?
He's not going to be cooperative.
He's going to be ornery.
And he's going to claim.
But let the system understand how unprecedented that is.
Legitimacy of Impeachment Inquiry 00:11:08
No, but what I'm saying, I'm not saying it's presidential, but I'm saying, is it?
Is it dignified?
Is it American?
Is it precedented to use impeachment as a political tool to bring down a legitimate president, which is absolutely what happened during the Trump presidency?
So I'd much rather, as a president, have the previous guy go reluctantly and throw out some claims on his way and then leave me alone, not try to get me impeached for a nonsense phone call, not to mention a whole long year of Russiagate conspiracy, which was made up.
And in fact, they knew it was made up when they launched it.
You know, so it's like I get I'm not championing what Trump is doing right now, although I do think he's entitled to have his legal challenges played out.
I just think, you know, you have to keep it in perspective, you know, to given what they have done to him.
Yes.
If you think politics is tit for tat, but you keep upping the ante, then sure.
Where do we end when that tribalism continues?
What we end with is the collapse of liberal democracy because if you can never negotiate, if you can never compromise, if you can never.
Put your own partisan interest behind that of the system itself, you will eventually end up with completely delegitimized liberal democracy.
And that is where we have gone.
And I'd like to see it restored.
And it's very hard to restore it.
No president, no president, the history of the United States has behaved this way after losing an election.
And the ability to also act as he did in the presidency, as if the separation of powers did not exist.
The idea that he doesn't have to send anyone to report to follow a congressional subpoena, the idea that he can simply switch funding depending on what he feels like, that he can declare national emergencies fakely if he wants to build a border wall that he never figured out how to build in the first place.
The way in which he treated the system, challenging everything legally and constitutionally, really assuming the presidency is.
As he put it, you know, a place where he can do whatever I want.
These were dangerous trends.
This is a very, I alone can fix it.
I alone can do certain things.
And the way in which he acted as if he was not subject to the rule of law, if he was not subject to congressional oversight, as if he could do whatever he wanted, if he could trade, he could use his powers as commander in chief to leverage dirt against his opponent in the election.
These things are not.
Within the tradition of liberal democracy, I'm not going to defend what Hillary did or what Stacey Abrams has said and what the Russiagate fanatics did.
And in my defense, I didn't go there on the Russia stuff.
I was a skeptic, but I was open minded.
I thought, well, the thing to do with this is if there's any doubt, let's find someone like Mueller, let him look into it.
That's not illegitimate, Mech, and it's not illegitimate to inquire into whether a president did misdeeds.
No, that's important.
They knew he didn't.
The evidence was stacked up in the His defense before they even got it started, and they willingly overlooked it and misrepresented their evidence to the FISA courts.
I mean, we could get back into all that.
If they had a good faith belief, that would have been one thing, but they didn't.
didn't they used it to bring it up?
I'm not sure about that, Megan.
Well, okay, we can agree to disagree because that's ancient history.
But I know you've even said Rachel Maddow is a disgrace.
Yes, no, I was not.
I am not a defender of the Russiagate conspiracy.
I wasn't at any point, you can go back and check it.
I was always like, well, let's look into this.
And if it's resolved, it's resolved.
So I didn't engage in that hysteria.
I always believed that he was a legitimate president.
I do believe in the electoral college.
But Hillary didn't behave this way after losing an election.
And it's dangerous to say that the entire electoral system is rigged by shadowy forces when lots of people are going to agree with you.
That's incredibly dangerous and should be resisted.
So let's talk about solutions because I read everything you write on the woke stuff and I think you're such a good spokesperson for why it's so pernicious.
And I know you think we should stand up.
For our values and push back against it.
But how?
How does one meaningfully do that?
What is the solution to fighting this battle?
You defend the individual.
You resist the idea that we are defined by groups.
You return to the basic political philosophy of the American experiment, which is that we have individual rights that are protected.
We're protected from each other and from the government, most importantly, from government.
Coercion, indoctrination, religious control, and that this is a model that is actually the only model that can work for a multicultural, multiracial society.
When you're this diverse, trying to enforce orthodoxy or trying to have one group control another group is a recipe for complete chaos and disorder.
What you have to do is to take it back down to the level of the individual human being and take that as the basis of our.
Civil order.
Then make arguments for this policy or that policy.
Make arguments for this change or that change, but within that context, and also in which anybody has the right to say anything at any time about anything.
And there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.
And that the ability to say what you believe is critical to the success of liberal democracy, because if we don't, we don't have the range of views that we need to make the right decision.
So, how do regular Americans put that into effect, right?
Like, my imaginary viewer or listener is Madge.
She's in Iowa.
She works all day.
She comes home, she consumes the news, and then she goes back to work the next day.
But how does she do it?
She doesn't have a pen with the power of yours or a mic with the power of mine, but she wants to fight these battles without getting fired.
What should she do?
If you're put into a woke indoctrination session, one of these critical race theory, sort of programs that's supposed to tell you how to behave in the workplace.
Just ask specific questions.
Don't take the whole general view.
Just say, how am I?
Why am I racist?
Why is that something I can't and haven't recognized in myself?
What do you mean by racism?
Constantly ask them, what do you mean by this?
Because one of the great weapons of the work has been distortion and abuse of the English language.
So the word racism, for example, we all knew what that meant.
It meant that if you were prejudiced against someone on the basis of something that had nothing to do with who they were, I mean, prejudiced against someone because of their race or gender, it does not mean some neo Marxist system.
Of racial control in which you are always complicit unless you revolt against it.
No, no, that's not racism.
Sorry, I'm not going to accept your definition of that word.
When you use the term white supremacy to refer to America, sorry, no, what do you mean?
I mean, I find that there's so little thought behind these concepts.
Most people are just mouthing them as if because it's trendy or fashionable to do that.
The answer to that is always the skeptical question.
What exactly?
How exactly?
How does racism work?
What do you mean systemic?
What does systemic mean?
Just keep asking the difficult, ordinary, simple questions, querying this entire structure.
What you realize when you start to do that is like all these grand ideologies, once you start poking bits of reality at it, it tends to crumble.
And so I have confidence that because woke ideology is a lie, This is not the way the world works.
It's immensely more complicated than somehow perennial racial gender warfare against one another.
It's much more interesting and positive and diverse than that.
Then it will collapse.
All lies collapse in the end.
It all depends upon all that matters is the damage that's done in the meantime.
Just don't let them push you around.
Don't let them rewrite the English language.
Trust yourself and your own instincts about whether you are a disgusting person or not.
You're probably like all of us, flawed, difficult.
We're all racist, yes.
Complicated.
And also, we're able to overcome that.
And we have overcome that.
And we do that on a one to one personal basis.
Again, you need to just question these notions of systems that have really been invented in the minds, certainly originally of French intellectuals, that you don't have to accept as a regular American in regular American society.
Reject it.
That you are not what they say you are.
Speak for yourself and don't be intimidated by these people.
I mean, they're very intimidating, but stare them in the eyes and tell them, I don't believe it.
But I think, particularly those of us in institutions where freedom of thought is important the universities, the media, journalism in general we have to start fighting back aggressively.
And by doing that, we can, and in doing that, we can focus on the specific reality that they're describing, which is in fact.
Just a fantasy, just an ideology to make themselves feel more powerful than they actually are.
Well, and I think people need to remember it's also not lawful for them to discriminate against you because of the color of your skin, because of your gender, because of your sexuality.
That's also not okay.
And so, if accused based on those things, which are immutable characteristics, you have a leg to stand on too.
It's not right to demonize a guy just because he's a white male.
If you're a young Asian American kid, first generation, parents didn't speak English, and you got into a good university through high grades, don't let them tell you you can't go there because of the color of your skin.
Don't accept that.
And look, in California, they had this new proposal.
Reclaiming Mainstream Media Fun 00:09:31
Every left wing organization supported it.
It was to reimpose affirmative action.
And in the most liberal state in America, a majority minority state, It went down in flames, even though it was massively funded as well.
People come to America, especially minorities, because they believe in the individual, they believe in hard work, they believe in things like merit, and they believe in things like.
Fairness and non discrimination.
Understand that this new ideology is a form of race discrimination.
It's a form of gender discrimination.
It's just an inverted form.
And fight it, constantly fight it.
And you can win because I think, actually, as we found out in this election, the majority of people agree with you.
Yeah, even minorities.
Even minorities are agreeing with you.
Especially minorities.
Coming over to Team Trump of all presidents coming over to Team Trump in a time when they're told they're awful if they do it.
Now, you've been fighting.
For years, I love how you've never bent the knee.
You've always said, This is how I believe, how I feel.
I don't really care if you don't like me.
If it costs me a job, it costs me a job.
And it really is easier said than done.
You're doing it now at Substack.
And so, how do people, first of all, how's that going?
I know it's very successful, but can you elaborate?
And second of all, how can people find you there?
Just go to Substack, just type in Substack Andrew Sullivan and you'll get the page.
And it's every week I'll send you a newsletter, and it's a variety of stuff.
The one thing I do always with my column is the next week I am required to address readers' disagreements with it, call it the descents of the week.
We have a contest of trying to guess where someone is from the view from their window every week.
And it's a lively, fun thing based on my old blog, The Daily Dish.
And it's doing really shockingly well.
I mean, to be honest, I'm incredibly touched.
By the way, readers have come through.
I mean, we're about altogether coming up to 100,000 people who want it to come to their boxes every Friday, their mailboxes.
And we have a hefty chunk of those now paying.
And so it's working and it keeps growing.
And it's proof, I think, that people will respond to individual writers who are just telling the truth as they see it.
People are hungry for thinking outside of the current boxes.
They are.
They're really eager to think more deeply about some of these issues in ways that the current orthodoxies prevent.
And what I'm trying to do is create a space, just like the old liberal media, in which there is a clear diversity of opinion, in which I grapple with alternative arguments, in which I have podcasts of people I disagree with, and in which we begin to re energize and rediscover the fun, the exuberance of debate, different ideas.
Not telling you you can't be part of this because you're white, black, male, whatever, but saying anybody can say this as long as your arguments make sense.
If they don't make sense, we'll rip them apart.
But if they do, we'll give you credit.
And that's what I brought up.
I grew up in an Irish Catholic family where everybody shouted at everyone else all the time, in which argument was constant.
I grew up in the debating society at Oxford, which I loved.
Contentious journalists, because I just enjoy disagreeing with people.
I think it's huge fun.
And I think that the seriousness and the glumness and the authoritarian dullness of the current conversation really, if you have something new to say, get out there and you'll find an audience.
And increasingly, I think you're going to have a mainstream media that is increasingly dull and uniform and left liberal.
And the beginnings of an alternative media landscape where all sorts of people are popping up, where talent really has its day, and where we can rebuild liberal democracy from the ground up.
The key thing, I think, and it's hard, is to be a model of this, not to get defensive, not to get offensive.
But to be open and with conviction and showing openly the ability that you yourself can be persuaded by a better argument if you have it, if they have it.
And so that's what I'm trying to do.
The Weekly Dish, it's doing really well.
I'm so grateful for you helping me get the word out about it.
And yeah, I was canceled by the right in the early 2000s because of my turn on the Iraq War and my hostility to torture.
And I've been cancelled by the left, and I'm still here.
So, you know, I think it's what Winston Churchill once said that there's nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and not getting hit.
And that's how I see myself in a way, with a determination also to enjoy democracy, not be so dour about it, and also so extreme about it.
I love that.
I'll tell you something in exchange that.
In the mornings, I get a bunch of different newsletters sent to me by different journalists.
It's, you know, sort of one of the things people are doing now is putting together the news and mailing it to you.
And one of the people in my inbox is Katie Couric, who I know a little.
And I read her newsletter and it had little synopses of things in the news and it had very cheery, positive, like, here's my interview with Nicole Kidman about the undoing, which I did look at because I was into that show.
So I thought I had a moment reading.
The newsletter thinking, you know, this is a path I could have taken where I send in the cheery newsletter synopsizing news and sort of, I don't know, just interviewing people like Nicole Kidman and doing that kind of thing.
And I think the truth is, I'm much more like you.
I am pugilistic by nature.
I would not be happy not in a fight.
I tried that.
I was miserable.
And it may not be bump free, it may not be easy. to be in the fight, but it's important.
And if you're built to do it, then you must, even if you get some bumps and bruises and cuts along the way.
Absolutely.
Look, I've had a wonderful career.
I hope to continue to have it.
Either you have that or you don't.
And the alternative, you would have been bored, silly doing soft morning TV forever, for God's sake.
I mean, it would have driven you up the wall.
And, you know, there's a place for it.
Absolutely.
But am I the person to come into a room and tell everybody what they want to hear?
No, that's not me.
That's just not my personality.
I've broken up more dinner parties.
I've upset more people than you can imagine.
And so, know yourself.
That's the other thing know yourself.
I also wanted at one point to go into politics, but I know enough about myself to know I'd suck at it.
Because I'd alienate way too many people.
You'd never tell anybody what they want to hear.
No.
But, you know, we all have different roles.
And I think the, but I do really believe the role of the media and journalists is the role you're talking about.
It's get in there, raise questions, make trouble, insist upon good answers from people in power.
And that's what I love to do.
And that's, and I think within the mainstream media, that was becoming harder and harder.
So I'm really thrilled to have this new platform that's free, that's open to criticism, but that is full of verve and fun.
And I'm sure your listeners would love it.
Free at last.
Andrew Sullivan, such a pleasure.
Such a pleasure to finally connect with you.
All the best in it.
Thank you, Megan.
I really appreciate it.
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