The Megyn Kelly Show - 20210809_andrew-sullivan-on-the-woke-lefts-religious-zealot

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Aug. 9, 2021 - The Megyn Kelly Show

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Tribalism Kills People 00:14:35
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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, Andrew Sullivan.
	This guy's brilliant.
	He just has such an ability to take what's happening in the country and condense it into understandable bits.
	And he's been writing about America.
	He is now an American citizen, but he's originally from Great Britain.
	And he loves his country.
	He has a deep, deep love of America.
	He understands how important a religious foundation is here.
	And he's been able to put his finger on How we've fallen so far from what our original ideals were and whether we can get back.
	And actually, he has some promising thoughts on that.
	So I think you're going to love his insights.
	We're going to kick it off with what's happening with the Cuomo aide who wants you to feel sorry for the difficult past couple of years she's had.
	Okay, Melissa, and go through a bunch of stuff happening in the news.
	So we'll get you caught up on the news today and also sort of a greater picture on what's happening in the country with one of my favorite people, Andrew Sullivan, in one minute.
	First, this.
	I want to start with Governor Cuomo because I'm just interested in the whole subject and what's happening with him.
	And the news this morning is that his top aide, this woman, Melissa DeRosa, has resigned.
	This is basically, last week I called her like his jackal.
	You know the movie The Omen, where little Damien is protected by the jackal?
	You have to get through the jackal?
	That's what she's been.
	She's been his strong arm enforcer when it comes to the nursing home scandals, when it comes to the women.
	And there's been a lot of testimony to this effect.
	So, this woman, I just, my jaw dropped this morning, I have to say, because she resigned.
	And she said, Yeah, I'm leaving.
	It's been a great honor to serve the people of New York.
	The past two years have been emotionally and mentally trying for me.
	For me.
	For me.
	It says something about our broader culture, does it not?
	Well, it does, because immediately there's any blowback on anything.
	People are constantly saying, Well, look at all these people attacking me, regardless.
	Of who ultimately is responsible for anything.
	And it's the calling out of bullying people and then claiming you're being bullied instantly when someone actually responds to it is the current easygoing technique.
	Yeah.
	I thought, you know, the obviously the Maureen Dowd piece this weekend was so brutal that she probably felt she had no option.
	But it's generally been scandalizing, isn't it?
	I mean, it's not just Cuomo himself.
	It's for me, of course, it's.
	It's his brother, too, this absurd propaganda in favor of this guy.
	I mean, only a little over a year ago, he was being touted as the most significant Democrat in the country.
	And everybody was going to be a quomosexual, if you remember.
	That was the line.
	But what an ugly person.
	What a very nasty man, it seems, in retrospect.
	Well, don't you feel like some of the fallout has been because we knew he was a bully and signs of that kept emerging?
	And then once the dam started to break on the nursing home scandal, All these people started coming out with their Cuomo bullied me stories, Andrew Cuomo bullied me stories.
	And it just made, you know, the public opinion on the guy start to turn.
	You start to see who he really is.
	It is.
	Amazing.
	I've learned anything the last five, six years in Washington.
	It's cowardice is the norm.
	I used to think that politics was full of kind of rather flawed people and people do things for good reasons and they enter careers for out of public service or whatever.
	But watching how no one has said publicly what they tend to say privately in Washington, that everyone seems terrified.
	Of getting fired or terrified of having their career upended in the slightest way.
	The absolute adherence to your career over any other principle and your own vanity over any other value.
	It's really, it's definitely a sign of our times, is it not?
	Yes, your vanity over any other value.
	Gosh, that embodies America right now in the saddest way.
	Let me switch to COVID on a larger matter.
	Obviously, Andrew almost had a COVID scandal on his hands, but in addition to the sexual harassment scandal, but COVID.
	And the Delta variant, and so on.
	Now, there's no question that Delta has not been great and that the number of cases are rising.
	But more importantly, the latest news is that the number of hospitalizations are rising and the number of deaths are rising on a relative basis.
	Though, again, it's 99.999% of people suffering from this are the unvaccinated.
	So if you've been vaccinated, your chances of being hospitalized or, God forbid, dying of COVID are still absolutely minuscule, a point the media needs to consider.
	Continue to emphasize.
	But now, what we're seeing is the Biden administration looking at governors in the states of Texas and Florida, in particular, who I think he accurately perceives as a potential threat in 2024, DeSantis, trying to blame them for what we're seeing, let's say, in Florida, where there are rising hospitalization rates and overcrowded hospitals where people with non COVID emergencies are having trouble getting beds.
	And to me, it's kind of interesting because when Trump was president, It was all Trump's fault.
	This is all a problem of the executive.
	Now that Biden's president, you've got rising rates and it's just a state by state problem.
	But they don't mention states like Louisiana where the hospitalization rates are going up because that's run by a Democrat.
	Well, it also reminds one of Kamala Harris saying she wouldn't take a vaccine if it were delivered by Trump back last year.
	I mean, I have to say, if you think of our fundamental problem right now, one of our fundamental problems is tribalism.
	Just watching something like a public health crisis, and that's what we've had.
	It happens every now and again.
	And you would think a matter of life and death would help us suspend our tribal loyalties and just accept that we all want to live.
	Do we not have that in common?
	And we all want to be safe.
	And yet we were incapable as a culture of doing that.
	That is how deep this tribalism has gone, it's immune to empirical data.
	And it's immune to empirical data, even if you're looking at people dying in front of you.
	And that is a kind of amazing cognitive power of a tribal mentality.
	And one sort of always remembers that the natural state of affairs for human beings, the default is tribal.
	That's how we were organized for 195,000 years of our 200,000 years on the planet.
	That's how we operated.
	We are so deeply tribal.
	So the achievement.
	In the West, over the last four or five hundred years, to actually conceive of societies which are not purely tribal, that actually value the individual and actually value reason over loyalty, is such a First of all, such a great achievement.
	Secondly, such an obviously fragile one.
	And what we're watching, if you look, I think, if one looks more deeply, is the collapse of that capacity.
	And that is truly problematic for a liberal democracy.
	It's truly impossible to have a liberal democracy unless we all consider ourselves, when we enter into politics, as equal citizens, regardless of identity, deliberating upon our common good.
	It's as simple as that.
	If we can't get there, If we're still, our fundamental argument is we want to find a way to demonize and attack the other tribe, then no politics is possible.
	It becomes a form of tribal war.
	It really has become a deadly war, in a sense, when you look at how that dynamic has affected the nation's reaction to COVID.
	Yes.
	You can say at this point, it's killing people, this tribalism.
	Now, I don't mean to say that there aren't some legitimate people who might legitimately have some worries about.
	A vaccine, or there is a good faith skepticism sometimes.
	I don't want to dismiss that.
	But in this case, it seems that there's no doubt.
	I mean, there's obviously a tiny amount of doubt.
	And the potential to save yourself, but also to save your fellow citizens, is so immediately available to you.
	Not to do that is really quite an achievement of tribal thinking.
	Well, I mean, one good thing, if you want to find some silver lining to the Delta variants spread, is that.
	As one would expect, the vaccination rates are going up naturally, naturally, not because of mandates necessarily, but because people see what's happening and then they go to the hospital, they go to the CVS or they go to the Kroger and they get vaccinated because whereas before they thought the risks of COVID did not outweigh the risks of the vaccine, their calculation is naturally changing as they see death come to unvaccinated people in their area.
	And so that makes sense.
	But of course, we aren't trusting that instinct as.
	A people right now, our government with the mandates, you know, it's spreading, you know, from industry to industry, from local government to local government, the vaccine mandates, the mask mandates, and on and on it goes because they think that's the solution.
	Well, one thing is to look at previous epidemics in a way in history and to see how this is the first time the world has essentially shut down for an extended period of time to prevent transmission of a virus.
	The first time.
	It didn't happen even in 1918.
	There were some occasional shutdowns in various cities.
	And what you learn from these previous plagues, which is they're horrifying, but the only silver lining of a plague is that it runs out of people to infect at some point and blows itself out.
	And the sooner that happens, obviously, the better.
	And the downside to, although I support before we had a vaccine, I think some measures to prevent transmission were totally sane and sensible and should have been done.
	I have no problem with it.
	But once you have a vaccine, And it's available to everyone, and a critical mass of people have got it.
	It's counterproductive to just nag people.
	Nagging can drive them crazy and it can create a counterproductive response.
	But reality, the actual reality of death and sickness, concentrates the mind and the heart remarkably.
	And it will happen.
	And if this picks up pace, then more people are going to get vaccinated.
	We're going to get ever closer to the kind of thing you're beginning to see in Britain.
	And in Israel, to some extent, who were slightly ahead of us on the curve here, which is that Britain had its Freedom Day, opened up everything, and was warned that the Delta variant, which was thriving.
	Take off and it collapsed.
	The Delta variant is under, is sick, the positivity rate in Britain is collapsing.
	So, because they may be running out of healthy younger people to infect and to transmit.
	Also, and so the sooner it's over, the less time it has to evolve into more different strains that might be more problematic.
	But notice this strain is not, we don't know exactly if it has a worse clinical.
	Outcome than normal COVID, if it were than the previous COVID, if it were in an unvaccinated person.
	We don't know, but we do know it's much more transmissible.
	And one of the things that's interesting about viruses is when they mutate, they almost always mutate into less harmful forms because it's in their interest not to kill off their hosts, to keep in their hosts as long as possible to keep replicating.
	So I don't think we should be as scared of variants as we have been.
	They're more likely to become more transmissible than more deadly.
	And we just, I think, need to get through this.
	We need the only way past this is through it.
	And let's, as I wrote this piece saying, let it rip.
	Let people deal with the consequences of their own actions.
	This is a free society.
	At some level, the government says, we've given you the tools to help yourself.
	Now help yourselves and help your fellow citizens.
	I mean, and at that point, let this thing take its course.
	That's exactly right.
	I loved your piece on that letter rip.
	It's not to be insensitive to death, it's to say, This is America where we're allowed to handle the natural consequences of our own decisions.
	We do it every day when we get behind the wheel of a car, when we live in a building where people don't get measles vaccinations, whatever it is.
	We all make decisions on our own personal risk calculation and what's okay with us.
	And that's what we're doing right now.
	As you point out, the government's job is done.
	They did it.
	They gave us a vaccine.
	If we can't, if we won't go get it, right?
	What are we supposed to do?
	Stay in masks forever?
	Have every industry mandate a vaccine that people may not want to get for very good medical reasons or emotional reasons of their own?
	Yeah.
	I mean, this is the thing.
	If you hate, as I do, lockdowns, you hate social distancing, you hate masks, well, the one obvious response to prevent all those things is to get vaccinated.
	So the idea that you have to be against all of the above seems completely crazy.
	No, be for the vaccine and then do your best to get rid of these masks and rid of these shutdowns.
Trust and Public Health Mandates 00:14:15
	I mean, I think that's the one other point I would like to make.
	Viruses live with us.
	We share the planet with them.
	I've had a virus in my bone marrow now for 28 years HIV, which was killing people and killed people for a very long time, had 100% fatality rate.
	But I've managed, thanks to the miracles of technology, and let's praise the miracle of the Myrna vaccines.
	I mean, the technology here is staggeringly good, and take advantage of it.
	Because the point is to get on with your life.
	The point isn't to defeat the virus.
	The only point of defeating the virus is to get back to your life.
	And when you fight these viruses, you can get too fixated on that idea without realizing this broader context.
	Well, can I see my friends?
	Can I see my family?
	Can I go out and have fun?
	Can I go to work?
	All those things are things we need to be getting back to as soon as possible because the toll that has been taken on the kids, for example, in terms of their educational loss, in terms of teenagers, in terms of their mental health, In terms of all of us, it is huge.
	And that's the other thing people don't take into account.
	These shutdowns and lockdowns are terribly damaging to people, they force us into a place where we are alone, isolated.
	We are more able to be manipulated because we're online all the time.
	We're more frustrated.
	And getting out of that as soon as possible should be our primary objective.
	And I don't understand why people on the right can't see that.
	To get back to normal, we just have to get this vaccine.
	Well, but it's not just the right.
	For sure, there's a greater reluctance among Republicans than Democrats as a whole.
	But the Black community doesn't want this vaccine.
	Only less than 25% of the Black community has been. vaccinated, there's real hesitancy for various reasons.
	And, you know, to your point, there's a lot of blame to go around on that.
	Kamala Harris saying she wouldn't take it and Joe Biden getting it and then wearing the mask everywhere, telegraphing that the vaccine didn't really work and the pulling of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six blood clot incidents out of millions.
	It's like there have been so many mistakes all along the way.
	And I could spend an hour talking about the media distrust.
	So people don't trust the evening news anchor when he says.
	The vaccines are safe.
	They just don't trust the evening news anchor to say anything anymore.
	So there's been such a great deal.
	At some point, also, you don't, you neither want to infantilize Republican right wingers who refuse to acknowledge reality, but not, I get irritated by the infantilization of African Americans as if people can't decide for themselves what they should be doing.
	I don't, I honestly, Megan, I looked this up yesterday and it's 38% nationally.
	You may be thinking about, I think, of African American vaccination.
	But that's still shockingly low, especially given the fact that we know that disproportionately African Americans are more likely to come in contact with it.
	If by anything, if for no other reason, tend to be working more jobs which require more interaction with the public, more out there, more essential work.
	And so they are the most vulnerable.
	And the failure to get that across from an administration that does nothing but talk about equity a million times a day, but to just get people safe.
	Is stunning.
	And that's why politically it's difficult for Biden.
	Biden can't start lambasting people because he's going to be lambasting his own base at the same time.
	But he should say, we've done what we can.
	For God's sake, get vaccinated and we're going to move on.
	And I think it would be a winning move.
	Here's my question for you on that.
	So in New York City, the vaccination rate among Black people is less than 30%.
	I hadn't seen the national stat of 38%.
	But here's, I'll make the counter argument, okay, since you and I seem to be on the same page.
	As I was reading the Wall Street Journal today, some other papers today about the rising hospitalization rates and people, people with heart attacks, people with other issues who cannot get a bed right now because the unvaccinated people who got COVID and now need serious help are taking up all the beds.
	I mean, I can see the other side's argument that it's a public health issue and that the mandates have to go into place.
	If not, you know, if we were telling unvaccinated COVID patients, Get out.
	You can't have the bed, right?
	Maybe that would be one thing, but we're not.
	We're kind of telling it's we're taking them on a first come, first serve basis.
	And somebody who may have gotten the vaccination, but then has a heart attack or a stroke may be struggling to get a bed because somebody who is like, I don't believe in any of this is taking up the bed.
	Yeah.
	I mean, obviously, you're right.
	The question of whether ICUs are available in various of these places that in the capacity necessary to deal with the demand is something I don't know for sure.
	And obviously, it's changing.
	All the time, my assumption is that they're not going to be overwhelmed.
	I mean, the reason for the original lockdown, if you recall, was that we can't, our medical system would collapse under the weight of suddenly all these infections.
	If If it is going to collapse again, then I can see the reason for actually initiating some mitigation things as maybe mandatory.
	But I'm not convinced yet, at least, that we're anywhere near the hospitalization rate that we were back in a year ago or a year and a half ago.
	In other words, I think there's still some room in the system.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, I was reading in the journal about Florida and Orlando, but I will say it's frustrating to me because.
	I read the Times and I feel like they have a motive to play it up.
	They've been so into the COVID fear, fear porn, as they call it, that I don't trust them anymore.
	So I read something like the Journal, even the New York Post.
	I feel like, okay, these are not people who have been leaning into COVID fear.
	So if they tell me that there's an overrun of beds or hospitalizations, I'll believe them.
	But how messed up is it that that's how you have to read the news now, right?
	It's like, I don't trust data I read in any given publication.
	Depending on the political outcomes or risks for the Republicans or the Democrats?
	Yeah, I mean, I think that at some point, I think we both agree on this, there's become a point at the New York Times, certainly, and to some extent at the networks, and the Washington Post, of course, and most of the mainstream media, that there simply is such an overwhelming majority of people there who have one political point of view that even if they're trying to be unbiased,
	the very framing Of the stories becomes impossible if you're not working with anybody who thinks differently.
	It is important to have people say, hold on a minute, why do you say that?
	Or why are you pitching it in that way?
	And I think that has been an institutional capture of one political party and one political party's objectives.
	It's almost impossible to find a Republican at the New York Times, even though it's supposed to be diverse.
	You know, it's funny that.
	Well, yes.
	And even people who are sort of Republican adjacent or even friendly to conservatism, very few are allowed.
	And when you look at the, but as far as I'm concerned, the op ed page is not worth reading.
	It's just a bunch of different demographic slots with the same opinion, which is why it's boring, actually, after a while.
	But what worries me is the way that these news stories just come off like op eds increasingly from the lead to the language, the way it's framed.
	And yeah, it is depressing because I still read The Time, I still read The Journal.
	I can't, increasingly, I can't read The Post.
	I'm sorry, it is such, it is so slanted.
	It's just hard to get through.
	New York Post or Washington Post?
	Washington Post.
	I'm sorry, I'm being a little Washington centric here.
	But yeah, they've gone much further than I imagined.
	And yeah, so you have this crisis of trust too, as a crisis of trust in the media and the government, which all makes this.
	So much harder.
	Here's a thought I had, Megan if this were affecting children, if COVID did what 1918 did and targeted children, and many children started dying last year, I think we would have had a much more different response.
	I think it would have been much more of an emergency.
	And I think we would, it's a strange thing, often this happens.
	Some of these viruses come.
	1918 did too.
	1918 Was the reverse because the older people, people who had actually gone through a pre existing flu of 1898, had developed immunity.
	So, what happened in 1918 is in fact, it was almost all kids and young people who were dying, which made it that much more traumatizing to people.
	I'm not diminishing the horror of older people dying and the way that we sequester old people and then let them die.
	But obviously, there is a different nature to the death of a 12 year old than an 82 year old.
	There just is.
	And I think our instincts would have kicked in in a more profound way.
	And maybe the sense that it's just going to kill off the old and the infirm has, in some ways, shifted our psychology around this particular plague.
	Up next, did you know that it was an event in Provincetown that led to the CDC returning everyone to these mask mandates?
	Well, Andrew lives there.
	And he's got some thoughts on how on earth something they call Bear Week led to a national mask mandate, which I think Andrew and many others find somewhat absurd.
	He'll explain also whether Abraham Lincoln was gay one minute away.
	I definitely want to get back to the media because there are a couple of examples over the weekend of, you know, why people don't trust the New York Times.
	I'm just, I loved the New York Times yesterday.
	I loved it.
	I just got that lovely review.
	Oh, right, right, right, right.
	And I want to get to your.
	To your book out on a limit in one second.
	Today, I'm going to praise the New York Times for its amazing insight and editorial skill.
	Makes perfect sense.
	Their book review, those are still solid.
	The book review section actually is really independent, pretty independent of the rest of the paper.
	But first, I want to ask you about because I saw you wrote something about how this initial outbreak that led to the renewal of the mask mandate by the CDC was based on something that happened in Provincetown during something called Bear Week.
	And no one's really talking about what that is or why, in their view, this is a ridiculous week on which to base national policy when it comes to mass or anything else.
	Can you explain that?
	Yes.
	It was two weeks, I think, but it was the week after the 4th of July and the following week, which is called Bear Week.
	So bear with me.
	Pardon me.
	Basically, this is a tiny little town.
	There are 900 year round addresses here, it's right at the end of the world.
	60,000 people come two weeks in a row.
	So 120,000 people altogether in those two weeks of young and middle aged gay men, overwhelmingly, who have not really had any sex or any dancing or any venting for a year and a half.
	This is going to be their blowout weekend or two weekends.
	And so that's what happened.
	It also happened to be really cold for some reason.
	Normally, everything happens outside.
	So everybody was jammed inside.
	And some of these little dance places in this old town.
	Like the black hole of Calcutta.
	I mean, I don't go in them in the normal time.
	And people were jammed and people were literally, you could not move.
	The lines around the blocks for the dance parties were just insane.
	I mean, it was so overwhelming.
	I stayed well away.
	I'm too old anyway for that stuff now, but I'm just saying this was insane.
	Okay.
	And not only that, but you're being honest, not just breathing each other, but every possible bodily fluid was flying in every possible direction.
	So this is not a good thing.
	Control group.
	It really isn't.
	This isn't like first and second graders sitting in school.
	No, it is not.
	It is the opposite.
	It's the worst possible thing you could do.
	And I understand how people, I always, you knew this, you read history.
	Where these plagues start to ease up, people go nuts.
	They did it after the 1918 19 war.
	If you read stories of the 1919 Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, even for Carnival in Rio, people said it was.
	It was like Middle Ages in its complete bacchanalian excess.
	And you see this also in the Middle Ages after the Black Death, people suddenly having these wild orgies in Rome, everywhere.
	There's a sense when you're under that kind of existential threat, people act out.
	But anyway, that's what it was.
	And, you know, it is what it is.
	People come here to let off steam.
	The positivity rate in the actual town, once they'd left, they took it all with them.
	So we now have a 3% positivity, below 3% here.
	It's been remarkably safe here.
	We have an 85% vaccination rate.
	Now, so 120,000, we have 700 cases and seven hospitalized.
	So, you do the math.
	I mean, it's incredibly small.
	Yeah.
	And I know several people who got it, who got it, and I was at a party with them yesterday.
	But I mean, this is literally why a lot of kids now and people are going to be wearing masks for the foreseeable future because it was after the Provincetown Bear Week, which we got to talk about why it's called Bear Week.
Coffee House Snobbery Explained 00:06:39
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Right.
	Because now, because of that, the mask mandate returned.
	Thanks a lot, by the way, Andrew.
	I know you live in Provincetown.
	So, thanks.
	Thanks for that.
	I know.
	I know.
	I didn't go to this party.
	I promise you, I would tell you if I did.
	But I didn't because it's just like, it's too much.
	But yeah.
	Why isn't Bear Week?
	Well, you know, there was a point, there's a piece in my book, actually, this new book called I Am Bear, Hear Me Roar.
	It's a sub, sub, subculture.
	Let's put it that way.
	It's basically at some point in the early 2000s, there were enough openly gay men who were also middle aged who were exhausted because they kept being told they had to go to the gym and stay in shape and to be attractive.
	And they just, Couldn't be bothered.
	And so they got kind of fat.
	And they have, and so it's basically a bunch of overweight, middle aged men with beards and back hair who show up to just hang out with each other and eat pizza and drink beer and hang out by the pool and go to parties and just chill.
	And it's, you know, I'll tell you, it is a lovely week.
	People, those bears, the big, fat, chubby, hairy ones are so mellow and sweet.
	They really are.
	It's totally wholesome.
	The previous week, which is what you would think of as these chiseled, like no body fat, beautiful young guys dancing all night long, that's called Circuit Week.
	And those guys are sort of the perfect young, hairless gay boys who show up.
	And so we have these, it's not just gay culture anymore.
	Gay culture is now so big in a way that it's these little subcultures.
	And you live in Provincetown, and all the time you get these different weeks where different kinds of gays show up.
	And lesbians.
	It's so great because I can just picture some in the bear week being like, remember when we used to come during circuit week?
	Those are, remember those bodies?
	Yes.
	And you just look over there and you're like, oh, well, we're 20 years older now.
	And I can't be bothered.
	I can't be bothered.
	But probably happier too.
	Happier.
	They are happier.
	The mood.
	Everyone in the first week is like all tense because, you know, am I as good looking as this guy?
	Am I hot?
	Can I get labeled?
	Bear week is like, oh, fuck it.
	You know, excuse my language.
	No, screw it.
	Sorry.
	Let's just hang out and have fun.
	They don't go to the beach.
	It's too far to walk.
	Plus, you get angry when you can't eat.
	It just makes you a generally grumpy person.
	It's a huge boon for restaurants that week, too.
	They eat all the time.
	Pizza shops make all their profits in like a couple of weeks.
	All right.
	Now, this reminds me so you mentioned your book, Out on a Limb, and one of the great pieces in there, because this is a celebration of your many, many writings over the years.
	Although I really, I don't, maybe I'm crazy.
	You tell me, I really feel like the piece you did last month on What's the Matter with You may have been the greatest thing you've ever written.
	It really, it truly.
	It's definitely top 10.
	But I wanted to ask you while we're on this subject of gay men and bear week and circuit week which one of those would Abraham Lincoln have attended?
	Huh.
	I have a feeling Abraham Lincoln would be stalking brutally through the dunes both those weeks.
	He's a bit of a loner.
	He's not really a party boy.
	No.
	Abraham Lincoln.
	So, can you set that up for the audience?
	Why I ask you that?
	Well, I have a piece in there about whether Abraham Lincoln was gay, which is a kind of unknowable question, but I kind of point out some facts.
	I don't know whether you read it, Megan, but I point out some biographical facts, which are, you know, they're kind of hard to just completely dismiss.
	I mean, I can't claim this, but I do think there's an interesting book I read, which by a Lincoln scholar that really went into it in some detail.
	I mean, it is remarkable that he slept with his law partner in the same bed for six years.
	And there it is.
	And there it is.
	There it is.
	I was because I read the piece and I was like, okay, so there's stuff in here about like, oh, he never really developed deep emotional relations with any woman, including his wife.
	I'm like, well, a lot of guys do that.
	They say he was the classic best little boy in the world type in childhood.
	One of the largest categories of gay male childhood there is.
	Okay, well, that could be explained by other means.
	And then you get to the part about him sleeping with another man in the White House when his wife was away.
	And I said, whoa.
	Whoa, that is the problem.
	You're right.
	That is the thing.
	And people would say, oh, it was very common for men to sleep with other men in those days.
	There weren't so many beds, et cetera, et cetera.
	I'm like, but not an honor guard in the White House where Mary Todd is gone.
	I mean, come on.
	I mean, what did you think was happening?
	I mean, I don't know.
	And I'm not claiming to know, but I think.
	Part of my role, part of what I try and do is ask these questions that other people are a little leery of asking and going there.
	Well, it's not like there weren't gay men back then.
	They just didn't act on it, or at least didn't do it loud and proud out in the open.
	Of course, there were.
	There have always been.
	And some of them, you know, some of them great Americans like Walt Whitman, for example, whose poetry is probably the greatest thing this country's ever produced in terms of poetry.
	Yeah, of course.
	And of course, how they understood themselves.
	I think there was a great snobbery of the present.
	Especially among some of us who are in minorities.
	And it's true that we've made huge gains and strides in terms of acceptance.
	But we tend to assume that the homosexuals and lesbians and cross dressers and transgender people before just didn't really exist or didn't function in everyday life, that people didn't know about them.
	Yes, they did.
	Yes, they were.
	And there were ways in which more traditional societies walked around it.
	Had euphemisms for it, tolerated it, allowed it.
	So, for example, I was talking to Michael Pollan, who has that amazing new book about coffee culture and how it happened in the 1650s, only happened in the West in the 1650s.
	And what happens?
	Coffee houses spring up with all this new ferment of ideas.
	Everyone stopped drinking and started drinking coffee.
	Everybody's sharp.
	Well, guess what happens?
	In those all male coffee houses, suddenly one of them becomes a gay coffee house, another one becomes a gay coffee house.
	They're called molly houses.
	So, if you look closely, you can see gay life.
	But it's represented in other ways, in other forms.
	And it's not actually very visible, but it's there if you look.
	And that's what historians need to look at.
	And just as a gay person, I just think, well, that's interesting.
	I have no vested interest in Abraham Lincoln.
	He's so much more important than this, but it's interesting, right?
	It is interesting.
Scaled Back Safety Measures 00:04:09
	I never heard anybody talk about it.
	But I will say your mention of snobbery, like what snobs we are now to sort of look back at history and say, oh, no, we're the first to do anything.
	And it's all about the me generation.
	Was reflected to go full circle in the news this weekend on COVID, right?
	Because there was a woman, she's a New York Times reporter, she was on CNN, I wanna say, she was on CNN, and she was trying to defend President Obama's, former President Obama's.
	Big birthday bash on Martha's Vineyard.
	She wasn't putting the defense in her own words.
	She was trying to explain why many of the Martha's Vineyard residents didn't have any problem with Obama having several hundred people there.
	This is a scaled back version.
	Remember, he got guff for having a party planned with 600 people.
	So he scaled it back.
	Now it's just several hundred.
	Okay, great.
	By the way, they say Larry David was one of the people who was disinvited the second time around.
	So I cannot wait until that episode comes out.
	Kirby, you're enthusiastic.
	He addresses the revocation.
	But, um, So he still has the party.
	And of course, all the shows this weekend that are talking about, like Meet the Press was lamenting with Dr. Fauci the South Dakota bike rally.
	Fauci was like, there's definitely, you know, concern about an outbreak because of that.
	They didn't mention anything about Obama's birthday bash.
	Okay.
	So here's the person, this woman from the New York Times on CNN.
	Her name is Annie Carney, New York Times White House correspondent, explaining why folks who live in the vineyard aren't worried about the Obama party.
	Listen.
	Other people said, you know, this is really being overblown.
	They're following all the safety precautions.
	People are going to sporting events that are bigger than this.
	This is going to be safe.
	This is a sophisticated, vaccinated crowd.
	And this is just about optics.
	It's not about safety.
	Oh boy.
	This is a sophisticated crowd, Andrew.
	So they won't get COVID.
	Well, yeah.
	Well, of course, you know, there are breakout cases.
	I mean, I'm not sure it was that risky since most of it was outside, even in a tent.
	It's not that bad.
	But yeah, look.
	The moment the public health authorities lost a huge proportion of the public was when, in the summer of 2020, the BLM marches started these massive things.
	And the response to it was so out of touch with what they had been saying about every other thing.
	And it was clearly also a political question.
	We were suddenly told that racism was a public health threat greater than COVID, and that therefore this stuff.
	Was okay.
	Or we were told that wearing masks.
	And look, there are nuances here.
	It does matter if a huge crowd gathers and they're all wearing masks, that will be a lot better than if they don't.
	It does matter if you're outside in a tent or inside in a crammed basement dance floor with 300 bears.
	These things are different.
	But the public health message has to be clear and consistent.
	And the minute it seems to be political or at least one rule for us and not a rule for everybody else, It's like the mayor of DC, Miro Bowser, like at an indoor party the same day she made indoor masks mandatory.
	And at some point, people just don't pass the sniff test.
	And if you're trying to get people to be less suspicious that maybe you're trying to get you to do things that they wouldn't do themselves, then this is going to play right into that, right?
	I mean, it's now I yesterday I had a little Party for my friends, but it was outside on a deck.
	It was only 40 people and we weren't, whatever.
	But I didn't, I mean, it's, it's, again, I don't want to stop living.
	And I don't think Obama had to cancel the whole thing, but I'm not the president of the United States.
	I'm former president of the United States.
	I certainly wouldn't suggest the guy cancel the thing.
	I've had parties this summer myself.
	They've been outside, but I would have had one inside too.
	We had it outside because it was nice weather.
	But I'm not the one lecturing everybody in the country on how they have to walk around with mandatory masks and have to, it can't work unless they have a mandatory vaccine and all that.
Hillary Clinton's Political Legacy 00:05:21
	The Democrats, you know, that's Obama's party.
	A lot of people who were there.
	So that's, you know, the hypocrisy is what gets people.
	Yeah.
	Well, the role of nagging people, no one likes the nagging party.
	No one likes the one telling you.
	Everyone likes the party that says, you know, take precautions, but have fun.
	And live your life.
	And the Democrats, I think, are, yeah.
	And I don't know why some Democrats don't, some of them just don't get that spirit of America.
	They don't.
	They just don't see that that's, you can go with the grain of it or you can spend your life nagging and lecturing it.
	And I do think it's a bad thing for the Dems.
	They don't want to come across as a scolding, angry party that's constantly trying to control everybody else's lives, which is how they increasingly come off.
	Too late.
	Well, I think you've made this point before.
	It sort of reminds you of the, You know, the Republicans back in the day when it was like that movie cannot be shown at the local movie theater because it's inappropriate.
	The Republicans used to have that mantle and now the Democrats have it.
	Yeah.
	In the book, I have this piece that came out in 98 called The Scolds, which is when in the latter part of the 20th century under Clinton, when conservatives became obsessed with personal morality because Bill Clinton was in the White House and obsessed with, gay marriage, with all these, they were constantly in a position of doing America down.
	I remember Robert Bork had this thing about calling America Gomorrah, or Bill Bennett was constantly talking about how to praise this country.
	There's a point at which also either side, the right or the left, to some extent is happening also on the right, where they're appealing to the vision of Hungary, for example, as a model for America, as if they really don't like America now.
	As if something's wrong with America now.
	They don't love it now.
	And that's dangerous for a political party to be basically criticizing the people you're hoping to represent in the Congress.
	And I think there's a scoldishness in political parties that really turns people off.
	If you look at the successful politicians, whether it be Reagan or Obama, for example, they weren't scoldy.
	At least I didn't think of them as scold.
	Goat and they were very optimistic and buoyant and go do your thing, and uh, and yeah.
	And but but but Jimmy Carter, you know, just spent four years telling us what a bunch of losers we were.
	Eventually, it's like, no, or Hillary Clinton with deplorables.
	And on that, I mean, Obama's probably one of his worst moments was when he was caught on Mike saying the bitter clingers remark about the Republicans, something he, you know, he didn't say that exactly publicly, but that you're those comments are so alienating when you dismiss huge groups of.
	People as awful.
	And that is one of the main reasons I think Hillary Clinton had no chance.
	I mean, she just turned off so many independents, even just by calling anybody who supported Trump a basket of deplorables.
	The one thing I would say in defense of that comment by Obama, which is if you look at it in context, he was talking to a Democratic crowd saying, understand why people are alienated, understand why they look at you and think you hate their guns, you hate their religion, their jobs have been lost.
	That was the context of that statement.
	And it came out horribly, obviously.
	But I think he was trying, actually, at that moment to tell Democratic elites to stop not being interested or caring about people who do have religious faith and do own guns and are worthy of talking to and understanding and engaging.
	And the thing, the difference between Obama and Hillary, the key difference is that Obama never ran to be the first Black president.
	Hillary only ran to be the first woman president.
	He actually pitched himself.
	On the issues and the renewal and all the other stuff.
	And Obama, you know, had a, it was brought up by white Midwesterness, his grandparents.
	And he always had an ability to reach actual white working class.
	That's how he won the Midwest twice.
	And people, I think, can, again, we sort of see things in black and white terms, we think, but that was the difference between Obama and Clinton.
	His tenacious belief, actually, in ordinary white working class Americans and their good faith.
	And I don't think he ever really lost that.
	And I've told you.
	The difference, it should be said, between Obama and Hillary Clinton.
	Hillary Clinton.
	That's right.
	Bill had it.
	Bill totally understood that stuff.
	And he did his best to try and get that Clinton campaign in 2016 to wake up.
	Yeah, but there's only so much you can do, right?
	It's like you can.
	And Hillary represented where the party was going.
	But we shouldn't give up on the Democrats either.
	People like Jim Clyburn, moderate African American voters, Eric Adams of New York City, there are people dealing with the real world who are actually elected as Democrats who aren't entirely awful in the sense that they aren't entirely.
	A note of hope.
Cops, Racism, and Media Pressure 00:14:07
	They do actually care.
	When African American kids are shot dead in the street as a function of depolicing, which seems not to concern terribly much some of the more active white people in the Black Lives Matter movement.
	So they see that the price of the delegitimization and demoralization of the police in this country over the last year has been in African American lives.
	Up next, a 29 year old female police officer was shot and killed in Chicago this past weekend.
	60 people were shot there, and that's just in one city alone.
	Meanwhile, the mayor doesn't want to hear anything about the possible connection between events like that and her anti-cop rhetoric.
	We'll get into that in one minute.
	But first, I want to bring you a feature we have here on the show called Sound Up, where we bring you some sort of sound in the news and discuss it.
	And today, we're going to bring you a clip that was, it's from the Daily Mail.
	They got their hands on a conversation between the then co-hosts of CBS's The Talk, Sharon Osborne.
	And her co host, Elaine Welteroth.
	Now, these two were part of sort of that viral clip where the cast seemed to be ganging up on Sharon Osborne for standing up for Piers Morgan, who was being called a racist because he questioned Meghan Markle's story in the Oprah interview, right?
	Remember this whole thing?
	Everybody was saying he was a racist.
	Why?
	Because he didn't believe Meghan Markle, because he questioned her.
	That somehow made him a racist, as if the color of your skin entitles you to an automatic assumption of truth telling.
	So she stood up for him, saying, you know, kind of lay off.
	And then she came under fire and ultimately lost her job on that show.
	As a result, it was absurd.
	The whole thing was ridiculous.
	Well, unbeknownst to me, my crack executive producer, Steve Krakower, caught this on the Daily Mail.
	I missed it and called attention to it.
	And I loved the sound bite and I love the story.
	So he's going to help me do this edition of Sound Up.
	Steve, hi.
	So basically, it was these two talking after the on air dust up at the on air pile on on Sharon Osborne, like right after that.
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	This takes place as soon as the show goes off the air.
	And this audio, which I saw the Daily Mail story a couple weeks ago when it came out.
	Elaine Welteroth sort of distanced herself immediately from it, but I hadn't really listened to the full 12 minutes of it and went back over the weekend.
	And it's really sort of remarkable about not just her talking, apologizing to Sharon, everyone knows you're not a racist.
	Of course, we know you're not a racist, which they didn't say on the air, of course, but also talking about why the conversation went the way it went, which I think really kind of pulls back the curtain about why, not just.
	This incident, but so many incidents get portrayed a certain way because of, frankly, the fear people have of social media and backlash, including women of color.
	Like Elaine and her other co host, Cheryl Underwood, who were going after Sharon on this segment.
	So here is Elaine and Sharon talking right after the pile on about Elaine's real feelings.
	Cheryl and I are held to a different standard by Black people and people of color out there who expect us to say something about every racist, anything similar.
	And it puts us in such a fucked up position.
	That even if we don't have the information, if we don't even really care, if we don't really want to engage, it feels like a spotlight is on us.
	It's like America is black America, white America, racist America.
	It's like they're all watching us, and there's this pressure to demonstrate how to talk about this stuff, but we haven't ever been guided on how to do this.
	I'm not a DNI expert.
	I didn't know I was going to come on here and be the.
	No, I don't know how to do that, actually.
	Neither do I. I'm just a old woman that has a lot of stories.
	So, first of all, fascinating insight, right?
	I mean, I appreciate her.
	I mean, she wasn't saying it publicly, but I appreciate the new information that even some public figures, you know, of color may be feeling what everyone's feeling, which is they don't really want to say anything.
	She didn't really want to pile on Sharon Osborne, but she felt like she had to.
	Because she felt like some woke warriors or the black community, people who are woke within the black community, were going to come after her for not taking a more aggressive stance.
	Okay, so I appreciate that.
	But then she totally disowned it when the tape came out.
	Right, right.
	I mean, this is someone who, in the segment, she goes, you know, it's the whole thing.
	We need people to stand up for anti racism.
	She kept saying, anti racism is what's being called for not just not being racist, which, you know, and then to go and say, look, I'm not an expert on this.
	I don't even really care about it.
	You know, it's incredible.
	It is, you know, but it's a good reminder for people too, that when you see sort of these performances, mostly online, but often sometimes on television too, they're exactly that.
	It's acting.
	It is, it's virtue signaling, but it's also acting.
	And even look back at that tape we heard.
	You remember this, Steve, where the ESPN anchor, Rachel Nichols, got in trouble for not wanting her black colleague to take over her role at the NBA Finals.
	And she had this private conversation with one of LeBron James's top people.
	And that guy was like, I'm so exhausted between Me Too and Black Lives Matter.
	I'm so over this.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And he had to apologize, although that part of the story really kind of quickly went away because, you know, the deference for LeBron James in the media is pretty strong that it even extends to his inner circle there.
	And it was mostly aimed at Rachel Nichols, who, by the way, I follow Rachel Nichols on Twitter.
	Every tweet she puts out is people calling her a racist in the replies.
	That's just.
	Wait, what do you.
	Oh, she puts something out and then everybody replies that she's a racist?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's, you know, just going forward, weeks later, now she just tweets.
	Something, oh, here's my conversation about this NBA player.
	Okay, everyone just calls her a racist because that's what they've been told to do.
	It's sad, but I do think to some extent you have to get used to that.
	You know, you can't listen.
	I mean, Andrew Sullivan, he's been called a racist many times.
	I've been called a racist many times, especially if you're a white person trying to have a conversation on race and you don't totally sign on to Black Lives Matter and all this anti racism, you know, BS propaganda.
	You're going to get called a racist.
	It isn't pleasant.
	I do think you kind of have to get to the point where you're like, okay, you know, you can call me whatever you want to call me.
	I'm just going to say how I feel.
	And then you find out over time, You're not alone.
	Most normal people don't think that at all.
	You can't listen to the Twitter commentators.
	That's the last place you should go for real info.
	Well, that, and that's what's so.
	Alarming about this.
	And it is on some level, I guess I feel a little bit bad for someone like Elaine Welteroth, who is saying, I feel this pressure that there's pressure to demonstrate how to talk about this stuff.
	Like saying that if I just don't say anything, I mean, again, talked about this with Andrew, if I don't say anything, I will get called out on Twitter by people and it will make me uncomfortable and it will potentially put my job at risk.
	You know, she really does feel this that the small minority of very loud voices on Twitter have this tremendous power right now.
	Yeah.
	And she did, to your point, in a longer clip, talk about how she doesn't even really care.
	Like, she's, it's not like, I really want to talk about it.
	I just don't have the tools.
	She pretty much made clear she didn't care what Sharon Osborne said.
	She wasn't like, she's busy.
	She's leading her life like most normal people.
	It's crazy executives at TV stations like CBS and people on Twitter who control too much of the national dialogue who try to shame you into saying just exactly the right thing.
	And, you know, having been on both sides of those people, I can say, I mean, I'm not somebody who kind of shames anybody, but I've been the target of theirs many times.
	And now I'm free.
	I can say life is much better when you're free of them, when you just finally say, I'm not playing your game anymore.
	Call me what you want.
	Totally.
	Yeah.
	Sharon needs a sub stack or a podcast.
	That's right.
	Wait, Sharon Osborne.
	Absolutely.
	And frankly, sounds like Elaine and Cheryl Underwood may need one too.
	Exactly.
	There's life outside of CBS, which, by the way, has absolutely no ratings anyway, that no one's watching that show.
	So get out.
	Get out while you still can.
	Steve, it's been fun having you on this edition of Sound Up.
	I appreciate it.
	Anytime.
	Thank you.
	And in one minute, back to Andrew.
	Just this weekend in Chicago, 66-0 people were shot in Chicago just this weekend.
	That's not even to speak about the murder rate for the major cities in America going up over one-third, over 35% year-on-year, which is the largest increase we have seen since 1968.
	And at that point, the murder rate had gone up year-over-year by 13%.
	So we are way up when it comes to murders in the United States.
	Obviously, it's related to what's gone on with the police.
	And by the way, in Chicago, there was a young officer, 29 years old, Ella French, shot in pulling over a car.
	She's dead.
	Her partner also shot, fighting for his life right now.
	And when Mayor Lightfoot there was asked, Hey, do you think the rise in attacks on cops in the city might be related to the anti cop rhetoric?
	She put up her hand and said, Just stop it.
	Stop it.
	It's like, No, you stop it, Mayor Lightfoot.
	You and the others who try to demonize police writ large because of some.
	Bad cases that have gotten outsized media coverage.
	You stop it because you're part of the problem.
	And this weekend, Andrew, Cori Bush, one of these big defund the police folks, she's a Democrat from Missouri, was asked about the fact that notwithstanding the fact she's pushed defund the police at every turn, it turns out she has spent $70,000 of taxpayer money on her own private security.
	And here she was.
	Defending that move.
	Listen here.
	I'm going to make sure I have security because I know I have had attempts on my life and I have too much work to do.
	There are too many people that need help right now for me to allow that.
	So if I end up spending $200,000, if I spend $10 more on it, you know what?
	I get to be here to do the work.
	So suck it up and defunding the police has to happen.
	Okay.
	So tell it to the 453 murdered people in Chicago just this year.
	They might have benefited from some police presence too, Corey.
	The one thing that I found very disturbing about the BLM protests is that last summer, is that.
	Normally, these protests can be very angry and very vociferous.
	For example, if you want to be a protest police abuse, then it's a perfectly legitimate, admirable in some ways, thing to do and chant your slogans.
	But they chanted them at the faces of the cops hired to keep them safe.
	And there's something about that that just, I do not believe, I'm a civil libertarian, I do not believe police should abuse people.
	And I think it's very important for us to be vigilant about it.
	I think we should protest it and we should.
	Do everything we can to prevent it.
	But you do not generalize and then take a random cop who's policing your march and shriek at them that they are bastards, pigs, all the other things, screaming at them in the face.
	I saw one picture of this young white woman, I think a student, just yelling at this older black cop, accusing him of being an agent of white supremacy.
	And it just made me sick.
	To be honest, the way in which cops in general have been the definition of bigotry, Megan, is generalizing from a few to everybody.
	And in that sense, the way that the BLM marches were targeting random police, just people, they had no idea who they were, they might be the best cop in the beat and accusing them of the sins of a handful.
	That is called bigotry.
	It is the definition of it.
	And you can be bigoted towards cops.
	And when, you know, the New York City Pride March actually prevented gay cops, people who are out in the job, people who for the last 25 years have had courage and integrity and done their job well as cops while also being gay, they were prevented from marching in the gay Pride March in uniform.
	And.
	Again, who are you attacking here?
	Are you really?
	Is this about Derek Chauvin?
	Fine.
	But these people who were unbelievable heroes, who have real integrity, and who took on a very hard task.
	And when these first cops came out in their units, it wasn't easy.
	They really, you know, I was enough to remember when that happened.
	And to see those same cops be treated this way by gay people just infuriated me and infuriated a lot of us.
	In the gays, among the gays, most of us did not want that to happen.
	You do polling of the gay public, and 80% wanted the gay cops to be marching, overruled by a clique of woke fanatics.
	And it's incredibly depressing because the other thing is that we're seeing around the country, city after city, police morale really collapse.
	Public denunciations of the cops without any qualifications have consequences.
White Supremacist Smear Campaigns 00:03:38
	It really does.
	And the consequences are not being felt by prosperous students at Yale.
	They're being felt by three year olds in downtown DC, shot dead in a barbecue, in a drive by, did nothing.
	That brings us to what happened to you.
	And you may not know this, but I was raving about this piece you wrote when you wrote it and recommended it to all of our listeners.
	And I've gotten a lot of feedback from people saying, thank you for that.
	Thank you for recommending it.
	Because they too love what you said.
	I will say, I mean, not to just really lick your boots, Andrew, but like it takes a special gifted mind to write what you wrote, it takes a special ability to process larger cultural events and distill it so quickly.
	Clearly, like you did in that piece.
	It's the gift that we have of you, really reflected in your book, Out on a Limb, that you've been writing about our culture for decades and have all that perspective.
	But unlike a lot of us, you can remember it.
	It's still in your head and it helps you frame new events.
	It's why you're such a gift.
	And you wrote in that piece, this is just to pick one of the many jewels that's in there.
	And I'm quoting now We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s.
	This isn't coming from the ground up, it's being imposed.
	Ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown.
	That, to the point you just raised, that's exactly it.
	In the name of anti racism, in the name of fighting anti blackness, the woman, the white woman in her Lululemon will go out there and scream in the face of the black older cop and tell him he's white supremacist adjacent, right?
	Or they'll let black and brown kids get killed.
	By the dozens in the inner cities, as they take away police who protect these communities because it makes them feel better at night when they go to bed in Brooklyn.
	Or they will abolish the SAT, which is the most powerful means to find bright, smart, young, poor Black kids to get them to college because it's elitist.
	Because the smartest Black kids who otherwise would not be found, who are lost in the system otherwise, don't deserve the same chance as everyone else.
	Again, part of this is.
	Is not constantly, we're constantly on the defensive.
	The sense that under the barrage of being told you're racist until you prove otherwise, we're so busy spluttering in a way, and our mouths are kind of opening, and we don't, there's no defense of that.
	It's how did you, when did you last stop beating your wife?
	You know, it's that the dynamics change, but you can reverse the dynamics and say, and this is what was happening to me, really.
	I've just been enduring this for, and one night I just was like, I'm just going to say, you know, screw you.
	You keep telling me I've gone crazy.
	I haven't gone crazy.
	I'm still the same person.
	What happened to you?
	You talk crazy.
	Yes.
	What happened to you?
	Because that's what it's based on.
	Everybody keeps coming up to you and saying, oh, you know, what happened?
	Now you're a white supremacist.
	Now you're, you know, take off the hood, Andrew, right?
	And it's like, no, I'm the same as I've always been.
	I know.
	And that, you know, at some extent, because of that, because suddenly every left Twitter person was calling me a white supremacist, I thought, you know, I can't defend myself against this.
	It is pure smear job.
	What I can do is produce a book of my own.
	Of my life's work, and you make your mind up.
	If you read this book and think there's white supremacists behind it, you're out of your mind.
	But go ahead.
	I wanted to say, I wanted this to be something I put out there to say, look, this is my work.
Defining America's Worst Past 00:13:12
	This is all it's about.
	Now, it's not left liberal.
	It's not.
	I know that.
	It never has been.
	It's an independent conservative voice, but it's also not Republican and it's also very anti authoritarian.
	And it comes really from the enthusiasm of an immigrant to America.
	I think sometimes those of us.
	Who come here?
	You know, when we hear people say, those of us who immigrated here from other countries, this country is the most racist place on earth, I just feel like saying them, are you out of your mind?
	Have you been to China?
	Have you been to Russia?
	Have you been to Japan?
	Have you been to rural England?
	Have you been to rural Germany?
	This place is a miracle.
	The ability of Americans with this level of unprecedented diversity of faith, of background, of religion, of race, of ethnicity, Of dialect, of language.
	It's never been attempted in human history before.
	And we're still doing okay.
	You know, you would have predicted, given humankind's basic nature, that we would be in a permanent civil war.
	But we haven't because liberalism and our constitution gave us enough air to live together without fighting a zero sum war.
	And we believe in a non zero sum world in which we can all win given enough space.
	And that's all I can say.
	I've never met, I mean, the English are pretty easygoing people in general.
	There are bigots and nasty people in every country.
	So let's just assume that.
	Okay, they're there.
	But the way in which Americans routinely, when you look at them, not in the papers, but in real life, Interact with each other, deal with each other as different racial individuals.
	It's really very impressive to anybody who has any sense of perspective.
	And it's only if you're 19 years old and been in Yale for three years that you can believe this kind of crap.
	It's just, it doesn't face the first instant of reality.
	It disappears immediately.
	And ask yourself why isn't there a multicultural, multiracial capital in China?
	Minorities in Japan.
	Where is the interesting minority part of Moscow?
	No, they're all exactly where we were a long, long time ago.
	America's had to evolve, partly because of its diversity.
	And that's why I'm still enthusiastically a citizen of these United States, having given up my subjection to Her Majesty, even though Her Majesty hasn't ever regarded me as having disappeared.
	But here's how you put it.
	This is from Out on a Limb in November of 1996, writing in the Sunday Times.
	You write about America and what you think makes it, the things that you thought made it such an enduringly liberating place.
	And this is a quote America is still a country where the past is anathema.
	Even when Americans are nostalgic, they're nostalgic for a myth of the future.
	What matters for Americans in small ways and large is never where you've come from.
	But where you are going, what you are doing now, or what you are about to become.
	That's exactly right.
	That's exactly right.
	And I read it with a little bit of a welling in the eyes.
	Well, feeling the loss, feeling a shift.
	Yes, but you know what, Lincoln, that is still America.
	And when one political tribe insists that you must go back to the darkest days of your history, not because we need to understand that, we do, and we need to face up to it, but to say that that's the meaning of America, the past.
	The worst of our past is what defines America.
	That was what the 1619 Project was about.
	That is what critical race theory is about.
	It is about this entire experiment, it is actually not an experiment in freedom, but an experiment in slavery.
	That is what they are saying.
	And it's important to understand that that's what they're saying, because that is why they don't believe in any of the constitutional guarantees of individual freedom that most Americans have believed in.
	But they're out of touch with the mood of Americans in general.
	Americans are not.
	Fixated on the past.
	Even if they know something, they want to know what we can do now?
	Okay, what can we do now?
	And the truth is, they're not being told what they can do now except hate themselves or give up their job or allow someone else.
	And that can't work as a political strategy.
	That's why I'm confident, Megan.
	All it takes is someone else to say, no, we're looking, we're a people of the future.
	We will never, we should examine our past.
	We should make amends.
	We should, again, they don't.
	Don't let them put you in that position of defending slavery, for Christ's sake.
	No.
	But in fact, we are proud of the amount of progress we've made to overcome that.
	It's not perfect, obviously, not.
	It was built on a crime.
	We know that.
	But what do we do now?
	And what can we become in the future?
	And how can we move forward?
	That's America.
	It's not Europe, it's the opposite.
	But America is that.
	And if you lose that, you've lost something incredibly important about the place.
	It's so different, though, because you're right.
	I agree with you on Americans in general.
	But the woke have seized control of all of our institutions, as you accurately point out repeatedly in this piece and in others.
	And you write about how you refer to this from, and you use Wesley Yang's term, who you also interviewed on your podcast, and I recommend that to everybody, the successor ideology.
	And the successor ideology is the next, it's the replacement for liberalism, small L liberalism in this country, meaning due process and freedom of speech and freedom of association and all the things that we grew up with as sort of the parameters by which we all agreed to live in this country.
	And they're getting rid of that slowly but surely, the elites who have taken over these cultural institutions.
	To the objection of most Americans, but most Americans don't fully understand how to make their objections clear, whether they could do that and keep their job, keep their place at a university, and so on.
	And this is what you write in the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence.
	And you are either fighting this and, quote, on the right side of history, or you are against it and abetting evil.
	There's no neutrality, no space for skepticism, no room for debate, no space even for staying silent.
	Contrasted to, as you point out, liberalism, which leaves you alone, whereas the successor ideology will never let go of you.
	They want a thought police.
	You're not allowed to think or feel as you want.
	You have to think and feel exactly as they want, and so on.
	And I do think it's growing there.
	I don't know.
	I think finally people are fighting back, but is it too late?
	Because I feel like the power, the control over these cultural institutions in every area that touches our lives, it feels ubiquitous and sometimes it feels overpowering.
	I think one way of looking at it.
	Is in some ways, sometimes I joke and said that Harvard has finally gone back to its roots and it's now once again a divinity school teaching students the right religion, teaching them not to say bad words, teaching them in the ways that America was also founded by a bunch of religious lunatics who were too crazy even for 16th century Reformation England.
	They were the people that even the crazy people in Europe couldn't handle and they landed a little bit from where I'm sitting.
	And there is a tradition in America of religious fanaticism and puritanism in policing the lives of others.
	This is the only country on earth that passed a constitutional amendment to prevent people drinking.
	Look at the past of America.
	In some ways, because what I would argue, because we don't have an established religion like most other countries did when they were founded, when America was founded, it gives everybody, it doesn't allow the Government to control people's morality in the way that it did in other established churches and states.
	And so people created their own, which is what made it so vibrant because religion in America was so self generated.
	It wasn't top down, it was very bottom up.
	The problem with that is that those upwellings of religious purity can become incredibly, you know, you get the Scarlet Letter, you get Salem.
	You get the Lavender Scare, you get the Hollywood Blacklist.
	There are these civil movements that aren't generated really by the government, they are out there in the society that is attempting to purify America constantly.
	And I think we should see part of this woke thing as part of America's religious tradition of calling to account people who are sinful and attempting to control and direct their lives.
	If you look at the way in which 19th century religious fundamentalists would police language to make sure you didn't say anything that could lead to lust or sex or greed or all the rest of it, you couldn't say swear words.
	And now look at whether woke police your language so you don't.
	It's the same.
	Instinct of telling other people how to live their lives in order to save their souls.
	Yeah, and to be in order to save their souls.
	And look, I don't need you to save my soul.
	My soul, whatever it is, is between me and God.
	And that's another part of America.
	But we should never underestimate that zeal, that puritanical zeal that's in American history that comes and goes and is currently at a horrible waxing period.
	Don't leave me now.
	We got more coming up in 60 seconds.
	If you look at history and view it through a lens that analogizes this to a religion, how does this end?
	How do we get back to small l, liberalism, free speech, free association, due process, and all the rest of it?
	Do we?
	Well, I think there are maybe, I can imagine a couple of ways.
	One is that it grotesquely overplays its hat, in which people are much more aware of its darker side.
	And I think.
	I'll be honest with you, Megan.
	I think that has begun to happen a little bit.
	I think I hear younger people saying, you know, finally rebelling against this.
	And finally, a generation that's coming up, maybe younger Gen Z, that looks at the way in which they're the older generation just above them, just basically took everything their teachers told them and swallowed it whole.
	I mean, this is not the way students were when I was there.
	We were constantly against our professors.
	But no, these people are like children being mothered by.
	These ideological people.
	So, I do think there's an element in which, at some point, the American urge to say, screw it, will come along and undermine this.
	The other way is it'll be mocked, that humor will take its edge away.
	And that's why it's so important to defend comedy.
	It's so important to defend the right of the jester in these moments.
	And it's also why they're obsessed with humor.
	Humor is the corrosion, is corrosive of orthodoxy.
	Because it immediately just gives you another perspective.
	So, humor is another thing.
	But in my more gloomy moments, I sort of think that the one thing that's missing, which we used to have, and the 21st century has really seen a collapse, was a shared, even if it wasn't completely sincere, but a shared Christian inheritance that understood that everybody was an individual under the eyes of God and answerable to God alone.
	And that we are all equal in the eyes of God.
	Now, that is a very basic belief that is part of all Christian beliefs, which is very much the founding of America, is a great solvent to tribalism.
	And just as Jesus was, in fact, the first anti tribalist, the first person who was of his tribe and said, no, the other tribe is just as good, sometimes better.
	That was a revolution in human consciousness.
	From that came Europe, from that came the possibility of the individual soul.
	From that comes individual rights, this notion that the individual is the most important person, most important factor, not families, not nations, not tribes, individuals.
	And take that away, take that infrastructure of thought and spirituality.
	And understanding of the world away as Christianity has collapsed in America.
Missing Spiritual Foundations 00:04:39
	And you may have taken away the foundations of the liberal order and without realizing it.
	And of course, when you've done that, people seek meaning elsewhere.
	They create new religions.
	I mean, if you looked at that summit, it was so fascinating because you could see a spontaneous new religion taking shape.
	People need it, so they create it if they don't have it.
	We used to have it as part of our inheritance, and we thought, Fuddy duddy Christianity, it's all, we don't need it anymore.
	And we take it away, and suddenly we begin to realize what we only realized what we had until it was going.
	And that's my concern, which is why I honestly believe, and I know this sounds cheesy or pious, but I do actually think that the only real long term project to rescue liberalism is a revival of Christianity.
	Wow.
	That's my next book.
	No, no, no.
	I love that because even I, as I am Christian, I'm Catholic.
	But I've said openly, I'm not so great about getting to the church these days.
	But I've been making an effort.
	I have been making an effort recently to get there and bring my kids.
	And I will say, obviously, I'm not woke, but whenever I leave, I'm always resolved to try harder, right?
	To be more generous in my opinions and my lens that I look at other people with, you know, to sort of get back to kindness, forgiveness.
	And that's what I mean by morality, not judgment of others, but non judgment, support, love.
	Understanding that we're here for a limited time, understanding of what Jesus wanted for me, wanted for the world, you drift too far from that.
	And no matter, even if you're not woke, your behavior can sort of stray from where you want it to be.
	It was just a good reminder to me that it does matter.
	Even if you're not totally connecting with the hymns, with what the priest is saying on any given day, just being with your fellow citizens, standing, kneeling, sitting, peace, the communion, all of it does something positive to you.
	Yes, it absolutely does.
	It also, you know, our lives are full of choices.
	And that's almost defined by that's almost a definition of freedom.
	We choose everything.
	And we go to, and that's so, and that's wonderful in so many ways.
	We're empowering and we have an extraordinary number of things to choose.
	But at some point, we also want not to choose.
	We need as humans to just obey and to submit in some way.
	And the safest, best, and psychologically and spiritually most productive way of doing that is going to a church in silence and kneeling.
	And accepting that you're not everything.
	There's something greater than you, and something that you're now required to do because you're just a human being at that service.
	Stand up now, kneel down, bow your head.
	It's a place where there are silences, where no one is behind the camera saying, pick that up, pick that pace up, we can't have that.
	Because it's giving you a different understanding of what time is, too, which is time is not about being productive in the next hour, time is about spending time with God.
	And also, By inference, it is spending time with those you love and the people around you, and not living abstractly in your head or constantly around your own wants and needs.
	And just we're human, so we forget it and we want to run our lives and we like power, we like choice.
	But the discipline to go every week and to say, Nope, there's something else, I need to remember that.
	And you know, that's also what having Sunday, the Sabbath, did, which is also gone.
	We had a whole day.
	Where shops weren't open, where choice ended, when you actually had a day of quiet and rest.
	And you can trace, I think, I know this sounds very fogeyish.
	And of course, I'm one of these people that's happy I can go out and get something on a Sunday afternoon.
	But we're missing something, missing something important, a moment of calm, of quiet.
	Our world is so full of noise.
	So there's a piece in the book called I Used to Be a Human Being, which is about my basically my breakdown after blogging for 15 years, after living online for 15 years, and how this is not a way of really living.
	That you think, Oh, I'm just doing all my online stuff on top of my life.
	It's all a game.
	And then at some point you realize, no, I'm not.
	This is my life now.
	I don't have those hours.
Cable News Noise vs Quiet 00:04:07
	I wasn't with that person.
	I wasn't with my kid.
	Even when I was with my kid, I was on my phone.
	And that wears you down.
	It's not good for people.
	It's just not good for the way we live.
	And so mitigating the technological challenges to spirituality and to sanity is also.
	Incredibly important that technological shift.
	I mean, I also think it's true that the way in which social media has altered the context of our discourse is incredibly bad.
	And I feel enormous concern about that.
	To create a communication structure that is designed to distract us and make us emotional and reactive is the worst context for any kind of public discourse at all.
	Which is why, you know, on Substack, we're actually trying to have a place where people can disagree, but at length with the context and nuance necessary, and with which we used to have in the old blogosphere when we started.
	I was going to say, you've always been doing that.
	But I admire that too.
	I can relate to that just having left cable news after, you know, 14 years or so.
	Cable and Facebook are kind of in the same business, you know, foment rage.
	Deep emotional swings that no one really gives a damn whether it's healthy for the participant.
	What they give a damn about is will the advertisers pay for this particular audience?
	And it feels, I don't know, somehow cleaner to not be doing that, right?
	To be in a business that allows for nuance and more fruitful discussion and intellectual massaging and not just like, you know, you on Fox News, I don't know.
	I think, I don't know whether Roger Ailes would have allowed that and couldn't have had the discussion that we had today, right?
	I love it.
	Almost certainly not.
	It would be, they don't want to complicate things for people.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	And add to show somebody's layer of humanity.
	Yeah.
	Or that you have some doubts about something.
	No doubts are allowed.
	One of the things I make a point of doing every week on the weekly dish is I always run dissents to the column that I ran the last week.
	And I am forced to answer the substantive, well crafted arguments against me.
	In other words, I'm not just having an easy hit, an easy, A riposte or something.
	My colleague at the dish, a man called Chris Boden, he edits it so I don't rig it.
	And I am put on the spot every week.
	And you know what?
	People, if cable news did that, if cable news did, okay, now we're going to deal with all the toughest things that people have said about what I said last night and go through them and defend yourself.
	I think people would find that interesting.
	No, instead, what we do is not we, because I honestly, I pride myself in not having done this, but they'll put up a liberal shill, right?
	An empty suit who you can just beat up on easily.
	I loved always putting on really smart liberals.
	Against really smart conservatives and letting them go at it, the frustration was they only had three minutes to do it.
	Okay.
	Nothing gets solved in three minutes.
	Right.
	But just the gesture.
	To understanding that we don't know everything and that more views are always better.
	And a contrary view is not, I mean, if it's in good faith, if it's a stupid, silly one, fine.
	But if it's a good faith, real critique, don't immediately impugn the motives of the person making it, which is the usual move.
	Don't impugn the identity of the person making it.
	Oh, well, you're a woman, you would say that.
	Or you're a man, you would say that.
	Or you're Jewish, you would say that.
	Or whatever.
	Actually, take the argument seriously.
	And if it has some cogency to it, it's going to improve your point of view, to nuance your point of view, to integrate that idea or that point into your own position.
	What's there to lose?
	What's there to lose, of course, is our pride.
	And so we create this thing called Twitter where our pride is the most important thing.
	How many followers do we have?
	How can we appeal to these people?
Don't Impugn Good Faith Critics 00:03:14
	And it's corrosive, as you say.
	But I, again, rather than getting too depressed, I see examples of writers.
	Resisting this of leaving the mainstream media, of starting these new ventures like you're doing, like Bari is doing, or people like Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald, or these people who are setting up new forums.
	And you know what?
	We are not collapsing in traffic this year.
	We are going up.
	And I feel the energy coming into the blog from the sense that we are in a period where it does matter.
	It does matter how we debate and argue right now, because these are important issues.
	And I do feel a slight Revival in energy in again against this.
	Oh, that's a great.
	I do.
	I wish to leave it.
	Honestly, Andrew, thank you for your insight, for your analysis, for your wisdom, your ability to put it in terms that we can understand.
	Andrew Sullivan, a big, beautiful, brilliant bear.
	No, I don't have enough back hair.
	I'm not having.
	I still have the circuit training.
	Okay, good to hear.
	No, I'm a daddy now.
	I'm a dad.
	I've turned into a daddy.
	That's what happens to you when you turn 50.
	Whether you like it or not.
	It's not when they first start calling you daddy.
	I'm like, oh, please, no.
	But there I am.
	It's a fate, not a calling.
	That was a pleasure.
	Good luck with it.
	Out on a limb, and everybody should go by it.
	Don't miss tomorrow's show because we are going to take you in depth on the eviction moratorium.
	The Biden administration has admitted they don't have the authority to do this.
	They admitted that right before they did it.
	And they're basically just flouting the law.
	I mean, it's really kind of insane.
	They're doing it anyway.
	And these same people who told us that Trump was behaving in extra legal ways don't seem to care, right?
	Because they like the cause, not evicting people who can't pay their rent.
	Well, why can't they pay their rent?
	What about the landlords?
	These are not all wealthy Mr. Potter types from It's a Wonderful Life.
	These are hardworking people who are trying to pay their own bills, who didn't understand they'd be subsidizing somebody else's life forever as a result of the pandemic.
	So we're going to take a hard look at it tomorrow with two people directly involved in this decision, in the aftermath and the effects.
	this decision and I think you're going to enjoy this discussion.
	See you then.
	Don't forget to subscribe, download, rate, and give us a review while you're there.
	Go to Apple Podcast Reviews.
	Let me know your thoughts.
	Still reading them all, still enjoying them all, and still getting great guest suggestions from you guys.
	Talk to you tomorrow.
	Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
	No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
	The Megan Kelly Show is a devil-may-care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.
	Welcome to this super enkele trendscast program for the ascended factory of the driftenden.
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Chapters

00:00:00 Tribalism Kills People
00:14:35 Trust and Public Health Mandates
00:28:50 Coffee House Snobbery Explained
00:35:29 Scaled Back Safety Measures
00:39:39 Hillary Clinton's Political Legacy
00:45:00 Cops, Racism, and Media Pressure
00:59:08 White Supremacist Smear Campaigns
01:02:47 Defining America's Worst Past
01:16:00 Missing Spiritual Foundations
01:20:39 Cable News Noise vs Quiet
01:24:47 Don't Impugn Good Faith Critics