I belatedly came to Shellenberger in my research on nuclear power’s potential to help cut carbon emissions. But his new book — on the terrible progressive governance in many American cities in recent years — is what gave me the idea to interview him. On homelessness, crime, addiction, and the fast-deterioration of our public spaces, San Fran-sicko, despite its trolly title, is empirical, tough-minded and, in my view, humane. But make up your own mind, in what was one of the more timely conversations I’ve had this year.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). Read the full transcript here.  For two clips of our conversation — on the reasons why San Francisco progressives won’t build safe homeless shelters, and on the growing backlash against Democrats on crime and urban disorder — head over to our YouTube page. (And be sure to check out Shellenberger’s substack — he’s on a major roll this week.)

A reader writes:

I just listened to the Dishcast with Sam Quinones and am so grateful you are covering addiction and homelessness. I especially appreciated the perspective that homeless addicts — who I am afraid of and repelled by — are suffering the most, and in genuine need of help. It’s easy to forget when I’m frustrated and everyone seems to be diagnosing the real problem as my own bigotry! (A personal anecdote: my brother’s truck was recently stolen and destroyed by addicts in Bakersfield, where he works as a firefighter and puts out fires every day that are set by the homeless. This is a problem!)

The diversity of guests on the Dishcast has been mind-expanding. In this episode I was reminded of John McWhorter’s claims about woke as the new religion. It seems as though homeless men, especially if they are racial minorities, have become sacred cows for progressives.

I think there are some more achievable policy solutions than strengthening communities and social relationships, however. This article from the California Globe highlights some concrete things that could be done by redirecting the massive resources already going to homelessness.

Here’s a clip of my conversation with Sam about the meth crisis:

Another reader remarks:

I loved your interview with Quinones. For one thing, I love his speaking style — many false starts and revisions, as he looks at the subject from many perspectives, going several directions before going ahead. (It’s my style as well.) I think it’s characteristic of many thoughtful people, but they don’t always get a chance to speak. The episode makes me want to read his book.

Another reader:

Thank you for introducing Sam Quinones to those of us who haven’t read his books. You and he shed so much light on the relationship between the large and ever-expanding encampments and meth and fentanyl use. He was able to explain the rapid expansion, which had been the most mysterious aspect of the issue for me.

We have always had homelessness, but not like what we see today. It’s a different thing altogether. I used to think that taking the profit motive out of drugs and decriminalizing them would reduce the problem, but I think I heard the opposite from Quinones. I also was unaware of the meth issue among gay men. The gay men I socialize with don’t talk about it, but maybe they are not having the problem (we are boomers).

Here’s a snippet of the convo on gays and meth:

A recommendation from a reader:

For those who are interested, there is a documentary on gay men and meth on Amazon Prime that is quite devastating to watch. (I’m not affiliated with Amazon, just passing along some info.)

Yes — but it’s from 2014! We could use an updated one. From a reader with first-hand experience with the meth crisis:

Overall, your perspective on crystal meth addiction in the gay male community is spot on. I was able to hide it for years, until one day I was unable to do so, and it caught up with me. Exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, I found myself unable to stop, as meth allowed me to cope with the isolation and other traumas. 

What I don’t think was discussed by you or Sam in his book are some positive steps towards recovery that many have found. First, the community of Crystal Meth Anonymous (CMA) moved itself online at the start of the pandemic and now continues to offer hundreds of meetings each week, in addition to in-person meetings across the world. I regularly find addicts are unaware of CMA and have trouble relating to those they find in AA or Narcotics Anonymous meetings. 

Second, some of us have found support against meth cravings through the use of the anti-depressant mirtazapine. There has been a small clinical trial. While not a panacea for meth addiction, I have met others who have found recovery through its use, along with a combination of regular attendance of recovery meetings.

A reader who practices medicine in California touches on some themes that Shellenberger and I discussed:

I wonder if you’re aware of the pressure put on physicians in the past to prescribe opiates. More than a decade ago, complaints of pain were termed “the fifth vital sign.” About that time the California medical board issued “guidelines” about dealing with complaints of pain. These were interpreted as meaning you could get in trouble with your licensing board if someone complained that you were unwilling to give them dope.

Drug-seeking behavior has been a problem for clinicians forever. If the patient gets the desired controlled substance, there’s the added advantage that you get your drugs free, or for minimal copays. It’s found in all practices and is always unpleasant unless you give in to what the patient wants. It certainly is the easiest thing to do. They get their prescription and leave.

(There are any number of legitimate uses for opioids, of course. I’m not discounting the pain of someone with terminal cancer. I’m talking about patients with chronic complaints of pain with no objective findings to explain the complaints.)

Responsible medical practice requires that you not prescribe in bad faith. If I don’t believe what I’m told, I am not to prescribe controlled substances. There are many tells an experienced physician can see. Sometimes you’re told things that require you to suppress a laugh — for example, a man with multiple skin abscess from skin popping was “attacked by a swarm of bees.”

This isn’t about being judgmental. It’s about not doing harm.

In my area, officials are working on getting addicts permanent housing — “the problem is housing” — complete with “wrap around” services. Addicts are free to continue using once we get them housed. It didn’t work when they were living with mom and dad, so why should it work in the hotel rooms we’re buying? None of those responsible for making policy seem to have considered that their approach may very well make it easier to continue the addiction. With the best of intentions, I think it likely that the current approach will lead to more harm. 

Incidentally, housing addicts in California has become a very big business.  Somebody is benefitting, even if it isn’t the addicted.

Several readers below share their personal perspective after reading my latest column, “Woke: On the Wrong Side of History.” The first:

Thanks for the fantastic essay. It really hit home for me as a Puerto Rican advancing through middle age, since so much has changed regarding race perspectives in my lifetime. Not only is the left (of which I count myself a member, sadly) on the wrong side of history, its most influential leaders are gobsmackingly ignorant of it. Hispanic support for Trump would not be such a shocking phenomenon for the left if it spent more time learning Hispanic history and less time trying to pretend Hispanics are all oppressed POCs wallowing in misery, desperately waiting for all-knowing lefty superheroes to liberate us from the shackles of white supremacy.

Regarding your comments on Hispanics being “white adjacent” and your observation that “even within the CRT category of ‘brown,’ there are those who identify as white,” those are the key insights pointing towards a history that the left has either forgotten or refuses to recall: Nearly all Hispanic immigrants to the US hail from former colonies that had been ruled by Spain, a European (i.e., WHITE) country. As such, the history of these immigrants has nothing to do with the 1619 Project and very little to do with Anglo white supremacy; rather, these immigrant cultures were informed by a white perspective of the Latin variety.

The Spanish imperial project (can you believe there ever existed a mean, horribly oppressive empire that spoke Spanish) was similar to that of the British, though it differed significantly because the Spanish did not aggressively police interracial mixing among whites, blacks, and natives. It was discouraged enough such that whites remained at the top of the hierarchy (which remains the case to this day), but a mixed-raced person could advance in Spanish society further than a “pure” black or indigenous person, especially if that person celebrated Spanish heritage, culture and so forth.

Over time there have developed large cohorts of Latin American Hispanics who identify as white (irrespective of how they may present to Anglos) because Hispanic culture historically rewarded celebrations of European ancestry and identity without regard to a “one drop” rule. These people simply do NOT identify as “oppressed” POCs and, if anything, identify as the descendants of great white conquering “oppressors.” None of this changes when they immigrate to the US. Putting the moral questions regarding these developments aside, these identities are real and widespread and the Democratic left needs to understand them, rather than wish them away because they complicate the “Black and brown” narrative.

There are data to back up my little history review. In the 2020 US Census, the government offered Hispanics more racial categories, such as “multi-racial” and “other,” in an attempt to steer them away from selecting white as a default option. Out of a total of 60 million Hispanics in the US, 20 percent still opted to choose white as the only selection for their race! That millions of Hispanics still identify as white ought to tell the left something about what they are getting wrong with this “brown” approach, namely that attempting to shoehorn an entire group made up of multiple races and backgrounds into one “oppressed” POC category is a fool’s errand.  

Another reader points to a form of privilege not appreciated enough:

I came from Cuba in mid-1960s at the age of 9 with no knowledge of English. My parents never learned English. By age 12 or 13, I had learned enough English so that friends of my parents would bring me their job applications and other forms to fill out. I was often impatient in doing that, something I deeply now regret. To me, the major privilege now isn’t color of skin, but knowing English and having American citizenship.

People from Central America, South America, and Caribbean don’t think of themselves in terms of being part of an identity tectonic plate. They think of themselves in terms of the country from which they come. They begin to classify themselves as Hispanic, or Latina/o, or the revolting “Latinx,” as an Anglo heuristic.  (“Latinx,” in my opinion, is left-wing linguistic neo-colonialism.)

By the way, when I went through diversity training at a very, very large, prestigious bank, among the microaggressions listed was, “Telling someone they speak English well.”

Another reader sizes up the two parties philosophically:

A friend recently insisted that the GOP has a form of nationalism that he described as “Country Music Nationalism,” which consists of “long neck beers, freedom, pickup trucks, flags, guns, farms, open roads.” A few of us pushed back, saying it’s not a positive narrative from the GOP, but a negative one (fear of foreigners, of snobs, of moral decay etc), and that patriotism is the confabulated positive version of it. Fear — in its Trumpian “they’re sending their rapists and murderers” form — is the narrative core.

We then realized the Dems are also obsessed with the past, but not in a good way: its sins. The past is not a golden age to return to, but the source of all our current ills and our doomed future. The 1619 Project isn’t a track record of the massive progress we’ve made as a civilization, nor even how much we have left to do, but about how we are permanently tarnished and broken. We ultimately boiled it down to two messages:

GOP: “The present is bad, our past was good. Return.”Dems: “Our past sins have doomed our future. Recant.”

The GOP narrative has a direction, even if it’s the wrong one, and will ultimately continue to win until the Dems have a vision of the future that’s not just righteous indignation and self-abasement. The true tragedy is that we’re all moving into the future. To have two parties who are terrified of it, instead of excited and inspired by it, does not bode well for us no matter who “wins.”

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The Covid news keeps coming, and I wanted to understand it better, especially as Omicron makes its way across the Atlantic, and as vaccine effectiveness declines. Who better to talk to than David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine’s Covid specialist and environmental correspondent? He was on the Dishcast early this year, before the vaccines arrived, and he’s about as honest a broker on the pandemic as anyone. I also asked him to debrief Dishheads on the upshot of COP26, the recent Climate Change conference in Glasgow. I learned a lot — about the waste of solar panels and the potential of nuclear power to help us get past carbon more quickly.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips my conversation with David — on his sobering assessment of the vaccines against Delta, and on Biden’s bumbling on Covid pills and testing — head over to our YouTube page.

A reader looks back to last week’s episode:

I just listened to your podcast with Christina Sommers and Danielle Crittenden, and was pretty struck by your conversation with David Frum regarding President Biden. I’m a strong Biden supporter and am quite sanguine on his chances in 2024 (yes, I believe he will run if his health permits), so you can imagine I was more partial to Frum’s argument. But I’m wondering about your diagnosis of the prospects of his presidency. Do you think his situation is irreversible?

You can point to any number of two-term presidents in recent memory and find a moment in time where, if the election were held on a given day, the president would badly lose re-election. I wasn’t around for Reagan’s presidency, but didn’t things look pretty terrible for him in early 1983? A Harris poll taken in early January of ‘83 had Mondale trouncing Reagan. FiveThirtyEight has Reagan hitting the mid-30s around that time, quite a bit lower than where Biden is now. Before that, by mid-1982, he was where Biden is now, polling-wise.

You could say the same of Bill Clinton’s first two years. It strikes me that few mention his inglorious dip into the mid-30s only a few months into his term, again per 538. Then there were Clinton’s low-40s averages heading into the 1994 elections, the collapse of one of his signature legislative pushes, and his infamous drubbing at the hands of Newt Gingrich. Was it considered likely at the time that he would skate to re-election just two years later?

I feel like citing H.W. Bush’s soaring public approvals in his first three years and his incredible collapse in 1992 is a cliché at this point. And of course Obama had his highs and lows, and spent much of 2011 treading water roughly where Biden is now in terms of his poll numbers — to say nothing of his total collapse after his first debate with Romney and rapid climb back to the lead just in time to clinch re-election (yes, I was around for your reaction to that!).

I guess my question is, knowing that ultimately successful presidents can recover from political lows and have, why do I get the sense that you think Biden’s condition is terminal?

Because of his age and declining abilities. This is no reflection on him: he’s pretty remarkable for a 79 year old. But his speeches lack fire and focus; he’s background noise in our politics; he keeps making gaffes, including a rather dangerous one on declaring support for Ukraine; he has allowed himself to be defined, fairly or not, by the far left. Cognitive ability declines sharply around 60. In 2028, which would be Biden’s final year in office if re-elected, he’d be 86, my mother’s age. Yes, Trump would be 82. But Trump has the energy and passion of the mentally ill — and I just can’t see Biden matching that even now, let alone in nearly a decade’s time.

Another reader sounds the alarm for Biden and his party when it comes to America’s schools:

The NYT posted this today (“Schools Are Closing Classrooms on Fridays. Parents Are Furious.), and I suspect it’s going to be the main theme in the midterm elections: parents and schools. We saw this play out in Virginia and NJ last month and it seems to be intensifying.

Here in Portland, there is a serious battle going on with the Teachers Association and the school district. The teachers have proposed making Fridays a self-learning day for the remainder of the year. The school district is pushing back, particularly based on parent backlash. And the Oregonian newspaper has come out against the proposal as well.

I think everyone sympathizes that teachers are undergoing an extremely difficult time, particularly with all the behavioral issues kids are having. But I can tell you that every parent I know is gobsmacked at the thought of returning back to online learning. There have to be other solutions. We can’t go back to having kids at home. 

I don’t think this has fully resonated with Democratic politicians, even after the backlash last month. While there’s been a lot of focus on CRT, just the fact of what parents have been dealing with the past 18 months of schools closings has been such a nightmare. I think this NYMag article was spot on about how blind the Democrats were to this issue, especially in New Jersey. This February article in The Nation about the situation on the West Coast was haunting and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

I don’t want to compare myself to other people, but as a parent, the past 18 months have been the hardest of my life. Every day is just holding things together and the impacts to kids are going to be felt for many years. What I’m just stunned about is how absent the Democratic leaders are on this issue. There’s a rage amongst parents right now that we feel unheard and are desperate. I feel like we’re headed towards a blowout midterm election that’s going to exceed what happened to the Democrats in 1994. And you can’t say they weren’t warned.

Tyler Cowen predicts that even a mild wave of Omicron will cause chaos in the schools. I remain unimpressed by the cheering-up we’ve been exposed to recently about Biden’s future. Inflation is at a 40-year high; the Southern border is chaotic; we are still losing around 400,000 Americans a year to Covid and 100,000 to fentanyl and other opioids. Murder rates are through the roof — and are exacerbated by Democratic DAs refusing to prosecute violent criminals and keep them off the streets. Trump, meanwhile, has cemented his hold on an increasingly deranged GOP. Yes, there’s a long way to go. Yes, things can turn around. Yes, some strong aspects of the economy will become clearer over time, if we’re lucky.

But if you think this administration isn’t in serious trouble, you’re dreaming.

Next up, a collection of reader comments on last week’s column, “Why Roe Will Fall And Obergefell Won’t,” continued from our main page this week. First a dissent:

I hope you’re right that Obergefell won’t fall, but I have my doubts. Three of the Justices who voted against Obergefell — a narrow 5-4 decision, compared to Roe’s 7-2 — are still on the Court: Roberts, Alito and Thomas (and Roberts wrote a pretty scathing dissent). Do you really think that there aren’t two of the new Justices (good Catholics all) who wouldn’t join the three still there to overturn the Obergefell decision? And you really believe that public opinion will change their long-held beliefs that not only is gay marriage wrong but probably that gay relationships are too?

I have no reason to think that John Roberts believes that gay marriage and gay relationships are wrong. I scoured Google but didn’t come up with anything. Alito seems quite hostile on religious grounds, but it seems important to me to distinguish constitutional arguments with moral ones. Another dissent:

As you know, the modern consensus on substantive due process posits that people have unenumerated fundamental rights in the Constitution that courts are obligated to protect. It’s the principle that undergirds everything from Griswold v. Connecticut to Roe to Lawrence v. Texas to Obergefell.

Right now there are six legal originalists on the Court who simply believe this consensus to be based on a flawed premise. If the Constitution is silent on the issue, be it abortion or same-sex marriage, they believe it’s a political question that must be handled by legislatures. To them, it doesn’t matter if the political issue at hand is popular (like gay marriage). If a majority on the Court feels the whole root of Roe is rotten, why wouldn’t they want to cut down the whole tree? Alito and Thomas have already indicated they want to revisit Obergefell, after all.

That’s why I find your position so naive. The conservative movement has been candid that once Roe goes, and the legal concept of substantive due process with it, they intend to do away with the rest of those domestic political issues we consider settled. A few months ago, for example, the Texas solicitor general submitted an amicus brief suggesting that the Court leave Lawrence and Obergefell “hanging by a thread,” adding that those two rulings, “while far less hazardous to human life, are as lawless as Roe.”

Furthermore, the pro-life movement openly espouses that certain forms of popular contraception (namely the birth control pill and IUDs) constitute abortifacients and should be banned. When the Court overturns Roe, red-state legislatures will redefine fetal personhood to begin at conception, which could functionally ban those forms of contraception.

So the issue is not just abortion, which may or may not be morally unique. It is the entire platform of “social ills” that the religious right believes are morally indistinguishable from abortion.

A big question with marriage equality, unlike abortion, is that hundreds of thousands of couples are now legally married. That’s a lot of facts on the ground that cannot be abolished overnight. Undoing those civil marriages would be a nightmare; and simply drawing a line under them, and banning all future marriages seems downright bizarre. It’s not impossible. And maybe I’m too complacent. But I think it’s a log shot.

This next reader gets more personal:

I agree with you that abortion is an incredibly complex ethical issue, and the tendency of some on the far left to treat it as no different from a trip to the dentist is facile and off-putting.

However. I’m a woman who has willingly had three children, and it’s hard to put into words the visceral horror inspired by the thought of being forced to go through pregnancy and birth against your will. Opponents of abortion tend to gloss over that bit with the “just adopt” argument. Pregnancy — and particularly the birth itself — can damage your body in ways that last the rest of your life. Incontinence, prolapse, and serious perineal tears are all routine.

In fact, for most healthy women, pregnancy and birth will be the most risky medical event in their lives. Some women do still die in childbirth in America — especially poor and black women, who will be overwhelmingly the most affected if Roe is overturned. We all know that if abortion rights become state by state, rich women will have no trouble traveling to procure an abortion; it will be poor women who pay the price.

Forcing a woman to bring a pregnancy to term is inhumane and unacceptable — even if it is the will of the majority of people in conservative states.

Another reader points to “one missed nuance in your good Roe/Obergefell piece”:

When you write, “when it does not concern an easily-outvoted minority,” and when you explain why abortion isn’t strictly a “women’s issue,” you elide something that needs confronting. Abortion does in fact concern an easily-outvoted minority: women currently of childbearing age at any given time. And an even smaller minority: women actually pregnant and affected by the question in a way no one else is.

I do believe that abortion is a taking of human life, and it’s a moral question that concerns us all. (I would say the same of warfare.) However, I’m reluctant for majorities to have unfettered say over a contested moral choice that affects the one person making it (or barred from making it) in such a fundamentally different way from the others who may vote on it without consequence to themselves.

I don’t assert that the Constitution confers the right of the pregnant woman to be the complete arbiter of her own choice, or the complete arbiter of her unborn child’s right to life. But I do feel her ethical claim on that position is the strongest one. I would limit the voice of the community to defining limits — for instance, the tradition-supported idea of “quickening,” or the Roe-imposed idea of “viability,” or the right-supported idea of waiting periods for enforced reflection on the choice. 

I think the Roe court used some particularly unfortunate and contrived reasoning, and I agree that it contributed to a grievous period of political polarization over an institution that historically helped us avoid that very ill. But the court’s conclusion was correct.

That’s pretty close to my own position. Another reader worries about the Court going much further than overturning Roe:

I’m pro-choice. If all the Supreme Court does is overturn Roe, I’d call it an extremely good day for the pro-choice movement.

What’s the point of being anti-abortion and learning that the Court overturned Roe, only to find that some states decide to make it cheap and easy to have abortions —either because it’s truly the will of the people, or because they cynically found a way to get huge revenues out of a “come-one, come-all” policy? Do you think anyone on the anti-choice side would be happy if “states rights” and the “will of the people” prevailed and the number of overall abortions remained steady?

So I don’t think that Roe will be overturned, or even very limited, if the Court cannot find a way to ban all abortions everywhere.

The bad news is I think there is a way. The conservative justices could use the logic of the so-called Human Life Amendments, one of which failed an initiative vote in Mississippi. The justices could find a 14th Amendment personhood right in the fetus and issue a total ban on abortions. If the fetus is a person, and especially if a viable fetus is a person, then well, you can’t kill people. And if you can’t figure out when viability begins, then you have to say that viability begins at procreation.  Goodbye Roe. Goodbye Griswold. Hello using the entire police power to prevent abortions.

Another reader backs my argument that Roe is very vulnerable when compared to Obergefell:

The parallels between laws regulating abortion and sexuality restrictions were drawn by Yale Law Professor John Hart Ely rather shortly after Roe was decided (emphasis mine):

[O]rdinarily the Court claims no mandate to second-guess legislative balances, at least not when the Constitution has designated neither of the values in conflict as entitled to special protection. But even assuming it would be a good idea for the Court to assume this function, Roe seems a curious place to have begun. Laws prohibiting the use of “soft” drugs or, even more obviously, homosexual acts between consenting adults can stunt “the preferred life styles” of those against whom enforcement is threatened in very serious ways. It is clear such acts harm no one besides the participants, and indeed the case that the participants are harmed is a rather shaky one.

Yet such laws survive, on the theory that there exists a societal consensus that the behavior involved is revolting or at any rate immoral. Of course the consensus is not universal but it is sufficient, and this is what is counted crucial, to get the laws passed and keep them on the books. Whether anti-abortion legislation cramps the life style of an unwilling mother more significantly than anti-homosexuality legislation cramps the life style of a homosexual is a close question. But even granting that it does, the other side of the balance looks very different. For there is more than simple societal revulsion to support legislation restricting abortion: Abortion ends (or if it makes a difference, prevents) the life of a human being other than the one making the choice.

I recommend the entire piece.

Another recommendation:

I wonder if you’ve come across Ronald Dworkin’s piece “Slow and Steady,” where he compares and contrasts the issue of abortion to that of gay marriage. Dworkin suggests that because opinions on gay marriage were allowed to evolve largely through the political process (a state-by-state basis), it allowed social change to be achieved in a manner where a new consensus was established and the broader institution of marriage for gays was secured, by and large, through POLITICAL consensus and legislation, as opposed to judicial fiat. He contrasts this with abortion, arguing that with Roe,

a universal right to abortion was speculated into existence and applied to the whole country. A theory imagined out of thin air, or at least from a novel interpretation of the Constitution, replaced the slow but steady process of acclimatization that goes hand in hand with accepted social change. For many conservatives the move seemed tyrannical; more important, it infuriated millions of religious Protestants, who adopted the new “family values” motto. The country has been fighting over abortion ever since.

He goes on to suggest that the issue has become so polarising precisely because opinions were not able to evolve through the legislative process but was short-circuited by SCOTUS, thereby radicalising the Christian Right.

I think you’re right: Roe is probably gone in all but name (and possibly completely overturned), which won’t bring us back to the days of the backstreet abortionists or abortions via coat-hangers, but will evolve on a state-by-state basis. Yes, that means it will disproportionately impact poor people and people of colour. At the same time, it’s worth noting that the American abortion laws today are more liberal than almost every other country in Europe. As Gerry Baker notes in the Times of London:

The Mississippi act before the court would do no more, in fact, than bring that state’s law into line with the prevailing legal conditions for abortion in 39 of 42 European countries, including such notorious abusers of women as Germany and Denmark. So the idea that the present legal framework in the US is the only way to protect a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion … is palpable nonsense, and demonstrated to be so by the practice of at least 191 other countries that don’t resemble the Republic of Gilead.

So, yes, it will be a messy process and it may well be the case that the Supreme Court takes a huge hit. But even Ruth Bader Ginsburg recognised that the legal reasoning behind Roe was highly flawed, so perhaps this will be a case of reculer pour mieux sauter.

This next reader is confident that abortion will remain legal because of the huge cultural shift toward premarital sex:

I think that both Roe and Obergefell reflect changes in attitudes about sexual morality. As of 1960, premarital sex was still widely viewed as wrong. For a young unmarried woman to get pregnant was getting “caught” doing this wrong thing, and abortion was a cover-up. Laws against abortion were consistent with reinforcing the norm against premarital sex. 

Very rapidly during the 1960s, premarital sex became widely accepted. To the extent that laws outlawing abortion are punishment for premarital sex, they punish something that is no longer considered a crime. I think that tolerance for premarital sex is what made Roe possible, and I don’t see that changing.  

Today, I would speculate that the minority who are adamantly anti-abortion are comparable in numbers to the minority who are adamantly against gay sex. The anti-abortion forces are better organized and more relentless, and of course they understand that they cannot base their case on hostility to premarital sex. But they are very much outside of the mainstream. If Roe falls, I predict that the political fallout will be bad for anti-abortion politicians. They are better off seen as unsuccessfully flailing against the courts than seen as taking us back to the infanticide of  “Ode to Billie Joe.”

Another reader challenges the “choice” rhetoric of those supporting abortion:

One aspect of the “pro-life” vs “pro-choice” debate I never really see considered is what “choice” exactly are we talking about as being relevant to the discussion. The vast majority of abortions occur following a “choice” to have consensual sex, whereby getting pregnant is a real outcome no matter what sort of contraception you use. This study indicates something in the order of 1% of abortions are due to nonconsensual sex/rape. I’m not trying to belittle all the other reasons for having an abortion, but the fact is the vast majority are due to consensual sex.

Inherent in the choice two people make to have consensual sex is the real possibility that pregnancy may be a result. Surely this is (or should be) understood and receive a greater emphasis in public dialogue, regardless of how inconvenient the consequence is. I guess I would argue that if you aren’t willing to accept the outcomes of “rolling the dice,” perhaps you shouldn’t be rolling the dice in the first place. To me, this is part of a wider issue in society where people could benefit from taking more responsibility for their actions rather than trying to offload consequences or look for quick fixes.

Well, yes. Point well taken. I do think that the serious pro-life position would be super enthusiastic about making birth control far more accessible to avoid unplanned pregnancies. And yet, my own church takes the polar opposite approach. Another socially conservative view:

Another reason why the abortion debate is messy is that it strikes at the heart of familial responsibility. To many people, asking a mother to endure nine months of pregnancy isn’t that different from forcing a father to endure say 18 years of blood and sweat working in a factory so that he can pay child support. All child-support laws, essentially, make the parental body an indirect resource for the familial child. 

“Pro-choice” is tantamount to saying absent fathers should have the ability, during pregnancy, to opt-out of child support laws if they choose, all without the women’s say. If that sounds disgusting, you are now closer to the instinctive reaction many have to pro-choice abortion laws in general. Abortion fundamentally destroys family obligation.

Another reader on the role of men:

My reasons for agreeing that abortion is not strictly a women’s issue is that the decision to bring a baby into the world affects an entire family: the father of the child that may be born, of course, but also what would be the siblings (at least half of women having abortions are already mothers), and any relatives who may need to support the woman, which may be a male relative. It is for this reason I think it has been a huge mistake for pro-choice activists to tell men they can sit this one out.

While I could find no statistics about the number of men who are grateful that their unplanned pregnancies were able to be terminated, I’m confident that most men are very happy they were not forced into fatherhood (or into being grandfathers or uncles, for that matter). My husband definitely feels this way about the abortion his ex-girlfriend had. 

A final reader digs into some interesting history behind the word “person”:

Your column contained a throwaway statement that it’s “unknowable” when the fetus becomes a person. When I am talking about abortion with non-believers, I always use the term “human being” rather than “person” because words carry their origins and baggage around with them, and the word “person” was invented or recast by the Catholic Church to define relations among the Three Persons of the Trinity.  

You may know all this already, but under Roman law, a “person” was a Roman citizen. The word “person” derived from a word meaning “mask” or (by extension) “public role.” You were a person when the state recognized you as such. Because slaves were not legal persons, “personhood” was part of a caste system in which legal status became confused with humanity. Slaves were not legal citizens, and so it was easy to think of them as also less than human.

In the controversy over Christ’s nature that occasioned the Council of Nicaea, the Roman term “persona” was recast to mean something more like what we call “personhood.” This was to help explain that God was Three Persons but One God. It was much richer philosophically and theologically than the Roman term. 

Thus the Christian concept of “person” entered Western culture and Western law. Christianity teaches that every human “person” is an image of God — and furthermore, that all human beings are, in fact, human persons. This second statement is not automatically derived from the first according to human reasons alone, since pagan cultures did in fact consider some human beings “sub-human” and/or not legally “persons.”

So that’s why I don’t use the term when talking about abortion to non-believers. I prefer to anchor the right to life in the rights of all “human beings,” which is more of a Greek philosophical term without as much theological baggage. I believe human rights accrue to all human beings from the moment of conception, period. So whether or not we know “when” a human being “becomes a person,” we DO know (because science has told us without equivocation) when an individual human life begins. You’re probably familiar with some of the quotes by embryologists at this link, regarding when human life begins.

Those who get hung up on “personhood” often confuse it with sentience or consciousness, which opens some ugly doors regarding whether people in a coma, with brain damage, or genetic conditions such as Down syndrome are “persons.” Just look at what Justice Sotomayor said recently comparing fetuses to brain-dead people.

In short, for persuasion purposes I would rather locate the universal right to life in being human rather than in “personhood,” even though I agree that human persons are images of God and thus sacred. I would rather make others argue why some human beings are less than human or don’t deserve human rights, than make them argue that they are human but aren’t legal “persons.”

I take the point. I use the word “person” in the modern Catholic sense: an inviolable, unique soul in a unique body. That’s also why I was so struck when the Catholic hierarchy applied the term to homosexuals.

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I’ve been meaning to invite Christina Sommers and Danielle Crittenden on the pod since they first had me on theirs, Femsplainers, a few years ago. This week we talked about men and women, trans and cis, gay and straight, and they drank rosé and I smoked half a joint, as we did on their pod.

For two clips of our conversation — on whether more women staying home during Covid was a good thing, and on how gender nonconformity is often a source of strength — head over to our YouTube page. You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed.

At the last minute, we re-invited to the pod Danielle’s husband, David Frum, because we both wanted to hash out our differences over the Trump-Russia media coverage. (We first debated the issue ten months ago, and my column last week was in response to his latest in the Atlantic.) I think we may have made some progress in finessing where we differ, and why. But you be the judge. Things got a bit heated here:

Meanwhile, readers continue to hash out the intricacies of Russiagate in a series of dissents that continue from our main page. First up:

David Frum has a really good summary of the evidentiary record, excluding the Steele Dossier, showing that cooperation with Russia did occur. In your response, you basically agree that he’s right about everything and just try to define the media narrative as something greater than that and say it hasn’t been proven. It would take another thousand words to explain all the ways in which this doesn’t work. (It can’t be collusion because he already liked Russia?? Really?!! Sanctions imposed under duress and then deliberately undermined prove he’s not guilty? Huh?!!)

From my point of view, you’re engaged in a hair-splitting exercise in denial. I guarantee that Rachel Maddow and others in the liberal media are not backing down from the idea that Trump and Russia may have colluded, cooperated, or coordinated (all three are bad), because they continue to see evidence that it’s true, regardless of the dossier — which has really been more of a distraction.

Another reader begins by quoting me:

“But this was not what the MSM tried to sell us from the get-go. What they and the Democrats argued — with endless, breathless, high-drama reporting — was that there was some kind of plot between Trump and Russia to rig the election and it had succeeded. Investigating this was hugely important because it could expose near-treason and instantly remove Trump from power via impeachment. This was the dream to cope with the nightmare.”

Andrew, read this NYT article: it seems that Don Jr. actually *did* meet with a Russian attorney, who promised documents that would embarrass Clinton, and the Russian government *did* hack into the Clinton campaign’s emails and did release those emails, and Trump himself asked the Russians (on national TV) to release more emails. And of course, Trump actually won the election, and the Russian intelligence service’s email dump may well have pushed Trump over the finish line, so it’s hard to argue that the Russian campaign wasn’t a success. So I’m trying to figure out exactly what the MSM got wrong here.

The only thing I can think of is that you think that the MSM actually accused the Trump campaign of initiating the hack of the Clinton campaign emails. But I can’t find any evidence that they did say that. In the article above, for example, the Times specifically says: “The precise nature of the promised damaging information about Mrs. Clinton is unclear, and there is no evidence to suggest that it was related to Russian-government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.”

In reality, of course, the Trump campaign contributed nothing to the Russian hacking beyond making it clear that should Trump win the election, there would be no retribution for influencing our election — which could be the campaign’s biggest contribution to the Russian hacking.

So, if you’re going to accuse the MSM of actually going further, please define what further actually means, and then, please, come up with a link to at least *one* article from CNN, NYT or the Washington Post to such an article. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable ask.

Another reader raises more question:

David Frum’s piece begins by setting a low bar, by his own admission, listing only those matters acknowledged by everyone. It leaves out other matters that are equally interesting, and it makes it fair to turn your question back around to you. If Trump really wasn’t guilty of outright treason or near-treason in his dealings with Russia, then:

* Why was he desperate to fire Mueller?

* Why did he meet privately with Putin on one occasion, barring his own translator, and on another, entertain the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the Oval Office, with few or no witnesses?

* Why did he make a craven public spectacle of himself standing next to the president of a hostile foreign power, raising the issue of election interference, and saying he believed him?

* Why did he briefly consider turning the former US ambassador to Russia over to the Russians for questioning?

Do you not find these matters worth considering, even though they weren’t cited by Frum? No less a Trump minion than Steve Bannon called the Trump tower meeting “treasonous” and commented further that “There’s no way [Don Jr. and his associates] didn’t take [the Russian visitor] up to the 26th floor to meet Dad.”

In the end, you seem to take refuge in the overused dodge, “But you see, Trump is too dumb to be a conspirator, so it’s really OK, and there’s nothing to see here.”

1. He wanted to fire Mueller because he cannot bear any rival authority, especially one with the power to subpoena. Show me an investigation Trump has not tried to obstruct. 2. No idea but this is again asking Trump to prove a negative. 3. Because he genuinely admires Putin more than the CIA. 4. Don’t know. But I’m not sure considering something and then not doing it is some kind of gotcha.

Another reader looks to Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair:

In your response to Frum, I’m mostly in agreement with you, but one line gave me a pause: “Manafort’s delivery of polling data to Moscow was deeply shifty.”

I highly recommend you check out Aaron Maté’s deep dive on this particular point over at Real Clear Investigations. Mueller did not conclude that Kilimnik was a Russian agent, nor did he charge Manafort with sharing polling data. The Senate Intelligence Committee and Biden’s Treasury Department have claimed that — but without any public evidence to show for it. They didn’t even interview Kilimnik, who is a Ukrainian-American, a longtime associate of Manafort, and a former U.S. State Department asset. According to him and Rick Gates, the polling data was old, top-line, and mostly available to the public. This is a far cry from the collusion we were promised at the outset of the Mueller investigation, and it’s the only remaining “smoking gun” that the press still clings to.

I understand why Frum would never mention these facts, but they’re the most important part of this whole affair, in my humble opinion. The Steele Dossier was used by the FBI to illegally spy on the Trump campaign and later administration, while some of the biggest names in U.S. intelligence and law enforcement were pushing the “Trump is a Russian agent” conspiracy theory: Brennan, Clapper, and to a lesser extent Comey and Hayden. It was the systematic delegitimization of the 2016 election by everyone who hated Trump for personal and policy reasons.

Frum aims directly at so-called anti-anti-Trump journalists, because these folks happen to be the most civil libertarian-minded people I know on the Left. And they were right about this whole investigation, just by being skeptical from the beginning.

Another reader argues that perception is reality — a reality that Trump himself created:

While some of us did indeed wait for, and hope for, a “smoking gun” that would prove a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Putin’s government, I think you’re assuming a connection that the MSM (to use an impossibly vague generalization) didn’t explicitly make. We know Trump openly welcomed Russian interference in the 2016 election on his behalf. Mueller confirmed more than a hundred unexplained meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian actors, some of them known spies. And as he infamously demonstrated in Helsinki in 2018, Trump participated in covering up his connections to Russia during the campaign and well after the election.

But was that enough to determine the outcome of the election? No one can determinatively say, and I seriously doubt it, but that’s really beside the point. Putin didn’t make Trump an illegitimate president. Trump did that himself by publicly behaving like we’d expect a Russian asset to behave, and intentionally creating the appearance that he was up to something behind the scenes — like his seizing of his interpreter’s notes after his first private meeting with Putin.

Was his obsequious flattery of Putin and lying about his ties to Russia motivated by “kompromat”? Irrelevant. His behavior was his behavior. Why did he side with Putin over the findings of American intelligence? Because he had secret business dealings with Russia? (He did.) Or because he wanted to provoke and outrage “the libs”?

It really doesn’t matter. We aren’t talking (at this point) about criminal “reasonable doubt” standards in a court of law. We’re looking at politics in the court of public opinion. And in politics, the appearance of impropriety is what matters. Trump openly displayed his contempt for the American system of self-government and the rule of law, and with that lawless disregard for our constitutional checks and balances alone he forfeited legitimacy in the eyes of millions, regardless of how they voted in 2016. He built his political career on the tabloid scandal of “birtherism,” then complained when political opponents painted him with the same brush.

As for the Steele Dossier, you’ll recall that it wasn’t made known to the public until after Buzzfeed leaked the whole thing in January 2017 — well after the election. Not only was nothing in it ever used by the Clinton campaign as “oppo research” (a practice Trump himself defended in regard to the Trump Tower “dirt on Hillary” meeting), but it was never used in any of the charges brought against Trump campaign officials.

I think you’re right about the embarrassment and defensive motivations of many in the press after Trump won. That was clearly on display. But it doesn’t explain Trump’s behavior — like his lifting of sanctions on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska in 2019. Trump himself rarely offered any reasons for his actions — they always came down to “I did it because I can,” even when he couldn’t. He left it up to the rest of us to fill in the gaps he stubbornly refused to account for himself.

It’s worth reiterating here that Trump’s behavior in all this, as in everything, was objectively appalling. My point is simply that that just doesn’t mean he’s guilty the way so many made him out to be.

Another reader frowns at Mueller:

Your condemnation of MSM is inconsistent with your accurate view of Trump. As a former federal prosecutor, it is hardly anomalous, let alone improper, to believe that Trump’s conflicts, pathological lying, motive, and shady past operated to render him particularly susceptible to Russian kompromat. It is not improper to believe that his repeated efforts to obstruct justice, including efforts to have witnesses lie, confirmed the notion that he had colluded with Russian assistance in the election. 

The failure to find a smoking gun confirming a federal conspiracy beyond any doubt does not mean it (or collusion, for which there is political consequence but no statutory prohibition) did not happen, or that those who claimed it had were craven opponents blinded by their own prejudice. 

Alone among suspects, Trump was treated with unique deference by Robert Mueller. Mueller did not force him to testify (where, Trump’s lawyers realized, he would have either lied or taken the fifth); he applied a very narrow view of conspiracy law that ignored or at the very least downplayed the enormous circumstantial evidence you yourself cite; and he used the DOJ policy against prosecuting sitting presidents as the basis for refusing to conclude, as all the evidence proved, that Trump had obstructed justice. 

Those in the MSM who were, as you put it, “breathless” in expecting Trump’s imminent downfall no doubt failed to consider the possibility that Mueller’s narrow approach would provide Trump a political escape hatch. But they cannot be condemned for “overkill” given the wealth of evidence that did exist.

Lastly, on a different subject, a somber note from a reader:

I hope you and yours are enjoying a blessed Thanksgiving. In case you hadn’t already heard, Maj. Ian Fishback just had an untimely death. It was your coverage and praise of his moral courage back in the blog days that brought him to my attention, and the same is likely true for many others. I hadn’t heard news of him in years; didn’t know that he went on to pursue postgraduate studies; and certainly didn’t know of his mental health struggles. Our society, our country, and certainly the Veterans Administration owe heroes like Maj. Fishback MUCH better than he received. May we all do better, and may his memory be an inspiration.

That’s a gut-punch. We so easily forget the trauma and psychological impact of serving in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially for a man like Fishback who also had to witness his peers violate the Geneva Conventions. If you have a moment, it’s worth re-reading the letter he once wrote to John McCain. It’s the letter of an American hero, a good and decent and courageous man, who came to die in an adult foster-care facility, after his demons overcame him. May he rest in peace.

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Many of you will recall the horrendous way in which the Catholic Church hierarchy responded to the AIDS crisis. Many blamed homosexual sex and refused to endorse condoms for heterosexuals. It was extremely hard for me to hang in there in this period, and I had to take months away from Mass after various appalling statements. It was a time when I first experienced the love of God and the intimacy of Jesus in contrast to the church that claimed to represent Him on earth.

But it was not the only story. On the ground, many lay Catholics, priests and nuns defied the hierarchy and came to the aid of the young and sick and dying. Michael O’Loughlin, another gay Catholic, has written a history book, “Hidden Mercy,” about this other story. We talked faith, sex, disease, and redemption.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of our conversation — on the nuns and priests who fought AIDS in spite of the Catholic leadership, and on how gay Catholics have wrestled with their faith — head over to our YouTube page. Pope Francis recently replied to a letter from O’Loughlin, posted in a NYT op-ed, that “Gives Me Hope as a Gay Catholic.”

A reader looks back to last week’s episode with Dominic Cummings:

I listened to Cummings despite having little interest in Boris, Brexit, or the UK. Although I heard little I agreed with, I found it interesting how much more thoughtful and intelligent the overeducated elite from Oxford are compared to Ivy Leaguers such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Elise Stefanik, or Tom Cotton. It is hard to find intelligent commentary coming from US conservatives today, guaranteeing that they will once again fail to capitalize on the disarray of the Democratic Party. Republicans seem intent on meeting Democratic incompetence with outright insanity. Meanwhile, as Cummings pointed out, many people want and would respond positively to cogent policy from either party.

Another fan of the episode:

Kudos to you for getting an interview with Dominic Cummings, who is in my opinion the most interesting man in UK politics today, indeed perhaps anywhere. He’s a very refreshing transformational thinker. It’s a shame that Boris Johnson decided not to keep him on, although I think the latter’s temperamental weaknesses (especially his incessant need to be loved) made that all but inevitable. Thatcher, by contrast, really didn’t care what the media or Whitehall thought, and she ultimately ended up being far more consequential than Johnson is likely to be, even though, as Cummings observed, Covid gave him an enormous opportunity to be similarly transformational.

Many (especially those who don’t really follow the UK closely) liken Cummings to Steve Bannon, which is an exceptionally lazy narrative. Cummings doesn’t have an ounce of racism in him or demagoguery, but is interested in policy and really doesn’t care what people think (which is extremely courageous). His diagnosis of American politics is spot on as well. I occasionally wonder whether the rhythms of politics, the need for the occasional cajoling, especially the retail aspects, make him unsuited to being a long-term player in the political process. I also kept pondering during the interview whether there was an American equivalent to Dominic Cummings out there right now? If so, who is it? 

It was a great discussion and I’m glad you gave him a wide berth in expressing his views. He’s a fascinating thinker.

This next reader wasn’t impressed:

The Cummings interview was a collection of softball pitches allowing him to say whatever he wanted to say with no challenges at all. You gave him a platform to preen for an hour and some. You said at the end that you are a huge fan. That much was obvious all along. If I wanted to pay to hear a fawning groupie gush I would have got everything I wanted.

He is a smart man, yes, but that’s not the only requirement for good politics. There were reasonable questions to be asked, like whatever happened to the “£350 million per week to the NHS”? That was a cruel joke coming just before COVID hit. And if he is so concerned about average British people, why did he think himself above the law when it came to the lockdown? What about the no-bid COVID contracts to buddies who had no idea how to do what they contracted for? The amount of money wasted was incredible. I could go on, but it’s not worth my time. It was a terrible interview. You have serious blinders on and you need to think more about that. 

Maybe I went too easy on him. But many of the issues that Brits have with him — his complicated flouting of Covid rules, for example, or the pledge that Brexit would help fund the NHS — might have been too opaque and insidery to a largely American audience. So I didn’t do the equivalent of a BBC interview.

An old college friend in England was also pissed off:

As a great admirer of what you have been doing at the Dish, I just wanted to let off some steam about your interview — or should I call it on-air ego massage — of Dominic Cummings.

I acknowledge that you extracted some great cameos of Johnsonaro in full flight, but even so, this was a whitewash of epic proportions. Only in front of a US audience could you have hoped to get away with avoiding a single question about Barnard Castle. But leaving that revealing but intrinsically unimportant episode aside, the analysis of Brexit was, as they might say on Match of the Day, woeful.

Why is it that Cummings’ self-serving construct of ordinary people (his phrase for the 37% of the electorate who voted Leave rather than the 36% who voted Remain) was, in truth, a cohort heavily weighted towards the less educated and the elderly? What does that tell us about the quality of reasons for the vote to leave? And whatever potential post-Brexit strategies there might have been, none was actually in place, still less put before the people.

So we have had a seismic shock but no clear way forward. The obvious risk, now materialising in spades, is years if not decades of muddle, chaos, lost wealth, and attrition and damage to the economy and society all around. Wasn’t this fantastically reckless? Now we have the worst of both worlds, no plan, and no safety blanket of the single market. The shortages of personnel and services are becoming very visible on a daily basis and the absence of a workforce to make them good, or of markets to replace the losses in the EU, all too apparent.

It could have been interesting to hear Cummings defend himself against these charges but instead, we had 90 minutes of “tell me why you were so right and everyone else so wrong.”

I’m not going to rehash all the arguments for and against Brexit again here. But this is a view of many in Britain and I’m happy to air their views. I think it’s too soon to see Brexit in full perspective, and I don’t think workforce shortages, which are occurring across the West, are solely due to Brexit.

Another reader is itching for more:

Wonderful interview. Andrew. Now you have to extend a (pro forma) invitation to “your friend,” Boris Johnson, to refute Dominic Cummings’ interpretation of events. I’d be interested if there was a response.

I can’t imagine Boris would come on. But maybe I’ll ask. Can’t hurt, I suppose. But what’s in it for him? Maybe I should ask Keir instead? Or ask Dom back in a year, now we’ve been introduced to him, to ask more specific questions. I just didn’t want to rehash Brexit with him, and think his broader ideas were worth more airing.

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How to introduce Dominic Cummings? I’d say he has a decent claim to be one of the most influential figures in modern European history, whatever you think of him. He innovated Brexit, led the Leave campaign, then guided Boris Johnson into a stinking election victory in 2019. The two allies then fell out, Cummings quit — and he is now “having a think.” He almost never gives interviews — let alone chat for an hour and a half. So this is a bit of a Dish coup.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). Read the full transcript here. For two clips of my conversation with Dominic — on the reasons he resigned as top aide at Number 10, and on what US politicians can learn from Brexit on immigration — head over to our YouTube page.

And be sure to sign up for the Dominic Cummings Substack.

Halfway down this page are five reader dissents over my criticism of the MSM, continued from our main page, but first, some reader commentary on British politics. Here’s a disgruntled Dish subscriber responding to my passing reference to how I “like” Boris Johnson to some degree:

I find I’m more and more uncomfortable, as a paying subscriber, to underwrite, even in the smallest way, your acceptance of Mr. Johnson’s con of us, the British people. Granted, he’s not a grifter in the same league as Mr. Trump, but nevertheless the thought of supporting him in any way — albeit indirectly through your journalism — has become something I can no longer tolerate. 

Perhaps you weren’t around in the days when the BBC (unwittingly I think) gave him for all those years a platform on “Have I Got News for You,” when naive middle-of-the-roaders like myself were mildly charmed by this apparently harmless but funny, over entitled Tory buffoon.

Little did we realise he was lining himself up to kill off our warm and productive relationship with Europe and all its benefits for ordinary citizens. He did it partly by getting us to know him as “Boris” — like he’s our friend, which he isn’t. It’s a mechanism that draws in people who are even more naive, and it means he gets forgiven for his absolute incompetence. He isn’t fit to be prime minister, and there is so much evidence out there that confirms it that I can’t really understand how you buy it. Ok, so you “like” him, whatever that means. 

Another dissent comes from a UK reader over my recent column, “The Boldness of Biden and Boris”:

It seems I only ever email to complain about your coverage of Boris Johnson. You write that it’s “the image that mattered” in Boris’s dealings with the French over nuclear subs and on the vaccine. The problem with much of what Boris is doing is that it’s all image. EU countries have overtaken the UK in vaccination rates and we have soaring infection rates compared to our neighbours.

Boris’s latest “Global Britain” is announcing bringing back pounds and ounces. Imperial measurements are only used by two countries (the US and Myanmar), and anyone under 50 was taught metric at school. Armando Iannucci wouldn’t write this stuff; it would look too bonkers.

This steady stream of jingoistic nonsense is just the usual background noise under Prime Minister Johnson — but it’s not the main reason I’m writing. The rise in National Insurance isn’t the bold “Red Tory” move you hail it as. It isn’t an injection of desperately needed new money into social care.

For readers outside the UK, I’ll explain. At the moment, if someone goes into long-term care because they are unable to look after themselves, the cost of that is recouped from their assets (over a certain threshold) when they die. This often means selling their home. (We had to do that when my Nan died in 2010.) What Johnson is doing is capping that limit (which wouldn’t have mattered in my case) and trying to recoup it with a raise in National Insurance — a tax that almost all workers pay. This means that care staff, who earn minimum wage or thereabouts, will be losing money to pay for the care of the people they’re looking after. 

If Johnson really had “the balls” you give him props for, he would have introduced a tax on assets. Others have been quick to point out that those paying rent are losing money while their landlords have avoided any new tax. Anyone over retirement age is also exempt from National Insurance.

I consider myself a centrist, I don’t belong to a political party, as I prefer to advocate ideas from the political left or right if they have merit. We have the worst of all worlds in Johnson — someone willing to raise taxes from those who can least afford it to fritter away on meaningless gestures and dodgy contracts to his friends. If that’s Red Toryism, you can keep it.

Another reader who doesn’t like Boris:

I’ve been a Dish supporter for many years and have loved the recent content and podcasts. I’m generally pretty aligned with your views, but there is one area where we diverge sharply: Boris Johnson. Everyone knows he’s a liar and a cheat, but maybe what’s flying under the radar is how consistently the Tory government is undermining democracy in the UK. You rightly call out the Republicans for their assaults on democratic institutions, but you turn a blind eye when Boris does something comparable.

In the podcast with Cummings, I raise the issue of pro-roguing parliament in 2019, which worried a lot of constitutionalists. You can hear his response.

A pro-Brexit reader thinks I overplayed the impact of mass migration on the Brexit decision:

I have to disagree with you about this sentence: “Elsewhere in the West, mass migration has empowered the far right, and taken the UK out of the EU.” It seems to me that you should agree with the decision to leave the EU, if for no reason but that the nation-state seems the best way for people to balance freedom and community. Perhaps I don’t know enough, but my understanding was not that the far right prevailed, but rather normal people revolted against their elite’s attempts to tell them that lowered wages and swift, important cultural changes due to immigration were to their benefit, when clearly they were not.

Certainly, elites benefit from mass migration — why pay more for an English house cleaner when you can pay less for a Romanian? — but the non-elite English had had enough of being told that Englishness was a racist construct and they had to bow to their diminished circumstances while the people asserting their moral superiority grew richer and more powerful. London is a world city, but it was also a haven for sketchy Third World actors with apartments they never used and whose values did not coincide with that of the average Brit. 

I don’t know if “The Great British Bake Off” is anything but an imaginary England, but it seems to honor racial and cultural diversity while also exporting a uniquely British grit, common sense, and attention to reality — someone does get kicked off every week — in a way I love to watch.

For more Dishcast on UK politics, check out our episode with Tim Shipman, the best political reporter in Britain. Below is his take on how Boris the Etonian won over the working class:

Here’s another clip on the vindication of Brexit when it comes to the Covid vaccine, and here’s another on whether the monarchy could will the death of Her Majesty. As always, please send us your thoughts on the Dishcast and potential guests: [email protected].

Because we ran out of space to include these on the main page, here’s the first of many readers to criticize my criticism of the mainstream media:

So wait, let me get this straight: you’re railing on the MSM for appearing to have a narrative and an agenda, you — a guy who has a very clear narrative and agenda, who joined Substack so you could be free to present your narrative and agenda without the constraints of fact-checking and editorial oversight that the MSM provides, constraints which, by the way, allow them to adhere to some semblance of journalistic standards and ethics, which also includes correcting mistakes when they happen, as they do, although apparently not corrected to your liking, often because the reporting didn’t conform to your narrative and agenda in the first place.

Tell me: what is your method for immediately owning up to and correcting the mistakes you make? The misinterpretations you make? The times when your narrative is way off? The times when the “tsunami” of CRT evidence you refer to amounts to some hand-picked anecdotes on your Twitter feed that your audience is supposed to find and then be suitably in awe of? What kind of standards or ethics does Substack expect you to follow?

Then again, maybe you don’t think of yourself as part of the media, and therefore somehow above it all.

And by the way, your cheap line trying to indict the MSM on Trump’s terms is low, and I think you know this. You know exactly who Trump is and what he does (lie). You know what journalism stands for and what it tries to do, however imperfectly. And you already know the cycles of examination and re-examination the press does to itself as a dynamic field in a dynamic society, which it is constantly doing, and which makes your rant entirely unproductive.

Oh please. There is a distinction between opinion and news, and my objection is not that the NYT, say, has leftist opinion columnists, but that it skews reality, and now does so to conform not to factual objectivity, but to “moral clarity” defined by the far left. Here, we always publish factual corrections immediately (but they are extremely rare), and we constantly air dissent over the opinions. We fact-check ourselves and Bodenner is gimlet-eyed.

Another dissenter looks at something specific:

Your conflations regarding the MSM have a heavy dose of hyperventilation. One example: “But notice how the narrative — embedded in a deeper one that the Blake shooting was just as clear-cut as the Floyd murder, that thousands of black men were being gunned down by cops every year, and that ‘white supremacy’ was rampant in every cranny of America … ”

Give me one example in the mainstream media where anyone ever hinted, much less said, thousands were being gunned down every year? Please try. It’s a ridiculous exaggeration, not really worthy of argument. 

Also, let’s look at a comparison: Lynching was a huge tool in white people suppressing African Americans. If you look at websites that document lynching, there were about 3,500 documented lynchings of black people over maybe 60 years, an average of about 60 per year. The point I’m making is that an act, such as police shootings of unarmed black men, can be a statistically rare event in a country of 330,000,000 people but still have an outsized impact on people’s perception of fairness and of their safety in the hands of those who are supposed to protect us all.

The MSM rarely include context in their stories about police violence, but the impression they gave was that such killings were ubiquitous. A recent public survey asked Americans to guess how many unarmed black men were killed by cops in 2019. The stats say 27. A recent study suggests that’s an undercount, so let’s posit 50 max. Money quote:

Overall, nearly half of surveyed liberals (44 percent) estimated roughly between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black men were killed whereas 20 percent of conservatives estimated the same. Most notably, the majority of respondents in each political category believed that police killed unarmed black men at an exponentially higher rate than in reality.

This next reader has quite the opener:

Andrew, I love you more than I love my own dick, but your essay on the MSM and its misdeeds left me cold. It was all to do with your last line: “And someone has got to stop it.” How can you write an essay like that and end with no actual input about WHO is supposed to stop it? “Someone” has got to stop it! OK. How does the stopping happen? More fact-checkers at NYT? Fewer partisan hacks at Fox? 

I come from a family that owned and published a daily newspaper. Breakfast and dinner was a conversation about news, what is it, and what are its ethics. My dad and grandfather railed against something I’m now convinced was a saviour for this sort of BS: the Fairness Doctrine. After it was abolished, discourse and fact-gathering and news all went downhill.

First off, congratulations on your dick. Second, the Fairness Doctrine only applies to broadcasting, and was abused. But I definitely think we should have a debate about bringing it back. As for who stops this crap, the answer is editors, who should not pushed around by woke Leninists, and should want their papers to be treated as reliable sources of information, rather than as a way to “teach” readers how to absorb the lessons of critical race theory (which is literally how the NYT executive editor explained his support for the 1619 Project and every story in the paper).

This next reader is hoping for help:

I work at a major news broadcast network, so please do not use my name or share my affiliation. Do you have any advice for producers and reporters in house to speak up and push back when you see these narratives go awry — to ensure our reporting is accurate and doesn’t make these baseless claims? I fear losing credibility among my peers and superiors or worse: facing an office awokening/contrived cancellation. I could elaborate at length and provide examples, but I know you must be so inundated, so I’ll keep it brief and hope you have a few minutes to share any advice on how to improve things on the inside.

Here’s my advice: take a risk in defending objectivity. Someone has to. All the energy is with the woke bullies. Find allies; make respectful factual arguments; lobby editors; talk about the credibility of the enterprise; argue for actual diversity of opinion in the newsroom.

Another reader has a mixed dissent:

Andrew, I get it. The MSM does tilt left and, indeed, can be faulted in many instances for jumping on the bandwagon before the band even arrives. And I understand that this week’s Dish was primarily aimed at the MSM — with justification. But two points:

#1. All you have to say about Rittenhouse is “He had no business being there with an AR-15”? For me, this is the essential story. We’ve simply come to accept that anyone can sling an automatic weapon over their shoulder and the best you can say is that he had no business being there? Your outrage should be far more targeted at our crazed gun culture, and that a juvenile like this one openly carried this weapon, than about how the MSM got it wrong. 

Which, of course, is Point #2: I’m assuming your rant on the MSM doesn’t include Fox News, because you don’t mention it in your essay. But distorting facts and intentionally putting out blatant mistruths (as opposed to “tilting” right) is a more appropriate target for outrage about the media.

Well, the thing is, Rittenhouse was reacting to widespread rioting, arson, looting and mayhem that the authorities seems unwilling to handle and many in the national press actually cheered on. Ultimate responsibility lies with those who started the rioting and the authorities that didn’t stamp it out. But Rittenhouse was a fool for taking the law into his own hands.

Another reader, another dissent:

You state, incredibly, that the Steele Dossier “dominated the headlines” for three years, insinuating that it was the primary basis for the Trump/Russia scandal. This take is false. The Steele Dossier was always a fringy bit of wishful sensationalism that had nothing to do with the mountain of verifiable connective tissue between Trump, Wikileaks, Putin, and his intelligence services that led to dozens of indictments, convictions, and guilty pleas from top Trump officials. Saying it “dominated the headlines” is a carbon copy of the Trump government-in-exile’s weak propaganda effort in light of the dossier’s plunge into disrepute. You tend to be totalistic in your criticism, and your hatred of the New York Times (which I largely share) has led you to embrace a completely false and revisionist history about the former president’s collusive relationship with Russia.

I have never disputed and do not dispute that Trump’s dealings with Russia were as corrupt as his dealings with everyone else. I do not dispute that Russia tried to tilt the election to Trump, and that Trump had no problem with that. What I never bought was the tale of an elaborate conspiracy theory about Russia’s Kompromat on Trump, or that his love affair with Putin could only be explained that way. I was open to it — but Mueller showed how thin that case was, and Trump’s substantive policy decisions on Russia simply cannot be regarded as pro-Putin.

The obsession with the Steele Dossier, as a kind of talisman for the entire conspiracy theory, was not minor. Simply the term “Steele Dossier” has 134,000 hits on Google News. I think the MSM lost perspective on this, fueled by their intense shock that Trump won.

Like the previous reader, this one shares a hatred of the NYT:

Not sure if you heard about this heinous crime last week, but a young woman (jogger) was attacked and sexually assaulted in Central Park last week. At around 7:20 am, a perp put the woman in a chokehold and then raped her.

The NY Post and NY Daily News, along with other local stations, were on the story and released photos of the suspect to assist with the NYPD manhunt. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), the NY Times didn’t cover the story at all — not initially, and they still haven’t reported the rape. On their website, if you search the suspect’s name “Paulie Velez,” you’ll get zero results. In contrast, search “Amy Cooper” and you’ll get almost 30 different articles and opinions of what was apparently a more notable and newsworthy “aggression” in the park. How’s this even possible?

Fortunately the suspect was caught with the help of the tip line, but I just can’t fathom how the NY Times is actively ignoring one of the most heinous crimes I’ve heard about in NYC in the past decade. It’s a major stain on the integrity of the paper. 

One was a rape; the other a micro-aggression. We all know where the MSM emphasis now is. Another reader looks back at a much older story than made national headlines:

As for when all this slippage between the facts on the ground and the MSM narrative really began to get bad: I’ve thought a lot about this. I remember the Duke lacrosse “rape” case in 2007 as the first moment when I realized that I’d bought into a false narrative. I had been teaching on a university campus in the South for five years, had been married to my African-American wife for three years, knew and liked two of the Duke professors publicly raging against the “rapists,” and was primed in every way to hate those white lacrosse players for what they’d done to the as-yet unnamed black dancer, Crystal Mangum.

Then Lucy, as it were, pulled the football away. The facts came out; the white DA’s perfidy was revealed; Mangum’s own black female associate said she was lying about rape because she got pissed off at the callow frat boys … and I realized that I’d been played, badly. That stung.

That was the watershed moment for me. From then on, whenever racial melodrama reared its head, and especially with Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in 2012 and 2014, respectively, I held off making any judgment in the heat of the moment. It killed me to do this, frankly. I WANTED to believe the continuing narrative about the machinations of Evil Whiteness. But the facts, when they came out, always embarrassed that narrative in one way or another, or in many ways.

Here, I’d like to offer a well-earned nod to one particular MSM commentator who actually manifested ethical bravery in the face of all this: Jonathan Capehart, whose 2015 column, “‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ was Based on a Lie,” dared to say out loud what none of his peers would acknowledge. It shows that occasionally the truth breaks through the narrative in a powerful way, even within the tainted purview of the MSM. The Michael Brown / Darren Wilson affair strikes me as the Left’s equivalent of January 6 denialism on the Right: thanks to the DOJ’s long and exhaustive investigation and report, we pretty much know what happened between those two men, but public memory on the Left insists on misremembering.

Capehart gets a retroactive Yglesias Award for that.

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Sam, the author of Dreamland, is out with another book about the explosion of hard and dangerous drugs, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. His reporting was an indispensable part of my big magazine piece on the opioid crisis, and we go into great detail on the pod.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of my conversation with Sam — on the rise of a new sinister meth, and on the media silence over gays and meth  — head over to our YouTube page.

Meanwhile, many readers keep the debate going on critical race theory in the wake of the Virginia elections. The first:

I agree with you on a lot on CRT, and I agree that the Arlington County materials one of your readers linked to is deeply problematic. We’ve got a little blond 12-year-old girl in school right now who was recently singled out by a really terrible teacher who basically demonized her as representative of the wrongs perpetrated by white people throughout history. We’re planning to talk to the teacher and maybe the school and will be having some out-of-school discussions with our kids.

So suffice it to say on this issue, I’m with Youngkin. However, I was surprised to see you say you’d vote for him if you were in Virginia. Do you consider yourself a one-issue voter? Youngkin certainly talked a more moderate talk, which I’d love to see become fashionable in the GOP, and I’d say he has the better of the education argument. 

But then there’s his waffling on Jan 6 and voter integrity — and commitment to a democratic society is pretty foundational. There’s Covid — I don’t want to get rid of mask mandates in schools. Do I even need to say this: Covid is NOT a fringe issue. Then there’s climate change, which is kind of a big deal too. Youngkin isn’t sure if humans play any role in global warming, and he warned that a transition to renewables will result in “blackouts and brownouts and an unreliable grid.” As for local issues, historically it’s been really hard to get Republican candidates to support desperately needed money for roads in northern Virginia.

The response to each of those can’t be “but CRT!” I don’t see how you weigh all that and come out for Youngkin.

Sometimes, you vote as a protest to make sure your voice is heard on a particular topic. I do see CRT as a foundational issue for a liberal democracy — and in a governor’s race, it would be my core issue. CRT’s premises and arguments are so designed to dismantle our entire constitution and way of life, it becomes a litmus test in my mind.

Another reader prods me further:

Unexplored in your column “The Woke Meet Their Match: Parents” is what role parents should actually play in public school education. Let’s look at it this way: public schools are going to continue to assign reading that troubles one constituency or another. Hardcore CRT is going to tick off many parents, and sexually explicit content (like in “Beloved”) will cause at least some parents to shield their children. On the other end of the spectrum, some parents believe history textbooks whitewash the most painful parts of our history.

My point is a mundane one: you can’t please everyone. What, then, is the solution?  Should parents be able to opt a 12th grader out of certain books? Should school boards simply water down curriculum so that no student reads any material that challenges their sensibilities? Should schools send parents mailers warning them of troubling content? Who decides what content is troubling?

In short: you implied that you think parents should have some sort of involvement. But what does that mean?

I think parents should be able to express their concerns, and teachers should reasonably accommodate them in egregious cases. If they don’t, parents need to elect better school boards, or recall members, as is happening in San Francisco of all places. But no, I don’t want to give parents a veto over anything their kid studies.

A sharp dissent from a public school administrator in NYC:

I agree with you about the far left’s overreach on matters of race, and that it dashed the Dems’ chance at winning the gubernatorial race, but, when it comes to what’s being taught in schools, with respect, you don’t know what you’re talking about (and even sound — dear Lord forgive me — a little like Tucker Carlson). You wrote that students are “being taught in a school system now thoroughly committed to the ideology and worldview of CRT, by teachers who have been marinated in it, and whose unions have championed it” — and then cherry pick examples to support these overgeneralized claims. 

First, unions have no say in what gets taught in schools. None. Whom they invite to their conferences (that no one goes to or cares about) has zero bearing on what students learn in their 2nd period Geometry class. Randi Weingarten and the AFT could invite Lucifer himself to give a keynote and it wouldn’t matter one jot. 

Two, there are 3.5 million public school teachers in the U.S. and 270,000 administrators. Where, and when, did all of us become indoctrinated into the “worldview of CRT”? Ed schools? Our famously ineffective “professional development” sessions? The staff lounge?? 

While there are, of course, exceptions, American public schools are not exactly known for their innovation, and teachers are notorious for their reluctance to adopt new ideas. That explains why so many elementary schools, after decades, still teach reading using methods wholly unsupported by the latest evidence-based science in reading instruction. It’s why every state mostly teaches a curriculum that has not changed since electricity was invented and which has not scaled or aged well to serve many students’ needs (or society’s). And it’s also why it only takes teachers about three years on the job before they start recycling units and lesson plans from the year before.

Schools and classrooms are such indescribably dynamic ecosystems with so many factors beyond our control that when we find a system that works for most students most of the time, we dig our heels in deep and use it (until a global pandemic shakes things up, and even then). Add to that the vested interests of the myriad stakeholders — teachers, unions, parents, politicians, education schools, policy makers, students — and the staggering amount of tax dollars we funnel into our districts, and you’ve got a slow, lumbering machine that makes an aircraft carrier look like a cigarette boat. 

And lastly, even if it were true that most teachers were CRT acolytes, as you fear, where, exactly, would this odious instruction be taking place? Gym? Band? AP Bio? Please. Schools — and school districts — are food courts, not Michelin-starred restaurants. They’re not nearly as coherent as you fear. So calm down, dude.

This next reader had a much difference experience:

A high school in San Francisco called me in to fill a one-year gig teaching geometry. I entered what I thought would be an interview like many I’d had in the past. Instead, it was a whole ambush. The three individuals sat facing me and slid a piece of paper over with about 12 questions on it. They circled four and took turns reading them aloud. No questions about me, my education, my previous experience. What they really wanted to know was how I would make sure that students of all races succeeded, how I would implement CRT into the curriculum, and how I could make the instruction of math anti-racist.

From another teacher:

I recently graduated with my Masters in Teaching, and I got two years of an exclusively CRT-based curriculum where learning great teaching strategies was prioritized far behind mastering the principles of anti-racism. Although some on the Left rightly claim that the idea of middle-school students reading Robin diAngelo is ridiculous, this is a motte-and-bailey fallacy. 

In my MAT program, we learned about how the racial education gap is due exclusively to white racism, and we did have to read DiAngelo, with no opposing perspectives. We learned about the evils of cutting government spending without addressing the mind-boggling amount of money that is absolutely wasted by administrative bloat and stupid, briefly-lived fad technologies.

I was on the left before starting graduate school, but my experience there pushed me way into the center because I could see how wasteful, baseless, and hypocritical so many of the left’s policies on education were and how entrenched CRT is in all things education. I saw a lot of bright, reasonable minds turn to anti-racist fanaticism because of the sheer social pressure against speaking up against the predominant perspective. 

As you say, there is simply no way that this kind of thing doesn’t trickle-down to students. We were told not to grade with red pens, to ignore certain grammar errors in favor of allowing room for cultural language expression, pressured to raise grades, and shamed for having too many failing students when the students themselves couldn’t even be bothered to show up to class, in part because they knew there would be no consequences. Kids may not be learning CRT explicitly, but they absolutely suffer the consequences of its pervasiveness in the school system. 

Looking back at last week’s episode with Ann Coulter, we predictably pissed off a lot of listeners. But not all:

I was surprised, pleasantly, to listen to Ann Coulter speaking out of her onscreen character. I was prepared to be forced to end the podcast early amidst anger and frustration listening to her, but instead I found it an entirely satisfying experience. 

From another listener who “enjoyed this interview”:

You challenged Ann Coulter in an engaging and — dare I say it — gentle way, which made for a real conversation and brought out some likable qualities in Ann. Not easy to do. 

Although it seems a bit quixotic, and isn’t enough to allow anyone to let their guard down, I think Ann’s prediction about Trump fading away, like Sarah Palin, has some merit. Reminds me that sometimes things aren’t resolved or transformed in sharp, definitive battles but in a slow crumbling, and turning of attention.

Another listener thinks I should have been less gentle:

Dude. Dude. DUDE! I’ve been with you since the early early days of the Dish. That interview with Ann Coulter was the most impotent one you’ve had since launching the podcast. There are too many examples of how you just let her spew unchecked nonsense: on parental leave, the transactions costs of diversity, the size of the federal work force, etc. Come on. Frustrating. I wanted more. She didn’t defend any of her positions. None. And you didn’t push her. At all. You didn’t even try.

Maybe I was too soft. But I was not trying to have a showdown, but a conversation. Another listener isn’t a fan of Coulter but liked the episode:

Thank you for a great interview with Ann Coulter. As someone who shares most of her views, I followed her work closely for years. However, she has two intolerable flaws that led me to largely tune her out.

The first is her increasingly tiresome shtick. Her tight dresses, coquettish laugh, hair toss, and outrageously offensive statements perfectly timed to coincide with the release of her books all served to increase her publicity and make her extremely wealthy. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone their wealth and fame, but one would think that at some point, she would start to prioritize the issues she is passionate about and try to make the progress on them that she is capable of, in light of her undeniable brilliance.

For example, I recall that in the run-up to the 2008 election, it seemed clear that the nominees would be McCain and Clinton. Ann announced to anyone who would listen that she would not only vote for Hillary, but even campaign for her. Among many other issues, there were certain to be several Supreme Court appointments in the coming years that could affect abortion jurisprudence. The late Mike Adams wrote at the time that Ann cared more about selling books than saving babies. Harsh, but it is hard to argue with that.

Ann’s second major flaw is that she has a long-standing habit of falling head-over-heels for political figures who (by her own subsequent admission) end up being frauds, charlatans, or plain morons. Among others, this includes W Bush, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, and Trump. On the latter, she attempted to explain away the fact that he hoodwinked her by saying she never could have imagined he would fail to follow through on his immigration promises.

I supported Trump’s campaign positions even more than Ann did. Yet I can honestly say it never even occurred to me that a lifelong cosmopolitan liberal Democrat, who couldn’t speak intelligently for ten seconds about the issues he professed to care about, never went more than two sentences without telling a bald-faced lie, and began his political career with the Birther lie, had even the slightest intention of following through on those promises. The fact that Ann fell for it, and often falls for it, makes it impossible for those of us who are kindred spirits to look to her for guidance on whom to support and whom to vote for during the primaries.

All that said, your interview with Ann was the most substantive commentary I ever heard from her, which made it extra enjoyable.

This next listener digs into some of the substance:

I think your and Ms. Coulter’s characterization of the past assimilation of immigrants paints a too idealistic picture, and is not completely accurate. I grew up in New York City, where immigrant groups had their own neighborhoods. While my experience is from the 1950s and after, I know that the earlier clustering was even more prominent. 

My experience of Chinatown exemplifies the long period of assimilation, probably driven both by choice and also by prejudice. Walking through Chinatown in the ‘50s and ‘60s was like entering a different country. On the streets the language spoken was Chinese, signs on the stores were also in that language, many, if not most, restaurants only had menus in Chinese. On the fringes of Chinatown were establishments that catered to a wider audience, and English signs and menus were available.

Other enclaves — Little Italy, German Town, the Polish enclave near where I lived, and other clusters — existed for many years. Certainly the little shtetls of the Lower East Side were rife with lots of folks who spoke only Yiddish, people who were excluded from employment, from certain businesses and from education (your alma mater, Harvard, among them). The immigrants from Central and Southern Europe, and other Catholic countries, like Ireland, were treated with suspicion, and also discriminated against. Their assimilation did not follow the petal-covered path you and Ms. Coulter implied.

One more listener:

Coulter’s vision of everyone sticking to their own homogeneous countries is a recipe for stagnation. There is a reason that every significant technological breakthrough of the last 70 years came from America! I have yet to see a laboratory — mine included — that does not thrive on the heterogeneous thought, creativity and insight that effortlessly flows from the human diversity that arises when selecting for intelligence and curiosity.

You cited the bland homogeneity of 1970s England. I lived in Western Europe through the entirety of the 2010s and not much has changed. People like Coulter — and the Bernie Bros — should try living in one of the countries they hold up as examples for America before they open their mouths. American culture is appropriation and it is a unique and beautiful thing.

All good points. Thanks as ever for expanding these conversations with your own critiques and feedback. The in-tray is always open: [email protected].

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She’s the author of 13 NYT bestselling books, including Adios, America. I know, I know. A lot of you are going to get mad at me for this one. If you’re a longtime Dishhead, you may even remember that we once had a Malkin Award every year, and this is how we described it:

The Malkin Award, named after blogger Michelle Malkin, is for shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric. Ann Coulter is ineligible — to give others a chance.

I once described Coulter as a “drag queen posing as a fascist.” But, I’ll be honest, I’ve come to admire her the last couple of years for taking on Trump — for breaking his promises on immigration. Agree or disagree, that took a certain amount of courage, given her audience. I also met her, and found her much more intriguing than you’d expect from the public image. I’m not sure I grilled her hard enough in this podcast, but I did try to flush out some inconsistencies.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of my conversation with Ann — on our differing views on diversity, and how she underestimated Trump’s intelligence — head over to our YouTube page.

A reader writes:

I just finished your episode with Briahna Joy Gray on race and class in America, and I wanted to take a moment to thank you for bringing on guests you don't necessarily agree with. Too many podcasters use the platform to simply promote their ideas and bring on guests who don’t challenge them. Even though I could sense frustration and struggle on your side from time to time, I enjoyed the dialogue.

The dialogue continues this week on Briahna’s pod — teaser below. God I look tired.

Meanwhile, many readers continue to respond to our episode with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. One writes, “Intended or not, you and the Bobs managed to scare the living s**t out of me just in time for Halloween”:

As a perennial supporter of outsiders — Howard Dean, local libertarians, Tulsi Gabbard, et al — I was embarrassed to vote for Joe Biden in 2020. And on January 6, I merely rolled my eyes at the wannabe cast of Idiocracy that stormed the Capitol, thinking I was witnessing a ridiculous but somewhat understandable temper tantrum within a heated historical moment.

But thanks to the book Peril, I realize I was gravely in error. We were instead, on January 6, watching people cheer on an aspiring demagogue who was planning a case through the rule of law that we could and should overturn a free and fair election — and we are about to watch him do it again. There is absolutely nothing more plausibly dangerous to our country in our near future.

During your closing minutes with the Bobs, you more or less label Trump as the one exceptional danger that ought to command our attention more than Wokeism. I agree — and surely far more dangerous than Biden. Even if we were to grant that the riots and crime sprees that took place alongside BLM protests were more dangerous than a mob attempting to capture or kill a vice president and/or members of our legislature, there’s little evidence Biden would further such riots beyond, perhaps, a misguided speech on race. Whereas we now know that President Trump would have done anything he could, including tactics bearing the weight of law, to further enable January 6.

We have to ask what likely coming transgressions to laws and norms are most likely to damage us irreparably: Biden and the Wokesters castigating us on Twitter for watching Dave Chappelle, or Trump’s lawyers aiming to discard popular votes? Indeed, the Woke may want to shame us, coerce us, and tell us what to think, but should what the Bobs report come to pass, the Right will have functionally stripped the right to vote. To me, that sounds as though the American experiment will have ended.

Another reader “watched this clip of your interview with the Bobs”:

I wondered why you changed from saying at the beginning that Trump was crazy but rational to saying he was crazy and irrational at the end. Could you parse this please?

I tried to explain above: you can be out of your mind, yet brutally rational in assessing your own narcissistic interests. From a reader in Portland, Oregon:

I’m a long-time reader — all the way back to your days at TNR. Judging from your newsletters at the current Dish, however, I just can’t follow. While on the one hand I don’t want to unsubscribe from your freebie version, I often find it hard to read. Not because I agree or disagree with your take on current issues — that’s mixed, as one would expect in a sane world — but more about your apparent understanding, or lack thereof, about the hierarchy of cultural threats surrounding us, and where the dangers in these threats really lie.

If you haven’t read this story from the WaPo about a Texas principal suspended for supposedly embracing CRT, I suggest you do. Cancel culture has been a feature of conservative America from the beginning. Right-wing cancel culture is the social force that chases millions of young people out of flyover country into the big coastal cities. I fought cancel culture when I was a teenager in Tulsa in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. It was made clear to me then that someone with my views — atheist, left of center — would be happier somewhere else. And I’m a white guy from the middle class. 

Bellyaching by conservatives in Trump country about being condescended to by coastal elites is a hilarious irony. It was their condescension to their own kids, their own refusal to be respectful human beings to their kids and neighbors, that chased so many of their children into the ranks of this “elite.” They act the way they do because they’re comfortable treating people who aren’t like them like crap. And now, finally, we’ve reached a cultural reckoning. The revolution is here, and no, it isn’t pretty.

I’m against the mentality of cancel culture, whether from the right or left. But I think your analysis of the gap between the cities and the rest is, shall we say, a little crude. The contempt goes both ways.

Next up, a reader pushes back on the “Email Of The Week” written by the Virginia mother, whom the reader assumes “has totally not read or understood the ADL materials”:

I took a close look at the provided links and saw nothing wrong or indoctrinating about them. The Reparations section is for 11th and 12th graders, for Pete’s sake.  Don’t you think such students are capable of having an informed discussion on this issue? I read the original piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates and thought it interesting and worthy of debate. Ultimately, I come down against reparations and in favor of making sure schools have enough resources to lift up everyone. 

My wife spent six years working on anti-bullying educational materials for middle schools as part of a long-term consulting job. They came up with syllabi that were similar to the ADL materials your reader links to and this was 14 years ago, before CRT and wokeness were even on the radar screen. I think that people are being fed “CRT cookies” as if this is an evil so big that we need to do everything in our power to destroy it. Don’t forget that it was not that long ago that the gay community was being savaged in a similar way.

You can go ahead and support Youngkin, who is a “Trump lite” candidate, but he won’t do anything to set this country or even the state of Virginia on the track it needs to be. With the emerging takeover of elections and school boards, we are on the road to a very dystopian future. Yes, we will ban Toni Morrison; yes, we will ban Margaret Atwood; yes, we will ban Mark Twain; and so it goes. Let’s enshrine the rule of the white male in perpetuity because that is the end game here.

Secession is beginning to look better and better to me!

I was with you until you degenerated into a rant against “the rule of the white male.” That racially essentialist generalization is exactly why the ADL has lost its way on this.

On a very different note, this last reader has an epic dissent against the Dish linking to a Substack piece entitled, “Anthony Fauci Has Been Abusing Animals for 40 Years”:

In reading your newsletter for some time now, I have come to see you as the epitome of rationality (validated by last week’s discussion with Steven Pinker). I am thus dismayed to see you jumping in with the lynch mob going after Anthony Fauci for the unfortunately named “beagle-gate” by linking to that Substack piece by Leighton Woodhouse. Perhaps you can be forgiven for an emotional reaction to this, given your devotion to animals and this breed of dog in particular. But the only thing ghastly about the article by Woodhouse is the lack of any kind of objective journalistic standard contained within it.

Let me start by providing some bona fides. I am a veterinarian who entered my career because of, fundamentally, a love of animals. I am also a research scientist that works for a pharmaceutical company. I work with hundreds of other such people that are lovers of animal and human life and devoted to making the world a better place — just like Anthony Fauci. Nobody I know in this field loves the animal aspect of animal research. In fact, I work with scores of colleagues whose main job is to ensure that our animal heroes are treated with kindness, compassion and respect — and provided as much comfort and freedom from pain as humanly possible, contrary to the implications of the Woodhouse piece.

The use of animals is an unfortunate but wholly necessary part of the advancement of scientific knowledge and, by extension, human health and welfare. Despite what Woodhouse claims, and while the entire field works tirelessly to improve methods that do not rely on animals, there is simply no truth to the notion that we can do without animal research and hope to continue the pace of remarkable innovation in medicine that we as a society expect and demand.

Woodhouse cherrypicks quotes from animal rights advocates and anecdotes that serve his argument while leaving aside the fact that nearly every single industrial and academic biomedical research laboratory or institution uses animals in their research. Animals are expensive, difficult to house and maintain and, as I mentioned previously, the objects of sympathy and respect. There is no rational scientist who would use an animal in her work if it were not absolutely the best way forward. Woodhouse’s “evidence” that animal research is optional is akin to the climate deniers who cite the single climate scientist out of a hundred that still thinks anthropomorphic influence on climate is still “unsettled.” It is very easy to sit back from a distance, while enjoying a quality and length of life and an understanding of biology unheard of even 50 years ago, and sling arrows at the entire endeavor.

In another stroke of fallacy, Woodhouse claims animal research is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned because it often fails. This is a “false cause” fallacy, misapplying the difficulty of the scientific endeavor to the methods that are being used. On the contrary, it is the difficulty of the scientific questions that we as a community are trying to answer that is responsible for the failure rate. Science is hard! Most experiments — and this would, by definition, include those employing animals — fail. The failure rate would be extraordinarily higher if we were to abandon our use of animal models which, although far from perfect, allow us to mimic and test complex biological phenomena far more accurately than any in vitro or in silico approach available today.

It is a baseless claim, unsupported by data, that there is a cabal of incestuous animal testers that only fund research that employs animals. In fact, most grant submissions require strong justification for the use of animal models and a thorough examination of alternative methods.

Woodhouse states that FDA does not mandate that human drugs be studied in dogs. While this statement is technically true, it is grossly misleading in that it hides a small but important nuance: the FDA mandates that human drugs be studied in dogs OR MONKEYS. But why let inconvenient facts detract from a point you are trying to make?

And the propaganda about organs on a chip and AI is the same fodder fed to legions of PETA activists for the last 25 years. Yes, we are working very hard on these technologies. In fact, my lab is on the cutting edge of this research and we are incredibly excited about the advances that we are making. But make no mistake, these are still very rudimentary models that are flawed in modeling the unbelievable intricacy of a complex, multicellular organism. They are useful in answering certain very well-defined research problems but utterly fail in addressing other, more complex questions.

It is easy to convince a lay person that this is trivial stuff that we can just answer with computers and parlor tricks, but I think few biologists would agree. I’d like to point out that the weather is predicted by only three key variables and yet, with the most powerful supercomputers, we can reliably predict it only three days in advance, maybe five if I’m being generous. In contrast, a human being has 20,000-25,000 genes and many times more epigenetic and environmental variables influencing how it responds to an event, be it an injury, a mutation or an infectious organism. Yes, there are differences between animal and human physiology. However, no organ on a chip or computer simulation will come close to approaching the modeling power that another closely-related multicellular organism provides.

Woodhouse relies on shameful appeals to emotion to make his case. This manipulation is the last resort of a flawed argument. He takes a page from the pro-life crowd, screaming the equivalent of pictures of D&C’d 12-week old fetuses. His article is full of heartrending imagery of the most awful, gruesome things that one could imagine. I am sure that he did not sensationalize anything, such as “FORCE-fed…PUPPIES,” dogs being “CUT OPEN,” “brains DESTROYED,” “AGONIZING pain,” etc.

But guess what? Animal research involves death. Just like eating bacon. There is no way to sugarcoat this, and while I am sure there are plenty of people who will be ready to sign a petition to ban animal research after reading these accounts, I wonder what their perspective will be if their loved one dies after taking an experimental drug that had never been tested in animals and was thought to be safe.

If you think this is only a theoretical scenario, I would encourage you to spend some time learning about the lives of the thousands of babies born without normal limbs to mothers that took thalidomide while pregnant. This is a birth defect that was later shown to be predicted by testing in rabbits (and is the reason that these FDA testing requirements exist today). And this is still, in 2021, not an effect that we can predict in anything other than a whole, living animal (I know this, as this is a subject of the research in my lab).

Finally, and most offensively, the article makes an ad hominem attack on Anthony Fauci as somehow an evil leader of this heinous cabal of animal torturers. Even the title of the article (“Anthony Fauci Has Been Abusing Animals for 40 Years”) conjures an evil, cruel Fauci laughing as he personally administers the torture to his subjects, like a crazed Torquemada. These are shameful tactics being employed by anti-vaxxer, mask-resenting Trumpers who see Fauci as the meddling, come-to-take-away-all-my-rights government, personified. The vile that is spewed at this honorable, intelligent servant of our country is disgusting. Unlike most of the talking heads in the public arena, he is someone who is not seeking power or prestige, has been honest and forthright and, by all evidence, is a caring individual who wants to do the right thing.

No matter what one’s views are on animal research, to paint Fauci in this way is disgusting. Argue against animal testing if you wish (it is a debate I think you will lose), but make no mistake, this type of research is, for the time being, broadly accepted in our society. Anthony Fauci is no more responsible for the culture of animal testing than the surgeon general is responsible for abortions.

Sorry for the long diatribe, but this one touched a nerve. I hope you can place your very admirable love and affection for your beagle aside and recognize both the complexity of this subject as well as the gaping flaws in that awful op-ed in Substack.

Well, we’re very happy to air your arguments. I completely agree with you about Fauci, and I didn’t write the piece — just linked to it. But there are trade-offs with respect to the use of animals in scientific research. I find the whole concept of ripping out their vocal chords to silence their screams and howls as they are experimented upon to be, well, evil. I hope you do too.

Bodenner and I are currently brainstorming guest ideas to discuss animal rights on the pod, so if anyone has a good suggestion, hit us up: [email protected]. Meanwhile, a reader sees a beaglegänger:

The reader writes:

I am very curious to know where your rescue beagle came from. I’ve attached some small photos of Charlie, who is now almost 8 and so greyer, but they capture him well enough. He looks to be if not a sibling, then a pretty close cousin, to your Bowie.

I adopted Charlie in March 2014, when he was judged to be between 1 and 2 years old (I picked December as his birthday for insurance purposes, but that’s been backed up by his vet looking at his teeth). His paperwork, such as it is, starts in the dog pound in Newport, TN, which is in Appalachia, just north of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He came patched up with some scars, one much the length of his leg, and is in blind in his left eye from some trauma. I speculate that he was abandoned and then hit by a car and found by some Good Samaritan. He is terrified of bangs — over and above fireworks phobia. I wonder if he was a failed hunter and abandoned for that reason, or if there was a hunting accident.

Anyway, he now lives in some style in New York, and you can perhaps see that two photos are from a cross-country road trip, in the Petrified Forest en route to Malibu, so, while it must have been a horrible experience, he landed on his paws. He is also my second beagle and I relate to everything you have ever written on the subject. But I know so little about Bowie, and based on this photo you posted of her, she has the same blue tick colouring as Charlie’s, and same patterns, and I note her hair is also a little longer. The tummy and tail look identical. It would be fascinating to hear of any history he knows.

I don’t think they’re related, since Bowie arrived via a Dish reader who was fostering her, and we were told she was originally from New York State. The thing about rescue dogs is that there is always a mystery about their origins. But they sure do look alike!

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Pinker’s new book is Rationality. It’s like taking a Harvard course on the tricks our minds play on us. We had a blast — and I pressed him on several points.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app,” which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of my conversation with Pinker — on what he believes is the biggest delusion in society today, and what we should do about truths that hurt people — head over to our YouTube page.

If you’d rather watch the whole episode in living color — and see the most famous hair in academia — we videotaped the remote convo in the Dishcast studio. It even has the view from Pinker’s window in the background:

Responding to my latest column on “our gay inheritance,” a reader actually hits on some themes discussed by Pinker and me:

I find your argument regarding the new censoriousness of the LGBTQ community to miss some important context. Namely, the Puritans were once the rebels and the outcasts. I understand that from your perspective, as a gay man, the defining Puritan ethos is one of vicious repression, but I think there are larger truths we can learn once we understand the genesis of the Puritans as a “marginalized community.”

How many powerful groups got their “start” in marginalization? The Catholic Church and Christians in general? Other groups that are so powerful that one might be called a bigot just for stating that they are powerful?

A story of persecution is useful for attracting empathy and support, even after a group has recovered from its marginalization. At that point, is there ever any incentive to abandon the story? No, because as a group rises in status, there is power to be had in advocacy for the group. And the higher the status of the group, the more power can be gained by the advocates. And at some point, the preservation and gain of power becomes the point, and so every marginalized group has a tendency to become “The Puritans” over time.

At this point in history, the larger danger, I believe, is that marginalized groups are being used to advance an agenda — the agenda of low-trust authoritarians. “Believe women” undercuts the presumption of innocence that we used to hold as a sacred belief. “Intent doesn’t matter” goes further along the path, essentially implying that everyone and anyone is guilty, and can be shamed at the pleasure of the attack dogs. “Follow the science” implies that there is only one true correct explanation, as determined by experts deemed in good grace by the media and government. Anyone who disagrees is distributing “misinformation.”

Brilliantly put. This next reader, using the tool of rationality but also empathy, continues a discussion thread from the summer driven by an anti-vax reader:

Immediately before reading the dissents over your “Let It Rip” piece, I read with disgust a wildly judgmental essay that a friend of a friend posted on Facebook. While I agreed with the spirit of frustration with the unvaccinated, the bitterness and judgment of the essay were breathtaking. These essays followed Sam Harris’ mea culpa regarding taking a preachy tone on the topic of vaccination. A pretty easy pattern emerged.

It’s not hard to see that many of us are communicating in tone and tenor that is completely devoid of any understanding for people who are simply afraid of the shots and any potential side effects. And whether these unvaccinated folks are behaving in a way we find rational isn’t really the point, is it? We all know what fear feels like, and no one arrives at a place of fear through a rational exercise — so how can we then judge fearful actions only by the standards of rationality? Yet that seems to be what much of the vaccinated population (of which I am one) wants to do.

Your impassioned final dissenter implied as much, and I sympathize: “What are we up against in the future? No one can say with concrete evidence. You might argue, that’s because there is nothing to worry about. Well, I don’t buy that. I know people in my own circle who have experienced heart issues, long-term fevers, menstrual changes and frequent illness since being vaccinated. That’s within months, imagine years.”

I also know women who suffered strange menstrual changes and people with days of heart palpitations. Those folks’ symptoms did subside, and they know that their cases are rare and that most others’ with the same problems will experience similar relief because they’ve read the opinions of people like Your Local Epidemiologist or watched Scott Gottlieb or plenty of others on the Sunday shows. But many others won’t have found their way to that type of information for whatever reason.

Assuming these experts are correct, should people like the dissenter seek out these data and figure all this out for themselves? Perhaps. But this is a confused media landscape we live in, and as The Dish has well documented, traditional outlets like the New York Times have been caught with their pants down on many occasions — not just with their allegiances to the Woke but with over-exaggerating the nature of COVID, so that the left comes off as psychotic paranoids to much of the right. The mainstream media has earned its reputation as the boy who cried wolf, and while I personally think it’s possible to parse through the hyperbole for the “real” news, I can at least understand the skepticism of those who don’t. While I’ve come to the conclusion that “there is nothing to worry about,” I understand some of the many reasons why others might not.

That said, I hope your dissenter would allow me to take exception with a claim that, while no doubt made in good faith, is simply wrong: “Not one person from the CDC or otherwise has compassionately addressed the very real fears that many of us have surrounding this shot. Not one ‘expert’ has given any feedback or concrete evidence regarding the hesitations that are plaguing the un-vaxxed. At least, no one has done that from a place of respect and understanding that I have been made aware of.”

No vaccine in history — and we have many — has developed long-term consequences. Vaccine side effects have shown themselves within matters of months, not years. I know this — and I suspect you know this — because many experts have addressed several of the primary fears people have about vaccines, including this one for COVID. While it’s true that the CDC has hosted a clinic over the last 18 months on how not to communicate to the public, the information the dissenter wants is now widely available, especially if we broaden our query to experts outside the Center for Disastrous Communication.

To start, if one can get past Sam Harris’ tone and that of his guest, Eric Topol, you’ll hear an obviously bright interviewer talking to a respected physician and researcher discussing the slim odds of short-term side effects, the history of vaccine side effects, the effectiveness of this vaccine compared to others, the misrepresentations of reported side effects, et cetera. Or another friend recently posted a concise University of Alabama-Birmingham press release citing a doctor running a vaccination center, tackling specific concerns over long-term side effects. The list of experts needn’t get longer here, I hope, to persuade your dissenter that experts are speaking out.

Your dissenter hopes to be communicated to from “a place of respect and understanding,” which shouldn’t be too much to ask in stressful times. I empathize. But I hope he or she would similarly consider that many of us find that the evidence is rather settled. Yet within that context of available data, we see people making decisions that put our immunocompromised friends in danger, leave us all exposed to greater chance of variants, and put the small risk of our children getting terribly sick against an even smaller risk of a side effect in getting vaccinated. This is where our sense of urgency comes from.

I think that gets the tone and the facts exactly right. This next reader addresses last week’s episode with John McWhorter on the woke religion:

I think woke culture certainly provides a worldview and a personal sense of a narrative arc. But the central aspect of Christianity — and most religions — is making meaning of our own mortality and easing death anxiety. Think of the famous Bible verse on the promise of everlasting life. For that reason I feel like woke culture is not a religion — there’s no talk of an afterlife.

Indeed. But that makes its religious energy more worrisome. If heaven can be made on earth, and there is nothing else, the justification for radical action in the here and now deepens.

Back to more dissents over my column on “betraying our gay inheritance”:

I agree with your take on where the illiberal left is going, but aren’t these just the children of ACT-UP with similar tactics? Didn’t ACT-UP make a big difference in the end? You seemed to think so when you reviewed the film “How to Survive a Plague.”

Yes, they were. And you’ll notice that my review was not lacking in criticism of some of the tactics. I opposed “outing” quite strongly, for example. I decried the violation of churches. And my measured defense of ACT-UP — largely as a psychological movement for overcoming a sense of helplessness — was in an extremely relevant context. Hundreds of thousands of gay men were dying in a terrifying plague, in a society in which they had almost no rights to family or decency.

I’m sorry but the plight of gay or trans people today is in no way comparable. And the way in which the risks we face are grotesquely exaggerated seems to me to be a rebuke to those of us who tackled a real life-or-death moment, under actual oppression. And dying of AIDS in the early 1990s was a little bit more traumatizing than being misgendered in 2021 in a country where trans people have full civil rights, and where the alleged “epidemic” of anti-trans violence doesn’t actually exist.

But this reader has had enough:

I began reading you when I was in college, in 2001 or so, to counterbalance my own leftward impulses. I’m bi, and having a gay “conservative” as a thought leader felt useful to my brain. Watching you support Obama gave me hope that reasonable conservatives could see that the Republicanism had become deeply violent and dysfunctional.

So I regret so much that I’m unsubscribing to the Dish, because I just can’t stand your constant defense of those who would do violence against trans people. If Trump were re-elected and decided to amp up the cops or round up the gender-nonconforming (like my partner, maybe? Or do they “pass enough”), his Goebbels would quote you left and right to steady their intellectual justifications.

I’m very sorry to lose you. But let me ask: which person “who would do violence against trans people” have I ever, ever defended? You’re not including Dave Chappelle or J.K. Rowling, are you? Because that’s completely insane. Engaging in a debate about some of the thornier questions about trans ideology, especially with respect to kids, is not condoning violence. If it is, then liberal democracy is over. Caving to every mounting demand from every victim faction because of “violence” is crude emotional blackmail that is indistinguishable from irrational hysteria.

And it’s worth recalling that Trump had four years to “round up” the “gender-nonconforming” and somehow didn’t. He failed to make his improvised trans military ban stick. While he was president, the Bostock decision was the greatest breakthrough for trans rights in history.

I support trans freedom and equality strongly. I always have. I do not support critical queer and gender theory — and that position is honestly held by me and by plenty of trans people too. I believe in liberal society. I will never apologize for it.

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For anyone who follows online debates over race in America, John needs little introduction. The Columbia linguist just wrote a bracing tract, Woke Racism, against the new elite religion. He, like me, despises the racism inherent in critical race theory and its various off-shoots, and let’s just say we talked very freely about many of the dynamics of our time.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). Read the full transcript here.  For two clips of my conversation with John — on the banality of wokeness, and how the woke religion hurts African-American kids — head over to our YouTube page.

Speaking of John, a reader mentions him in the context of this dissent:

Love your podcast, but your complaints about the NYT are becoming tiresome and seem to reflect a lack of recent reading. With Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, and now John McWhorter writing consistently reasonable columns that are not knee-jerk liberal, your tirades against the Times sound more like sour grapes every week. (No rational person supports Trump, so those voices aren’t going to be heard there except in the occasional guest column.)

Sometimes you paint with such broad strokes that you fall prey to the same distorted view of the opposition — lumping them all together with the most extreme elements of the woke left and exclaiming, “Can you believe what they’re saying?!” Stop with the straw men!

Sour grapes? The NYT has published many of my essays and reviews, and gave my new book a rave. But if my reader thinks that non-left views have more than token appearances in that paper, then I don’t know what to say. Conservative writers need not support Trump, but might be able to defend the non-interventionist, neo-protectionist agenda that also seeks to limit immigration. Another reader is curious to find good alternatives:

As a lifelong Democrat (I was elected to county office on the McGovern ticket) and subscriber to liberal mainstream media, I was interested in your antipathy to those sources. What I need is balance. What sources and commentators do you trust for their objectivity?

The Wall Street Journal is often a very neutral read in its news pages. Various Substacks help balance out the left-framing of everything. The Economist is much more based than the biased CNN or MSNBC.

Looking back to our episode with Cornel West, the following clip, where he offers his take on critical race theory and the 1619 Project, was really popular among readers:

One reader remarks how “Cornel West just exudes a cerebral, erudite common (universalist) warmth and decency. Is this why he’s seemingly so out of fashion on the left?” Another reader:

“We’ve got to fight the notion that whiteness is reducible to white supremacy.” Yes — thank you, Dr. West. This is my issue with how CRT is being disseminated. I don’t have any problems with teaching history, however reprehensible some of our predecessors behaved, but don’t teach children that they have some sort of original sin based on their skin color.

Condoleezza Rice said the same this week:

Another reader on Cornel’s deep love for the humanities:

I found very interesting Dr. West’s response to your question of who people should read more of. His response was Chekhov. Now, critical race theory would tell you that Dr. West, a black man, shouldn’t find too much in common with Chekhov, a dead white man. But in fact the opposite is true.

Moreover, Dr. West’s analysis of Chekhov’s work wasn’t a critical theory analysis of cis, white, patriarchal, capitalist, etc, etc. Rather it was a fundamental engagement with. the. text. — can you hear the annoying clapping? — and what that text says about the HUMAN condition. I think there is something deep to this, especially in our current cultural moment. That a black American professor in 2021 finds such deep communion with a Russian white playwright from (roughly) 150 years ago … worlds apart, and yet deeply connected.

And this is the real beauty of a liberal education — you can commune with anyone outside your own “lived experience” and learn from them. Their identity matters far less than their ideas — and the more cultural and historical boundaries we cross the more we stand to learn.

Many more readers keep the conversation going over the episode with Briahna Joy Gray:

This was a really good talk. While it can be fun to hear you, Andrew, chat with your old buddies, this is the kind of talk I’m here for. Briahna is obviously incredibly sharp. In my experience, articulate thinkers like her are rare out on her wing. She really is the kind of progressive intellectual we need to put forward the best version of the worst ideas from the left. I’m so tired of only finding rational sense-makers clustered around the center of everything. I enjoy getting my opinions challenged, but it doesn’t work if those doing the challenging seem delusional.

And so, it was a bit frustrating to hear Briahna make so much sense, and then draw conclusions that don’t line up with her premises — i.e. how she ascribes so much of America’s problems to class differences, but then talks as though race is the biggest game in town. But I also know she has a long life of hard thinking ahead of her, to work out some of the kinks in her own moral and political reasoning, and articulate more connections that will help me see the flaws in my own. I can’t wait to see who she’ll become in the next 5, 15 and 50 years.

Anyway, I just wanted to put my order in for more conversations like that, please.

The conversation between Briahna and me will continue soon, when I go on her podcast, Bad Faith. Another reader quotes me:

“Why, then, one wonders was the black family far, far stronger a century ago, when oppression was much greater and the welfare state so much more meager?”

Mass incarceration. And I learned that from Briahna on the Dishcast.

It started way before mass incarceration. No doubt that hurt it as well. But how else are you going to stop endless murder and mayhem in your communities — if you don’t take the killers off the streets? Another reader:

I want to share one point that I didn’t see mentioned in your reader responses to the Gray interview. I understand the reason that Ms. Gray, and others, seem unwilling to acknowledge “even the slightest contribution of cultural factors.” It’s the underlying meaning that they assume such an admission would mean: that the cultural factors are the fault of the individual. In other words, for her to admit that absent fathers are the problem, either: 

*  She is admitting that the fathers inherently don’t want to be there, or

*  She’s afraid others will interpret it as such.  

The one dissent you posted speaks directly to this misunderstanding when the reader writes, “To hear you lament the lack of father figures in the ghetto as if this was due to the unique moral failings of Black men” ... when people on the left hear someone say “it’s because the fathers are absent,” what they hear is “the fathers are absent due to a moral failing.” The most common way these two sides talk past one another is conflating “responsibility” with “fault”:

Left: “You’re wrong, it’s not their fault”Right: “No you’re wrong, it’s their responsibility!”

Both are right.  

Exactly. What matters is how we fix it — and if we can. This next reader wants me to “please dive deeper on absent fathers!”

I loved your episode with Briahna — it’s so interesting to get the socialist perspective on policy debates, to make us think more broadly about what’s possible. Like many listeners, I was particularly interested by your exchange on the causes and consequences of absent fathers. I think this might be a bit of a blind spot for you, having never negotiated fertility, pregnancy, and parenting within a romantic relationship. For me and my other highly successful, college-educated friends (all straight women), birth control was serious business from early adolescence, for both us and our parents. We all knew that an unintended pregnancy would really undermine our ability to pursue our goals.

The women I’ve known who became single mothers had a very different approach. They were not very proactive and diligent about birth control and became pregnant at young ages while in youthful romantic relationships that lacked the stability and economic means to be an independent nuclear family. These women (girls really) usually still lived with their parents! It’s a pretty difficult situation to integrate a new young father, especially when the mother’s parents may not be very welcoming.

Your Dishcast guest Bryan Caplan touched on this topic as well: in order to avoid absent fathers, we really need to focus on people waiting until they are in a stable, mature relationship to have children. (As I understand it, one of the best tools for this is long-term reversible birth control, like an IUD.) You should invite an expert on this topic on your podcast! I’m not sure who would be right — maybe someone in Brad Wilcox’s circle (though not Brad himself, I don’t think). Maybe this guy, Nicholas H. Wolfinger?

In the meantime, you’ve piqued my interest, so I’ll be diving into a whole journal issue on the subject, “Out of Wedlock: Causes and Consequences of Nonmarital Fertility.” I also just read a Brookings piece titled, “An analysis of out-of-wedlock births in the United States” — written by none other than Janet Yellen, of all people! Essentially, the increased availability of contraception and abortion has changed the dynamics of premarital sex and unplanned pregnancy, ultimately resulting in a huge decline in shotgun weddings.

Out here in Las Vegas, I’m catching up on your podcast episodes after the birth of my second child — out of wedlock, in more of the Scandinavian fashion, because my partner makes waaaaaaay more than me and I would lose tons of tax benefits if we tied the knot.

I agree on early, easy access to contraception. It both reduces the number of kids without fathers and the number of abortions. Win-win.

Yet another reader:

What I found most interesting about your conversation with Briahna is that in terms of policy, you and her actually agree on quite a bit, which you repeatedly make clear. You are both interested in UBI, for example. What’s really different are the philosophical underpinnings behind your positions. Briahna supports UBI because she sees it as a way to help poor and working class people for their own sake; you support it because you think it helps stabilize a society that becomes unstable when there is too much income inequality. Same position, but with a fundamental difference in motive and emphasis.

One more reader this week:

I just listened to your conversation with Briahna while passing into my 10th hour of tomato harvesting for the day. So this part made me laugh:

“ … instead of some migrant worker having to spend all her day in the hot sun picking tomatoes, that that process can be automated and that migrant worker can … can do anything else in the world”

As a migrant (from East Sussex!) who works 40 hours a week at a Montreal rooftop greenhouse, I can happily report that tomato harvesting is wholly conducive to podcast consumption. I look forward to The Dishcast every Friday!

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In the year or so that I’ve been podcasting, this may be the most significant conversation I’ve recorded. It’s a civil, careful examination of the core political question we face today: how can we save liberal democracy from becoming tyranny? The skill with which Bob Woodward and now Robert Costa have put together a chronology of the Trump administration should remind us of how truly grave the threat was — and is. No hyperbole here; just brutal realism and a refusal to deny what is staring us in the face.

Something new for the Dishcast this week: video. If you’re a paid subscriber and want to watch as well as listen to my discussion with Bob and Robert in our DC studio, go here. Or check out this short clip of the 1.5 hour episode:

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). Read the full transcript here. For two audio clips — on the various signs of Trump’s insanity, and on how the non-interventionist president still got us on the brink of war — head over to our YouTube page.

Staying on the topic of Trump, several readers reflect on the episode we did last month with Michael Wolff. The first writes:

I really appreciate your measured but firm concern about Trump, and I thoroughly enjoyed your conversation with Wolff, whose overall take on Trump — not a mastermind but a moronic, egomaniacal, accidentally genius, dangerous rabble-rouser — has always seemed the most accurate one.

But what I’d add to your essay on “Deepening Menace of Trump” is that, if he’s re-elected (and I agree with you that it’s VERY possible), the GOP and the various amoral grifters attached to Trump will have had four years to give far more purpose to strip-mining democracy.

Whereas the first time around, Trump was an unguided missile, someone who no one was sure could be manipulated, it’s now clear he can be maneuvered to do all sorts of catastrophic harm by people skilled at flattering his demented ego and exploiting his proud ignorance of history and how government works. Take the first Trump presidency and add to it the steely discipline of GOP cynicism and the ever-increasing, violent insanity of his cult followers, and your “deepening menace” becomes lethally nihilistic on many levels. 

This next reader, on the other hand, gives Trump much more credit:

Michael Wolff has such a narrow, one-dimensional view of Trump that it’s hard to swallow completely. I voted for Trump because he lacked the smooth rehearsed qualities of professional politicians. I hoped a businessman would provide refreshing leadership. (After all, Reagan the Actor turned out to be quite wonderful in most respects.)

I have lived to regret my vote for Trump, because his hideous personality has completely overshadowed his accomplishments. If he had stayed out of view and simply put forward his agenda, I believe he would have been re-elected. His response to Covid was far better than Biden’s, something the mainstream press has given Trump little credit for. The great masking debate notwithstanding, it truly was Operation Warp Speed. And while many, including myself, are impatient with anti-vaxxers, you should pull out the clips of Kamala Harris casting doubt on a “Trump vaccine.”

If Trump had been re-elected, would the Left be the main vaccine holdouts? Maybe so.

Other Trump accomplishments include:

* Slowing illegal immigration and his success in requiring asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico.

* He was derided for trying to work with Kim Jong-Un, an impossible task, but Trump managed to put a pause on North Korean nuclear reactor development. Under Biden, the reactor has again been fired up. No other president did anything meaningful on this front.

* Largely ignored was Trump’s successful efforts to broker some degree of cooperation between Israel and Arab countries.

* A less tangible benefit of a Trump presidency was a restored national pride and confidence. Obama seemed ashamed or disdainful of our country. America is truly a place where opportunity is endless and anyone can make good, and he didn’t seem to appreciate that.

In my opinion, the Trump accomplishments prove that he was more than just a crazy guy who couldn’t pay attention.

Speaking of policies under a GOP administration, a reader has a suggestion:

I completely agree with your 2019 argument for nuclear power as a means of combating climate change. My recent brainstorm on the issue: on a political level, GOP primary candidates who are pro-nuclear seem much more likely to succeed than Dem primary candidates who are pro-nuclear. Is it time to reach out, or prod, the Republican Party to make it happen? Steal the entire issue of the environment while putting millions to work building power plants? Launch perhaps 10 years of sustained old-school infrastructure stimulus? Own the libs by making them live through an American nuclear Renaissance?

This could win a lot of elections. But probably only on the GOP side, God help us.

Yes! But of course no.

Another Trump voter compares his administration to the current one:

I would argue that Trump’s domestic and foreign policies were superior, on balance, to Biden’s. Foreign policy: taking action against China and forging Pacific relationships to that end; insisting that the Europeans fulfill their commitments to a common defense; the brokered deal between Serbia and Kosovo; and pursuing the Abraham accords. Domestic policy: the border policies; Operation Warp Speed; promoting our energy independence; and the tax cut that spurred economic growth. 

While both Biden and Trump supported the exit from Afghanistan, Biden has to take full responsibility for the withdrawal fiasco. The Infrastructure and “Build Back Better” pork bills will bankrupt my children and grandchildren and drive the economy to ruin. Inflation is back now. While the Delta variant is causing harm, one can’t blame Biden (too much), except for letting our scold-in-chief, Dr. Anthony Fauci, flap his jaws in excess. Pandemics affect both Republicans and Democrats. 

One reason that many Republicans and Independents support Trump is that he opposed the inclinations of the Administrative State. Many working-class folks feel disempowered by our elites. It’s their way or the highway.

Biden generally supports the “wokerati.” People are getting fed up. Look at the minor “revolts” at school board meeting over masking children. Statistically, there is little threat to kids. People are fed up with the denigration of our country and the push to institute Critical Race Theory throughout our institutions.

I hope that Trump doesn’t run again. I agree that he is a boisterous, divisive and cantankerous. I would not want to work for him. However, if he’s the nominee of the Republican Party running against either Biden or Harris, I will gladly support Trump. I was aghast at the January 6th riot. Yet the BLM riots were far more damaging to the country. Biden was elected as a unifier, but he’s as divisive as Trump.

So if it becomes a choice of two evils, I choose Trump as the lesser of the two.

Another reader underscores a big part of Trump’s foreign policy record:

As a Bulgarian American, who now lives in Brussels, I am mostly interested in the effect of different US presidents on foreign affairs. By looking at the data, unlike all of his predecessors, the much maligned Trump is actually the first one who did not start a new war with the aim of feeding the military-industrial complex that has been ruling America since WWII.

I am amazed how little attention people pay to the actual policies of our presidents, and the media distracts the people by emphasizing the character of the president. Obama was a nice person, yet a horrible president. Trump was the opposite. I feel that instead of talking about Trump’s craziness, people, especially in Europe, should erect a monument for him because he did not start any new wars that ultimately hit the EU. (Remember the “F**k the EU” line by the Obama appointees who fomented the Ukraine-Russia war?)

Here’s one more reader, on “Stop the Steal”:

I regularly read that “two-thirds of Republican voters believe the election was stolen,” as you quoted, and I simply don’t believe it. I believe the pollsters; I don’t believe the poll respondents.

It just seems impossible to me that 48 million Americans really believe that. If even a small fraction of that number believed Trump had the election stolen from him, there would be mass protests, riots — civil war basically — which would have shaken our country to its knees by now. Trump would be chaining his fat ass to the White House door. And as much as I loathe and fear Trump, if I believed the election had been stolen by the Democrats, I’d be out there raising hell, too. 

Instead, we had a few thousand goons cosplaying the “radical” on January 6th.  This was not nothing. The entire thing was and remains terrifying. But again, I believe very few people even there, in their hearts, believed that the election had really been stolen. (My fear is that among them were some flinty-eyed young men a la Timothy McVeigh, true believers on a mission.) 

Most of my family have sadly gone full MAGA, and when I confront them about Trump’s election lies, they sort of mumble something about “Well ... I don’t know, but I don’t trust those Democrats.” It reminds me of their half-denials of climate change and flabby anti-vaccination positions: they are more statements of group membership than expressions of true belief. When liberals call them “stupid” or “uniformed,” they are missing the point. It’s not about having grappled intellectually with these positions and come to the wrong conclusions. These are just public stands being taken, symbolic lines being drawn that transcend the actual issue at hand.  

In the same way, I want us to call “b******t” on progressive cry-bullies who disingenuously claim to have been made to feel “unsafe” by a pronoun they don’t like. We should not be taking the claims of Trumpets on face value. We should call them out for their lack of sincerity. “Really, you believe Democrats denied Trump a landslide victory and all you can do is complain that Biden is a geriatric socialist?”

This reality might be more horrifying than them simply being under the spell of bad information. But I think we would do ourselves all a favor by seeing through the facade.

I hope you’re right. I really do. Let me add one thing to these dissents: I’m really proud that The Weekly Dish has such a diversity of opinion among our readers and subscribers. You’re as much a part of what we offer as my own scribblings are. Keep writing. We’ll keep posting: [email protected].

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