The Megyn Kelly Show - Andrew Sullivan on the Woke Left's Religious Zealotry, Anti-Tribalism, and a Crisis of Trust | Ep. 142

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Andrew Sullivan, author of "Out on a Limb," to talk about the woke left's religious zealotry, the importance of anti-tribalism, a crisis of trust in the media, consequences of "Defund The Police" rhetoric, Andrew Cuomo's vanity, Jesus Christ and Christian faith, Bear Week and Provincetown, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today on the program, Andrew Sullivan. This guy's brilliant. He just has such an ability to take what's happening in the country and condense it into understandable bits. And he's been writing about America. He is now an American citizen, but he's originally from Great Britain. And he loves his country. He has a deep, deep love of America. He understands how important a religious foundation is here. And he's been able to put his finger on how we've fallen so far from what our original

ideals were and whether we can get back. And actually he has some promising thoughts on that. So I think you're going to love his insights. We're going to kick it off with what's happening with the Cuomo aide who wants you to feel sorry for the difficult past couple of years she's had. Okay, Melissa, and go through a bunch of stuff happening in the news. So we'll get you caught up on the news today and also sort of a greater picture on what's happening in the country with one of my favorite people, Andrew Sullivan, in one minute. First this. I want to start with Governor Cuomo because I'm just interested in the whole subject and what's happening with him. And the news this morning is that his top aide, this woman, Melissa DeRosa, has resigned.

This is basically, last week I called her like his jackal. You know the movie The Omen where little Damien is protected by the jackal? You have to get through the jackal? That's what she's been. She's been his strong arm enforcer when it comes to the nursing home scandals, when it comes to the women. And there's been a lot of testimony to this effect. So this woman, I just, my jaw dropped this morning, I have to say, because she resigned and she said, yeah, I'm leaving. It's been a great honor to serve the people of New York.

The past few years have been emotionally and mentally trying for me. For me! For me! It says something about our broader culture, does it not? Well, it does, because immediately there's any blowback on anything. People are constantly saying, well, look at all these people attacking me, regardless of who ultimately is responsible for anything and it's it's uh the calling out of the bullying people and then claiming you're being bullied instantly when someone actually responds to it is the current easygoing technique yeah i thought you know the obviously the maureen dowd piece this weekend was so brutal that she probably felt she had no option. But it's generally been scandalizing, isn't it? I mean, it's not just Cuomo himself.

For me, of course, it's his brother too, this absurd propaganda in favor of this guy. I mean, only a little over a year ago, he was being touted as the most significant Democrat in the country. And everybody was going to be a homosexual, if you remember, that was the line. That's right. But what an ugly person. What a very nasty man, it seems, in retrospect.

Well, don't you feel like some of the fallout has been because we knew he was a bully and signs of that kept emerging? And then once the dam started to break on the nursing home scandal, all these people started coming out with their Cuomo bullied me stories, Andrew Cuomo bullied me stories. And it just made the public opinion on the guy start to turn. You start to see who he really is. It is amazing. I've learned anything in the last five, six years in Washington. It's cowardice is the norm. I used to think that politics was full of kind of rather flawed people and people do things for good reasons

and they enter careers out of public service or whatever. But watching how no one has said publicly what they tend to say privately in Washington, that everyone seems terrified of getting fired or terrified of having their career upended in the slightest way. The absolute adherence to your career over any other principle and your own vanity over any other value. It's really, it's definitely a sign of our times, is it not? Yes, your vanity over any other value. Gosh, that embodies America right now in the saddest way. Let me switch to COVID on a larger matter. Obviously, Andrew almost had a COVID scandal on his hands, but in addition to the sexual harassment scandal, but COVID and the Delta variant and so on. Now, there's no question that Delta has not been great and that the number of cases are rising. But more importantly, the latest news is that the number of hospitalizations are rising and the number of deaths are rising on a relative basis.

Though, again, it's 99.999% of people suffering from this are the unvaccinated. So if you've been vaccinated, your chances of being hospitalized or God forbid dying of COVID are still absolutely minuscule, a point the media needs to continue to emphasize. But now what we're seeing is the Biden administration looking at governors in the states of Texas and Florida in particular, who I think he accurately perceives as a potential threat in 2024, DeSantis, trying to blame them for what we're seeing, let's say, in Florida, where there are rising hospitalization rates and overcrowded hospitals where people with non-COVID emergencies are having trouble getting beds.

And to me, it's kind of interesting because when Trump was president, it was all Trump's fault. This is all a problem of the executive. Now that Biden's president, you've got rising rates and it's just a state by state problem. But they don't mention states like Louisiana where the hospitalization rates are going up because that's run by a Democrat. Well, it also reminds one of Kamala Harris saying she wouldn't take a vaccine if it were delivered by Trump back last year. I mean, I have to say, you know, if you think of a fundamental problem right now, one of our fundamental problems is tribalism. Just watching something like a public health crisis. And that's what we've had. It happens every now and again. And you would think a matter of life and death would help us

suspend our tribal loyalties and just accept that we all want to live. Do we not have that in common? And we all want to be safe. And yet we were incapable as a culture, as a culture of doing that. That is how deep this tribalism has gone. It's immune to empirical data. And it's immune to empirical data, even if you're looking at people dying in front of you. And that is a kind of amazing cognitive power of a tribal mentality. And one sort of always remembers that the natural state of affairs for human beings, the default is tribal. That's how we were organized for 195,000 years of our 200,000 years on the planet. That's how we operated. We are so deeply

tribal. So the achievement in the West over the last four or five hundred years to actually conceive of societies which are not purely tribal, that actually value the individual and actually value reason over the loyalty, is such a, first of all, such a great achievement. Secondly, such an obviously fragile one. And what we're watching, I think if one looks more deeply, is the collapse of that capacity. And that is truly problematic for a liberal democracy. It's truly impossible to have a liberal democracy unless we all consider ourselves, when we enter into politics, as equal citizens, regardless of identity,

deliberating upon our common good. It's as simple as that. If we can't get there, if we're still a fundamental argument is we want to find a way to demonize and attack the other tribe, then no politics is possible. It becomes a form of tribal war. It really has become a deadly war, in a sense, when you look at how that dynamic has affected the nation's reaction to COVID. Yes, you can say at this point, it's killing people, this tribalism. Now, I don't mean to say that there aren't some legitimate people who might legitimately have some worries about a vaccine. There is a good faith skepticism sometimes. I don't want to dismiss that. But in this case, it seems that there's no doubt. I mean, there's obviously a tiny amount of doubt. And the potential to save

yourself, but also to save your fellow citizens is so immediately available to you. Not to do that is really quite an achievement of tribal thinking. Well, I mean, one good thing, if you want to find some silver lining to the Delta variants spread, is that as one would expect, the vaccination rates are going up naturally, naturally, not because of mandates necessarily, but because people see what's happening and then they go to the hospital, they go to the CVS or they go to the Kroger and they get vaccinated because whereas before they thought the risks of COVID did not outweigh the risks of the vaccine, their calculation is naturally changing as they

see death come to unvaccinated people in their area. And so that makes sense. But of course, we aren't trusting that instinct as a people right now. Our government with the mandates, you know, it's spreading, you know, from industry to industry, from local government to local government, the vaccine mandates, the mask mandates, and on and on it goes because they think that's the solution. Well, one thing is to look at previous epidemics in a way in history and to see how this is the first time the world has essentially shut down for an extended period of time to prevent transmission of a virus. The first time. It didn't happen even in 1918. There were some occasional shutdowns in various cities. And what you learn from these previous plagues,

which is they're horrifying, but the only silver lining of a plague is that it runs out of people to infect at some point and blows itself out. And the sooner that happens, obviously, the better. And the downside to, although I support, before we had a vaccine, I think some measures to prevent transmission were totally sane and sensible and should have been done. I have no problem with it. But once you have a vaccine and it's available to everyone and a critical mass of people have got it, it's counterproductive to just nag people. Nagging can drive them crazy and it can create a counterproductive response. But reality, the actual reality of death and sickness

is concentrates the mind and the heart remarkably. And it will happen. And if this picks up pace, then more people are going to get vaccinated. We're going to get ever closer to the kind of thing you're beginning to see in Britain and in Israel, to some extent, who are slightly ahead of us on the curve here, which is that Britain had its freedom day, opened up everything, and was warned that the Delta variant, which was thriving, take off, and it collapsed. The Delta variant is sick. The positivity rate in Britain is collapsing.

So because they may be running out of healthy younger people to infect and to transmit. Also, and so the sooner it's over, the less time it has to evolve into more different strains that might be more problematic. But notice this strain is not, we don't know exactly if it has a worse clinical outcome than normal COVID, if it were than the previous COVID, if it were in an unvaccinated person, we don't know. But we do know it's much more transmissible. And one of the things that's interesting about viruses is when they mutate, they almost always mutate into less harmful forms, because it's in their interest not to kill off their hosts, to keep in their hosts as long as possible to keep

replicating. So I don't think we should be as scared of variants as we have been. They're more likely to become more transmissible than more deadly. And we just, I think, need to get through this. The only way past this is through it. And let's, as I wrote this piece saying, let it rip. Let people deal with the consequences of their own actions. This is a free society. At some level, the government says, we've given you the tools to help yourself. Now help yourselves and help your fellow citizens. I mean, and at that point, let this thing take its course. That's exactly right. I loved your piece on that letter rip. It's not to be insensitive to

death. It's to say, this is America, where we're allowed to handle the natural consequences of our own decisions. We do it every day when we get behind the wheel of a car, when we live in a building where people don't get measles, vaccinations, whatever it is. We all make decisions on our own personal risk calculation and what's OK with us. And we that's what we're doing right now. As you point out, it's the government's job is done. They did it. They gave us a vaccine.

If if we can't if we won't go get it right, what are what are we supposed to do? Stay in masks forever? Have every industry mandate a vaccine that people may not want to get for very good medical reasons or emotional reasons of their own? Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. If you hate, as I do, lockdowns, you hate social distancing, you hate masks. Well, the one obvious response to prevent all those things is to get vaccinated. So the idea that you have to be against all of the above seems completely crazy. No, be for the vaccine, and then do your best to get rid of these masks and rid of these shutdowns. I mean, I think that's

the one other point I would like to make. Viruses, they live with us. We share the planet with them. I've had a virus in my bone marrow now for 28 years, HIV, which was killing people and killed people for a very long time, had 100% fatality rate. But I've managed, thanks to the miracles of technology, and let's praise the miracle of the Myrna vaccines. I mean, the technology here is staggeringly good. And take advantage of it. Because the point is to get on with your life. The point isn't to defeat the virus. The only point of defeating the virus is to get back to your life. And when you fight these viruses, you can get too fixated on that idea without realizing this broader context. Well, can I see my friends? Can I see my family?

Can I go out and have fun? Can I go to work? All those things are things we need to be getting back to as soon as possible, because the toll that has been taken on the kids, for example, in terms of their educational loss, in terms of teenagers, in terms of their mental health, in terms of all of us, is huge. And that's

the other thing people don't take into account. These shutdowns and lockdowns are terribly damaging to people. They force us into a place where we are alone, isolated. We are more able to be manipulated because we're online all the time. We're more frustrated. And getting out of that as soon as possible should be our primary objective. And I don't understand why people on the right can't see that. To get back to normal, we just have to get this vaccine. Well, but it's not just the right. For sure, there's a greater reluctance among Republicans than Democrats as a whole. But, you know, the black community doesn't want this vaccine. Only 20, less than 25% of the black community has been vaccinated. There's real

hesitancy for various reasons. And, you know, to your point, there's a lot of blame to go around on that. Kamala Harris saying she wouldn't take it and Joe Biden getting it and then wearing the mask everywhere, telegraphing that the vaccine didn't really work. And the pulling of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine after six blood clot incidents out of millions. It's like there have been so many mistakes all along the way. And I could spend an hour talking about the media distrust. So people don't trust the evening news anchor when he says the vaccines are safe. They just don't trust that evening news anchor to say anything anymore. So there's been such a breakdown. But at some point also, you don't,

you neither want to infantilize Republican right-wingers who refuse to acknowledge reality, but not, I get irritated by the infantilization of African-Americans as if people can't decide for themselves what they should be doing. I don't, I honestly, Megan, I looked this up yesterday, and it's 38% nationally. You may be thinking about, I think, of African-American vaccination. But that's still shockingly low, especially given the fact that we know that disproportionately African-Americans are more likely to come in contact with it

if by anything if for no other reason tend to be working more jobs which require more interaction with the public uh more out there more essential work and and so they are the most vulnerable and the failure to get that across from an administration that does nothing but talk about equity a million times a day but to just get people safe is stunning. And that's why politically it's difficult for Biden. Biden can't start lambasting people because he's going to be lambasting his own base at the same time.

But he should say we've done what we can, for God's sake, get vaccinated, and we're going to move on. And I think it would be a winning message for him. Here's my question for you on that. So in New York City, the vaccination rate among Black people is less than 30%. I hadn't seen the national stat of 38. But here's, I'll make the counter argument, okay, since you and I seem to be on the same page. As I was reading the Wall Street Journal today, some other papers today about the rising hospitalization rates and people, people with heart attacks, people with other issues who cannot get a bed right now because the unvaccinated people who got COVID and now need

serious health are taking up all the beds. I mean, I can see the other side's argument that it's a public health issue and that the mandates have to go into place. If not, you know, if we were telling unvaccinated COVID patients, get out, you can't have the bed. Right. Maybe that would be one thing. But we're not. We're kind of telling it's we're taking them on a first come first serve basis. And somebody who may have gotten the vaccination, but then has a heart attack or a stroke, maybe struggling to get a bed because somebody who is like, I don't believe in any of this is taking up the bed. Yeah. I mean, obviously you're right.

The question of whether ICUs are available in various of these places in the capacity necessary to deal with the demand is something I don't know for sure. And obviously it's changing all the time. My assumption is that they're not going to be overwhelmed. I mean, the reason for the original lockdown, if you recall, was that we can't, our medical system would collapse under the weight of suddenly all these infections. If it is going to collapse again, then I can see the reason for actually initiating some mitigation things as maybe mandatory. But I'm not convinced yet, at least, that we're anywhere near the hospitalization rate that we were back in a year ago or a year and a half ago.

In other words, I think there's still some room in the system. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was reading in the journal. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, well, I was reading in the journal about, um, Florida and Orlando, but I will say it's frustrating to me because I read the times and I feel like they have a motive to, to play it up. They just, they've been so into the COVID fear, uh, fear porn as they call it, that I don't trust them anymore. So I read something, something like the journal, uh, even the New York post, I feel like, okay, these are not people who have been leaning into COVID fear. So if they tell me that there's an overrun of beds or hospitalizations, I'll believe them. But how messed up is it that that's how you have to read the news now? Right. It's

like, you know, I don't trust data I read in any given publication, depending on the political outcomes or risks for the Republicans or the Democrats. Yeah. I mean, I think that at some point, I think we both agree on this. There's become a point at the New York Times, certainly, and to some extent at the networks and the Washington Post, of course, and most of the mainstream media, that there simply is such an overwhelming majority of people there who have one political point of view that even if they're trying to be unbiased, the very framing of the stories becomes impossible if you're not working with anybody who thinks differently. It is important to have people say, hold on a minute, why do you say that? Or why are you pitching it in that way?

And I think that has been an institutional capture of one political party and one political party's objectives. It's, it's almost impossible to find a Republican at the New York Times, even though it's supposed to be diverse. You know, it's funny that that's it. Well, yes. And, and even people who are sort of Republican adjacent or even friendly to, you know, conservatism is very few are allowed. And when you look at it, but as far as I'm concerned, the op ed page is not worth reading. It's just a bunch of different demographic slots with the same opinion, which is why it's boring, actually, after a while but what worries me is the way that these news stories just come off like op-eds increasingly from the lead to the language the way it's framed and yeah it is

depressing because i still read the time i still read the journal uh i i increasingly can't read the post i'm sorry it is such it is so slanted it's it's just hard to get through um you're close to washington post washington post i'm sorry i'm being a little washington centric here It is so slanted. It's just hard to get through. New York Post or Washington Post? Washington Post. I'm sorry. I'm being a little Washington-centric here. But yeah, they've gone much further than I imagined. And yeah, so you have this crisis of trust, too, as crisis of trust in the media and the government, which all makes this so much harder. Here's a thought I had, Megan, is if this were affecting children, if COVID did what 1918 did and targeted children and many children started dying last year,

I think we would have had a much more different response. I think it would have been much more of an emergency. And I think we would, it's a straight, often this happens, you know, some of these viruses come. 1918 did too. 1918 was the reverse because the older people, people who had actually gone through a pre-existing flu of 1898 had developed immunity. So what happened in 1918 is that it was almost all kids and young people who were dying, which made it that much more traumatizing to people. I'm not diminishing the horror of older people dying in the way than an 82-year-old. There just is. And I think our instincts would have kicked in in a more profound way. And maybe the sense that it's just going to kill off the old and the infirm has in some ways shifted our psychology around this particular

plague. Up next, did you know that it was an event in Provincetown that led to the CDC returning everyone to these mask mandates? Well, Andrew lives there and he's got some thoughts on how on earth something they call Bear Week led to a national mask mandate, which I think Andrew and many others find somewhat absurd. He'll explain also whether Abraham Lincoln was gay. One minute away. I definitely want to get back to the media because there are a couple of examples over the weekend of, you know, why people don't trust the New York Times. I'm just I love the New York Times. Yes, today.

Loved it. I just got that lovely review. Oh, right, right, right, right. And I want to get to your to your book out in a minute. One second. Today, I'm going to praise the New York Times for its amazing insight and editorial skill. Makes perfect sense. Their book review, those are still solid. The book review section actually is really independent, pretty independent of the rest of the paper. But first, I want to ask you about, because I saw you wrote something about how this

initial outbreak that led to the renewal of the mask mandate by the CDC was based on something that happened in Provincetown during something called Bear Week. And no one's really talking about what that is or why in review this is a ridiculous week on which to base national policy when it comes to masks or anything else. Can you explain that? Yes. It was two weeks, I think. It was the week after 4th of July and the following week, which is called Bear Week. So bear with me.

Pardon the pun. Basically, this is a tiny little town. There are 900 year-round addresses here. It's right at the end of the world. 60,000 people come two weeks in a row. So 120,000 people all together in those two weeks of young and middle-aged gay men, overwhelmingly, who have not really had any sex or any dancing or any venting for a year and a half, this is going to be their blowout weekend or two weekends. And so that's what happened.

It also happened to be really cold for some reason. Normally everything happens outside. So everybody was jammed inside. And some of these little dance places in this old town are like the black hole of Calcutta. I mean, I don't go in them in the normal time. And people were jammed and people were literally, you could not move. The lines around the blocks for the dance parties were just insane.

I mean, it was so overwhelming. I stayed well away. I'm too old anyway for that stuff now. But I'm just saying, this was insane, okay? And not only that, but being honest, not just breathing each other, but every possible bodily fluid was flying in every possible direction so this is not this is not a good control group it really isn't this isn't like uh first and second graders sitting in school no it is not it is it is the opposite it's the worst possible thing you could do and um you know i i understand how people i

always you knew this you read history the wesley's plagues start to ease up people go nuts they did it in after the 1918-19 war if you read stories of the 1919 carnival in rio de janeiro and even for carnival in rio people said it was like Middle Ages in its complete bacchanalian excess. And you see this also in the Middle Ages after Black Death, people suddenly having these wild orgies in Rome, everywhere. There's a sense when you're under that kind of existential threat, people act out. But anyway, that's what it was. And you know, it is what it is. People come here to let off steam. The positivity rate in the actual town, once they'd left, they took it all with them.

So we now have a 3% positivity, below 3% here. It's been remarkably safe here. We have 85% vaccination rate. Now, so 120,000, we have 700 cases and seven hospitalized. So you do the math. I mean, it's incredibly small. Yeah. And I know several people who got it, who got it.

And I was at a party with them yesterday. But I mean, this is this is literally why a lot of kids now and people are going to be wearing masks for the foreseeable future because it was after the Provincetown bear week, which we got to talk about why it's called bear week. Um, right. Because now, because of that, the mask mandate returned. Thanks a lot, by the way, Andrew, I know you live in Provincetown, so thanks. Thanks for that. I know. I know. I didn't go to those, but I promise you, I would, I would, I would tell you if I did. Um, but I didn't because it's just like it's too much. But yeah, it's Bear Week. Well, you know, there was a point, there's a piece in my book, actually, this new book called I Am Bear, Hear Me Roar.

It's a sub, sub, subculture. Let's put it that way. In the early 2000s, there were enough openly gay men who were also middle-aged who were exhausted because they kept being told they had to go to the gym and stay in shape and to be attractive. And they just couldn't be bothered. overweight, middle-aged men with beards and back hair who show up to just hang out with each other and eat pizza and drink beer and hang out by the pool and go to parties and just chill. And it's, you know, I'll tell you, it is a lovely week. People, those bears, the big, fat, chubby, hairy ones are so mellow. They really are are it's totally wholesome the previous week which is all what you would think of is these chiseled like no body fat beautiful young guys dancing all night long that's called circuit week and those guys are sort of uh

they're the perfect young hairless gay boys who show up and and and so we have these it's not just gay culture anymore gay culture is now so big in a way that it's these little little subcultures and you live in provincetown and all the time you get these different weeks where different kinds of gays show up uh and lesbians it's so great because i i can just picture some in the bear week being like remember when we used to come during circuit week those are remember those bodies yes and you just look over there like oh well we're 12 20 years older now and i can't be bothered i can't be but probably happier too happier they are happy the mood everyone in the first week is like all tense because you know am i as good looking as this guy am i hot can i get labeled bear week is like oh fuck it you know excuse my language no it's true it's sorry um let's just hang out and have fun they don't go to the beach it's too far to

walk plus you get angry when you can't eat you it's it just makes you a generally grumpy person it's a huge boon for restaurants that week too they eat all the time pizza shops make all their profits in like a couple of weeks all right now this reminds me so you mentioned your book out on a limb and one of the one of the great pieces in there because this is a celebration of your many many writings over the years although i really i don't maybe i'm crazy you tell me i really feel like the piece you did last month um on what's the matter with you may have been the greatest thing you've ever written. It really, it's definitely top 10, but I wanted to ask you while we're on this, on this subject of gay men and bear week and circuit week,

which, which one of those would Abraham Lincoln have attended? I have a feeling Abraham Lincoln would be stalking brutally through the dunes. Both those weeks. He's, he's a, he's a bit of a loner. He's not really a

party boy, Abraham Lincoln. So can you say that for the audience, why I ask you that? Well, I have a piece in there about whether Abraham Lincoln was gay, which is a kind of unknowable question, but I kind of point out some facts. I don't know whether you read it, Megan, but I point out some biographical facts, which are, you know, they're kind of hard to just completely dismiss. I mean, I can't claim this, but I do think there's an interesting book I read, which by a Lincoln scholar that really went into it in some detail. I mean, it is remarkable that, you know, that he slept with his law partner in the same bed for six years. And there it is. And there it is. And there it is. Cause I read the piece and I was like, okay,

so there's stuff in here about like, oh, he never really developed deep emotional relations with any woman, including his wife. I'm like, well, a lot of guys do that. You say he was the classic best little boy in the world type in

childhood. One of the largest categories of gay male childhood there is. Okay. Well, that could be explained, you know, by other means. And then you get to the part about him sleeping with another man and in the

white house when his wife was away. And I said, well, that, that, that is the, that is, that is,

you're right. That is the thing. I'm like, and people would say, Oh, it was very common for men to sleep with other men in those days. There weren't so many beds, et cetera,

et cetera. I'm like, but not an honor guard in the White House where Mary Totti's gone. I mean, come on. I mean, what did you think was happening? I mean, I don't know. And I'm not claiming to know,

but I think part of my role, part of what I try and do is ask these questions that other people are a little leery of asking and going there. Well, it's not like there weren't gay men back then. They just didn't act on it, or at least didn't do it aloud and proud out in the open. Of course there were.

There have always been. And some of them, you know, some of them great Americans like Walt Whitman, for example, whose poetry is probably the greatest thing this country's ever produced in terms of poetry. Yeah, of course. And of course, how they understood themselves. I think there is a great snobbery of the present, especially among some of us who are in minorities.

And it's true that we've made huge gains and strides in terms of acceptance. crossdressers and transgender people before just didn't really exist or didn't function in everyday life, that people didn't know about them. Yes, they did. Yes, they were. And there were ways in which more traditional societies walked around it, had euphemisms for it, tolerated it, allowed it. So, for example, I was talking to Michael Pollan, who has that amazing new book about coffee culture and how it happened in the 1650s, only happened in the West in the 1650s. And what happens? Coffee houses spring up with all this new ferment of ideas. Everyone stopped drinking and started drinking coffee. Everybody shopped. Well, guess what happens? In those all male coffee houses, suddenly one of them becomes a gay coffee house. Another one becomes a gay

coffee house. They're called molly houses. So if you look closely, you can see gay life, but it's represented in other ways, in other forms. And it's not actually very visible, but it's there if you look. And that's what historians need to look at. And just as a gay person, I just think, well, that's interesting. I have no vested interest in Abraham Lincoln. He's so much more important and more than this than this. But it's interesting, right?

It is. It is interesting. I never heard anybody talk about it. And but I will say your mention of snobbery, like what's not what snobs we are now to sort of look back at history and say, oh, no, we're the first to do anything. And it's all about the me generation was reflected to go full circle in the news this weekend on COVID, right? Because there was a woman, she's a New York Times reporter. She was on CNN. I want to say she was on CNN and she was trying to defend President Obama's, former President Obama's big birthday bash on Martha's Vineyard. She wasn't putting the defense in her own words. She was trying to explain why many of the Martha's Vineyard residents didn't

have any problem with Obama having several hundred people. There's a scaled back version. Remember he got guff for having a party plan with 600 people. So he scaled it back. Now it's just several hundred. Okay, great. By the way,

they say Larry David was one of the people who was disinvited second time around. So I cannot wait until that episode comes out. Curb your enthusiasm. He addresses the revocation, but, umocation. But so he still has the party. And of course, all the shows this weekend that are talking about like Meet the Press was lamenting with Dr. Fauci, the South Dakota bike rally. And Fauci was like, there's definitely, you know, concern about an outbreak because of that. They didn't mention anything about Obama's birthday bash.

OK, so here's the person, this woman from The New York Times on CNN. Her name is Annie Carney, New York Times White House correspondent, explaining why folks who live in the vineyard aren't worried about the Obama party.

Listen. Other people said, you know, this is really being overblown. They're following all the safety precautions people are going to sporting events that are bigger than this this is going to be safe this is a sophisticated vaccinated crowd and and this is just about optics it's not about safety oh boy that's a sophisticated crowd and so they won't get covered well yeah well of. Well, of course, you know, there are breakout cases. I mean,

I'm not sure it was that risky since most of it was outside, even in a tent. It's not that bad. But yeah, look, the moment the public health authorities lost a huge proportion of the public was when in the summer of 2020, the BLM marches started these massive things, and the response to it was so out of touch with what they had been saying about every other thing. And it was clearly also a political question. We were suddenly told that racism was a public health threat greater than COVID, and that therefore this stuff was okay. Or we were told that wearing masks, and look, there are nuances here. It does matter if a huge crowd gathers and they're all

wearing masks, that will be a lot better than if they don't. It does matter if you're outside in a tent or inside in a crammed basement dance floor with 300 bears. These things are different but the public health message has to be clear and consistent and the minute it seems to be political or at least one rule for us and not a rule for everybody else it's bullshit like the mayor of dc meryl bowser like at an indoor party the same day she made indoor masks mandatory. And at some point people just, it doesn't pass the sniff test. And if you're trying to get people to be less suspicious that maybe you're, you're, you're, they're trying to get you to do things that they wouldn't do themselves,

then this is going to play right into that. Right. I mean, it's, it's, now I, I, yesterday I had a little party for my friend but it was outside on a deck it was only 40 people and we weren't whatever but i but i didn't i mean it's it's again i don't want to stop living and i don't think obama had had to cancel the whole thing but i'm not the president of the united states i certainly wouldn't suggest the guy cancel the thing. I've had parties this summer myself. They've been outside, but I would have had one inside too. We had it outside because it was nice weather. But I'm not the one lecturing everybody in the

country on how they have to walk around with mandatory masks and have to, it can't work unless they have a mandatory vaccine and all that. That's the Democrats, you know, that's Obama's party. A lot of people who were there. So that's, you know, the hypocrisy is what gets people. Yeah. Well, the role of nagging people. No one likes the nagging party. No one likes the one telling you everyone likes the party that says, you know, take take precautions, but have fun and live your life. And the Democrats, I think, are. Yeah. And I don't know why some Democrats, some of them just don't get that spirit of America. They don't. They just don't see that you can go with the grain of it

or you can spend your life nagging and lecturing it. And I do think it's a bad thing for the Democrats. They don't want to come across as a scolding, angry party that's constantly trying to control everybody else's lives, which is how they increasingly come off. Too late. Well, you, you, I think you've made this point before. It sort of reminds you of the, you know, the Republicans back in the day when it was like that, that movie cannot be shown at the local movie theater because it's inappropriate. The Republicans used to have that mantle and now the Democrats have it. Yeah. In the the book i have this piece that came out in 98

um called the scolds which is when in the latter part of the 20th century and under clinton when when conservatives became obsessed with morale personal morality because bill clinton was in the white house and obsessed with with with with gay marriage with all, they were constantly in a position of doing America down. I remember Robert Bork had this thing about calling America Gomorrah, or Bill Bennett was constantly talking about

how to brave this country. There's a point at which also either side, the right or the left, to some extent is happening also on the right where they're appealing to the vision of Hungary, for example, the model for America, as if they really don't like America now, as if something's wrong with America now.

They don't love it now. And that's dangerous for a political party, to be basically criticizing the people you're hoping to represent in, in the Congress. And I think there's a scoldition of some political parties that is, that is, that really turns people off. If you look at the successful politicians, whether it be Reagan or Obama, for example, they weren't scoldy. At least I didn't think of them as scoldy.

I certainly thought of Reagan as goat and they were very optimistic and buoyant and go do your thing. And, uh, and yeah, but, but, but Jimmy Carter, you know, just spent four years telling us what a bunch of losers we were eventually. It's like, it's true. Or Hillary Clinton with deplorables. And on that front, I mean, Obama's probably one of his worst moments was when he was caught on Mike saying the bitter clingers remark about the Republicans, something he, you know, he didn't say that exactly publicly, but that those comments are so alienating when you dismiss huge groups of people as awful. And that is one of the main reasons I think Hillary Clinton had no chance. I mean, she just turned

off so many independents even just by calling anybody who supported Trump basket of deplorables. The one thing I would say in defense of that comment by Obama, which is if you look at it in context, he was talking to a democratic crowd saying, understand why people are alienated, understand why they look at you and think you hate their guns, you hate their religion, their jobs have been lost. That was the context of that statement. And it came out horribly, obviously. But I think he was trying, actually, at that moment to tell democratic elites to stop not being interested or caring about people who do have religious faith and do own guns and are worthy of talking to and understanding and engaging. And the thing, the difference between Obama and

Hillary, the key difference is that Obama never ran to be the first black president. Hillary only ran to be the first woman president. He actually pitched himself on the issues and the renewal and all the other stuff. And Obama was brought up by white Midwesterners, his grandparents. And he always had an ability to reach actual the white working class. That's how he won the Midwest, twice. And people, I think, can, again, we sort of see things in black and white terms, we think. But that was the difference between Obama and Clinton. His tenacious belief, actually, in ordinary white working class Americans and their good faith. And I don't think he ever really lost that. And I've dealt with that.

The difference, it should be said, between Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton, yes. Bill had it. Bill totally understood that stuff. And he did his best to try and get that Clinton campaign in 2016 to wake up. Yeah. But there's only so much you can do. Right. It's like you can. And Hillary represented where the party where the party was going. And but, you know, we shouldn't give up on the Democrats either. You know, people like Jim Clyburn, moderate African-American voters,

you know, Eric Adams of New York City, there are people dealing with the real world who are actually elected as Democrats who aren't entirely awful in the sense that they aren't entirely woke. They do actually care when African-American kids are shot dead in the street as a function of depolicing, which seems not to concern terribly much some of the more active white people in Black Lives Matter movement. So they see that the price of the delegitimization and demoralization of the police in this country over the last year has been in African-American lives. Up next, a 29-year-old female police officer was shot and killed in Chicago this past weekend. 60 people were shot there, and that's just in one city alone. Meanwhile, the mayor doesn't want to hear anything about the possible connection between events like that and her anti-cop rhetoric. We'll get into that in one minute.

But first, I want to bring you a feature we have here on the show called Sound Up, where we bring you some sort of sound in the news and discuss it. And today we're going to bring you a clip that was it's from the Daily Mail. They got their hands on a conversation between the then co-hosts of CBS's The Talk, Sharon Osbourne and her co-host Elaine Welteroth. Now, these two were part of sort of that viral clip where the cast seemed to be ganging up on Sharon Osbourne for standing up for Piers Morgan, who was being called a racist because he questioned Meghan Markle's story in the Oprah interview. Right. Remember this whole thing? Everybody was saying he was a racist. Why? Because he didn't believe Meghan Markle because he questioned her. That somehow made him a racist as if the color of your skin entitles you an automatic assumption of

truth telling. So she stood up for him saying, you know, kind of lay off. And then she came under fire and ultimately lost her job on that show. As a result, it was absurd. The whole thing was ridiculous. Well, unbeknownst to me, my crack executive producer, Steve Krakauer, caught this on the Daily Mail. I missed it and called attention to it. And I loved the soundbite and I love the story. So he's going to help me do this edition of Sound Up. Steve, hi. So basically, it was these two talking after the on-air dust up at the the on-air pile-on on Sharon Osbourne, like right after that. Exactly, yeah.

This takes place as soon as the show goes off the air. And this audio, which I saw the Daily Mail story a couple weeks ago when it came out. Elaine Welteroth sort of distanced herself immediately from it. But I hadn't really listened to the full 12 minutes of it and went back over the weekend. And it's really sort of remarkable about not just her talking, apologizing to Sharon. Everyone knows you're not a racist. Of course, we know you're not a racist, which they didn't say on the air, of course, but, but also talking about why the conversation went the way it went, which I think, you know, really kind of pulls back the curtain about why not just this incident, but so many incidents get portrayed a certain way because of, frankly, the fear people have

of social media and backlash. Including women of color, like Elaine and her other co-host, Cheryl Underwood, who were going after Sharon on this segment. So here is Elaine and Sharon talking right after the pile on about Elaine's real feelings. Cheryl and I are held to a different standard by black people and people of color out there who expect us to say something about every racist, anything similar. And it puts us in such a f***ed up position that even if we don't have the information if we don't even really care if we don't really want to engage that it feels like a spotlight is on us it's like america is black america white america racist america it's like they're all watching us

and there's this pressure to demonstrate how to talk about this stuff. But we haven't ever been guided on how to do this. I'm not a DNI expert. I didn't know I was going to come on here and be the... No. I don't know how to do that, actually. Neither do I.

I'm just a f***ing old woman that has a lot of stories. So, first of all, fascinating insight, right? I mean, I appreciate her. I mean, she wasn't saying it publicly, but I appreciate the new information. Yeah. That even some public figures, you know, of color may be feeling what everyone's feeling, which is they don't really want to say anything. She didn't really want to pile on Sharon Osbourne, but she felt like she had to because she felt like some woke warriors of the black community, people who are woke within the black community were going to come after her for not taking a more aggressive stance.

OK, so I appreciate that. But then she totally disowned it when the tape came out. Right, Right. I mean, this is someone who in the segment, she goes, you know, it's the whole thing. We need people to stand up for anti-racism. She kept saying anti-racism is what's being called for not just not being racist, which, you know, and then to go and say, look, I'm not an expert on this. I don't even really care about it. You know, it's, it's incredible. It is, you know, but it's a good reminder for people, too, that when you see sort of these performances, mostly online, but often sometimes on television, too, they're exactly that. It's acting. It is.

It's virtue signaling, but it's also acting. Back at that tape, we heard, you remember this, Steve, where the ESPN anchor Rachel Nichols got in trouble for not wanting her Black colleague to take over her role at the NBA finals. And she had this private conversation with one of LeBron James' top people. And that guy was like, I'm so exhausted between Me Too and Black Lives Matter. I'm so over this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he had to apologize, although that part of the story really kind of quickly went away because, you know, the deference for LeBron James in the media is pretty strong that it even extends to his inner circle there.

And it was mostly aimed at Rachel Nichols, who, by the way, I follow Rachel Nichols on Twitter. Every tweet she puts out is people calling her a racist in the replies. That's just. Wait, what do you. Oh, she put something out and then everybody replies that she's a racist? Yeah. Yeah. That's just going forward. Weeks later, now she just tweets something. Oh, here's my conversation about this NBA player. Okay. Everyone just calls her a racist because that's what they've been told to do. It's sad, but I do think to some extent,

you have to get used to that. You can't... Listen, I mean, Andrew Sullivan, he's been called a racist many times. I've been called a racist many times, especially if you're a white person trying to have a conversation on race and you don't totally sign on to black lives matter and all this anti-racism, you know, BS propaganda, you're going to get called a racist. It isn't pleasant. I do think you kind of have to get to the point where you're like, okay, you know, you can call me whatever you want to call me. I'm just going to say how I feel. And then you find out over time, you're not alone. Most normal people don't think that at all. You can't listen to the Twitter commentators. That's the last place you should go for real info.

Well, that, and that's what's so alarming about this. And it, and it, and it is on some level, I guess I feel a little bit bad for someone like Elaine Walteroth, who is saying, I feel this pressure that there's pressure to demonstrate how to talk about this stuff. Like saying that if I just don't say anything, I mean, again, talked about this with Andrew. If I don't say anything, I will get called out on Twitter by people and it will make me uncomfortable and it will potentially put my job at risk. You know, she really does feel this, that the small minority of very loud voices on Twitter have this tremendous power right now. Yeah. And she did, to your point in the longer clip, talk about how she doesn't even really care.

Like she's it's not like I really want to talk about it. I just don't have the tools. She pretty much made clear she didn't care what Sharon Osbourne said. She wasn't like she's busy. She's leading her life like most normal people. It's crazy executives at TV stations like CBS and people on Twitter who control too much of the national dialogue who try to shame you into saying just exactly the right thing. And, you know, having been on both sides of those people, I can say, I mean, I'm not somebody who kind of shames anybody, but I've been the target of theirs many times. And now I'm free. I can say life is much better when you're free of them. When you just finally say, I'm not playing your game anymore. Call me what you want. Totally. Yeah. Sharon needs a sub stack or a podcast. That's right. Wait, Sharon Osbourne. Absolutely. And frankly,

sounds like Elaine and Cheryl Underwood may need one too. There's life outside of CBS, which by the way, has absolutely no ratings anyway. No one's watching that show. So get out. Get out while you still can. Steve, it's been fun having you on this edition of Sound Up. I appreciate it. Anytime. Thank you. And in one minute, back to Andrew. Just this weekend in Chicago, 66-0 people were shot in Chicago just this weekend. That's not even to speak about the murder rate for the major cities in America going up over one third, over 35 percent year on year, which is the largest increase we have seen since 1968. And at that point, the murder rate had gone up year over year by 13 percent. So we are way up when it comes to murders in the United States. Obviously, it's related to what's going on with the police.

And by the way, in Chicago, there was a young officer, 29 years old, Ella French, shot and pulling over a car. She's dead. Her partner also shot fighting for his life right now. And when Mayor Lightfoot there was asked, hey, do you think the rise in attacks on cops in the city might be related to the anti-cop rhetoric? She put up her hand and said, just stop it. Stop it. It's like, no, you stop it, Mayor Lightfoot. You and the others who try to demonize police writ large because of some bad cases that have gotten outsized media coverage. You stop it because you're part of the problem. And this weekend, Andrew, uh, Cori Bush, one of these big defund the police folks, um, she's a Democrat from, uh, Missouri was asked about the fact that notwithstanding the fact she's pushed

defund the police at every turn, it turns out she has spent $70,000 of taxpayer money on her own private security. And here she was defending that move. Listen here. I'm going to make sure I have security because I know I have had attempts on my life and I have too much work to do. There are too many people that need help right now for me to allow that. So if I end up spending $200,000, if I spend $10 more on it, you know what? I get to be here to do the work. So suck it up and defunding the police has to happen. Okay, so tell it to the 453 murdered people

in Chicago just this year. They might've benefited from some police presence too, Corey. The one thing that I found very disturbing about the BLM protests is that last summer, is that normally these protests can be very angry and very vociferous. For example, if you want to be a protest police abuse, then it's a perfectly legitimate, admirable in some ways, thing to do and chant your slogans. But they chanted them at the faces of the cops hired to keep them safe. And there's something about that that just, I do not believe, I'm a civil libertarian, I do not believe police should abuse people. And I think it's very

important for us to be vigilant about it. I think we should protest it and we should do everything we can to prevent it. But you do not generalize and then take a random cop who's policing your march and shriek at them that they are bastards, pigs, all the other things, screaming at them in their face. I saw one picture of this young white woman, you know, I think a student, just yelling at this older black cop, accusing him of being an agent of white supremacy. And it just made me sick, to be honest. The way in which cops in general have been, the definition of bigotry, Megan, is generalizing from a few to everybody. And in that sense, the way that the BLM marches were targeting random police, just people, they had no idea who they were. They might be the best cop in the beat

and accusing them of the sins of a handful. That is called bigotry. It is, it is the definition of it. And, and you can be bigoted towards cops. And when, you know, the New York city pride march actually prevented gay cops, people who have are out in the job, people who for the last 25 years have had courage and integrity and done their job well as cops while also being gay, they were prevented from marching in the gay pride March in uniform. And again, who are you, who are you attacking here are you really is this about Derek Chauvin fine but these these people who were unbelievable heroes who have real integrity

and who took on a very hard task and when these first cops came out in their units it wasn't easy right and they they really you know old enough to remember when that happened and to see those same cops be treated this way by gay people just infuriated me and infuriated a lot of us in the gays, and 80% wanted the gay cops to be marching, overruled by a clique of woke fanatics. And it's incredibly depressing. Because the other thing is that we're seeing around the country, city after city, police morale really collapse. Public denunciations of the cops without any qualifications has consequences it really does and and and the consequences are not being felt by prosperous uh students at yale they're being felt by three-year-olds in downtown dc shot dead in a barbecue in a, in a, in a drive by nothing. That brings us to what happened to you. And you may not know this, but I was raving about this piece you wrote when you wrote it and recommended

it to all of our listeners. And I've gotten a lot of feedback from people saying, thank you for that. Thank you for recommending it. Because they too love what you said it. I will say, I mean, not to just really lick your boots, Sandra, but like, it takes a special gifted mind to write what you said. I will say, I mean, not to just really lick your boots, Andrew, but like it takes a special gifted mind to write what you wrote. It takes a special ability to process larger cultural events and distill it so clearly like you did in that piece. It's the gift that we have of you really reflected in your book out on a limb that you've been writing about our culture for decades and have all that perspective. But unlike a lot of us, you can remember it. It's still in your head and you'd helped you frame

new events. It's it's why you're such a gift. And you you wrote in that piece. This is just to pick one of the many jewels that's in there. And I'm quoting now, we are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn't coming from the ground up. It's being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown. That to the point you just raised, that's exactly it. In the name of anti-racism, in the name of fighting anti-blackness. The woman, the white woman in her Hululu lemon will go out there and scream in the face of the black older cop and tell him he's white supremacist adjacent, right? Or they'll let black and brown kids get

killed by the dozens in the inner cities as they take away police who protect these communities because it makes them feel better at night when they go to bed in Brooklyn. Or they will abolish the SAT, which is the most powerful means to find bright, smart, young, poor Black kids to get them to college because it's elitist, because the smartest Black kids who otherwise would not be found, who are lost in the system otherwise, don't deserve the same chance as everyone else. Again, part of this is not constantly, we're constantly on the defensive. The sense that under the barrage of being told you're racist until you prove otherwise, we're so busy spluttering in a way and our mouths are kind of opening and we don't there's no

defense of that it's how did you like when did you last stop beating your wife you know it's that the dynamics change but you can reverse the dynamics and say and this is what was happening to me really I've just been enduring this for and one night I just was like I'm gonna I'm just gonna say you know screw you you keep telling me I've gone crazy I haven't gone crazy I'm still the same person what happened to you crazy yes what happened to you because that's what it's you know, screw you. You keep telling me I've gone crazy. I haven't gone crazy. I'm still the same person. What happened to you? You've gone crazy. Yes. What happened to you? Because that's what it's based on. Everybody keeps coming up to you and saying, oh, you know, what happened? Now you're a white supremacist. Now you're, you know, take off the hood, Andrew, right? It's like,

no, no, no, no, no. I'm the same as I've always been. I know. And that, you know, at some extent because of that, because suddenly every left Twitter person was calling me a white supremacist. I thought, you know, I can't defend myself against this. It is pure smearshop. What I can do is produce a book of my life's work and you make your mind up. If you read this book and think there's a white supremacist behind it, you're out of your mind. But go ahead. I wanted this to be something I put out there to say, look, this is this is my work. This is all it's it's about. Now, it's not it's not left liberal. It's not. I know that it's it never has been.

It's an independent conservative voice, but it's it's also not Republican and it's also very anti authoritarian. And it comes really from the enthusiasm of an immigrant to America. I think sometimes those of us who come here, you know, when we hear people say, those of us who immigrated here from other countries, this country is the most racist place on earth. I just feel like saying to them, are you out of your mind? Have you been to China? Have you been to Russia? Have you been to Japan? Have you been to rural England? Have you been to China? Have you been to Russia? Have you been to Japan? Have you been to rural England? Have you been to rural Germany? This place is a miracle. The ability of Americans with this level of unprecedented diversity of faith, of background, of religion, of race,

of ethnicity, of dialect, of language, It's never been attempted in human history before. And we're still doing okay. You know, you would have predicted given humankind's basic nature that we would be in a permanent civil war. But we haven't because liberalism and our constitution gave us enough air to live together without fighting a zero-sum war. And we believe in a non-zero-sum world in which we can all win, given enough space. And that's all I can say. I've never met... I mean, the English are pretty easygoing people in general. There are bigots and nasty people in every country. So let's just assume that, okay? They're there. But the way in which Americans routinely, when you look at them, not in the papers, but in real life, interact with each other, deal with each other as different

racial individuals, it's really very impressive to anybody who has any sense of perspective. And it's only if you're 19 years old and been in Yale for three years, that you can believe this kind of crap. It doesn't face the first instant of reality. It disappears immediately. And ask yourself, why isn't there a multicultural, multiracial capital in China? Where are all the minorities in Japan? Where is the interesting minority part of Moscow? No, they're all exactly where we were a long, long time ago.

America's had to evolve partly because of its diversity. And that's why I'm still enthusiastically a citizen of these United States, having given up my subjection to Her Majesty, even though Her Majesty hasn't ever regarded me as having disappeared. But here's how you put it. This is from Out on a Limb in November of 1996, writing in the Sunday Times. You write about America and what you think make it, the things that you thought made it such an enduringly liberating place. And this is a quote, America is still a country where the past is anathema.

Even when Americans are nostalgic, they're nostalgic for a myth of the future. What matters for Americans in small ways and large is never where you've come from, but where you are going, what you are doing now, or what you are about to become. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I read it with a little bit of a welling in the eyes, feeling the loss, feeling a shift. Yes, but you know, Megan, that is still America.

And when one political tribe insists that you must go back to the darkest days of your history Not because we need to understand that we do and we need to face up to it But to say that that's the meaning of America the past The worst of our past is what defines America that was what the 1619 project was about That is what critical race theory is about. It is about this entire experiment is actually not an experiment in freedom, but an experiment in slavery. That is what they are saying. And it's important to understand that that's what they're saying, because that is why they don't believe in any of the constitutional

guarantees of individual freedom that most Americans have believed in, but they're out of touch with the mood of Americans in general. Americans are not fixated on the past. Even if they know something, they want to know what can we do now? Okay. What can we do now? And the truth is they're not being told what they can do now, except hate themselves or give up their job or allow someone else. And, and that can't work as a political strategy.

That's why I'm confident, Megan. All it takes is someone else to say, no, we're looking, we are a people of the future. We will never, we, we should examine our past. We should, we should make amends. We should, again, they don't, don't, don't let them put you in that position of defending slavery, for Christ's sake. No. But in fact, we are proud of the amount of progress we've made to overcome that.

It's not perfect. Obviously not. It was built on a crime. We know that. But what do we do now? And what can we become in the future? And how can we move forward? That's America.

It's not, Europe is the opposite, but America is that. And if you lose that, you've lost something incredibly important about the place. It's so different though, because you're right. I agree with you on Americans in general, but you know, the, the woke have seized control of all of our institutions, as you, as you accurately point out repeatedly in this piece and in others. And you write about how you you refer to this from and you use Wesley Yang's term, who you also interviewed on your podcast. I recommend that to everybody. The successor ideology and the successor ideology is the next. It's the replacement

for liberalism, small liberalism in this country, meaning due process and freedom of speech and freedom of association. And, you know, all the things that we grew up with as sort of the parameters by which we all agreed to live in this country. And they're getting rid of that slowly, but surely the elites who have taken over these cultural institutions to the objection of most Americans, but most Americans don't fully understand how to make their objections clear, whether they could do that and keep their job, keep their place at a university and so on. And this is what you write in the successor ideology. There is no escape, no refuge from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence. And you are either fighting this and quote on the

right side of history, or you are against it and abetting evil. There's no neutrality, no space for skepticism, no room for debate, no space, even for staying silent. Contrasted to, as you point out, liberalism, which leaves you alone. Whereas the successor ideology will never let go of you. They want to thot police. You're not allowed to think or feel as you want. You have to think and feel exactly as they want and so on. And I do think it's growing. I don't know. I think finally people are fighting back, but is it too late? Because I feel like the power, the control over these cultural institutions in every area that touches our lives, it feels ubiquitous and sometimes it feels overpowering. I think one way of looking at it is in some ways, sometimes I joke and said that Harvard has finally gone back to its roots. And it's now once again, a divinity school,

teaching, teaching students the right religion, teaching them not to say bad words, teaching them in the ways that America has always, America was also founded by a bunch of religious lunatics who were too crazy, even for 16th century Reformation England. They were the people that even the crazy people in Europe couldn't handle, and they landed a little bit from where I'm sitting. And there is a tradition in America of religious fanaticism and Puritanism, policing the lives of others. This is the only country on earth that passed a constitutional amendment to prevent people drinking.

Look at the past of America. In some ways, because what I would argue, because we don't have an established religion, like most other countries did when they were founded, when America was founded, when America was founded, it gives everybody, it doesn't allow the government to control people's morality in the way that it did in other established churches and states. And so people created their own, which is what made it so vibrant, because religion in America was so self-generated.

It wasn't top-down, It was very bottom-up. The problem with that is that those upwellings of religious purity can become incredibly, you know, you get the Scarlet Letter. You get Salem. You get the Lavender Scare. You get the Hollywood Blacklist. There are these civil movements that aren't generated really by the government. They are out there in the society that is attempting to purify America constantly. as part of America's religious tradition of, of, of calling to account people who are sinful and, and attempting to control and direct their lives.

We look at you, if you look at the way in which 19th century religious fundamentalists who police language to make sure he didn't say anything that could be, that could lead to lust or sex or greed or all the rest of it. You couldn't say swear words. And now look at where the woke police your language so you don't. It's the same instinct of telling other people how to live their lives in order to save their souls.

Yeah, and to be a good person. In order to save their souls. And look, I don't need you to save my soul. My soul, whatever it is, is between me and God. And that's another part of America. But we should never underestimate that zeal, that puritanical zeal that's in American history that comes and goes and is currently at a horrible waxing period. Don't leave me now. We got more coming up in 60 seconds. If you look at history and view it through a lens that analogizes this to a religion, how does this end?

How do we get back to small L, liberalism, free speech, free association, due process, and all the rest of it? Do we? Well, I think there are maybe, I can imagine a couple of ways. One is that it grotesquely overplays its hand in which people are much more aware of its darker side. And I think, I'll be honest with you, Megan, I think that has begun to happen a little bit.

I think I hear younger people saying, you know, finally rebelling against this. And finally a generation that's coming up, maybe younger Gen Z, that looks at the way in which the older generation just above them just basically took everything their teachers told them and swallowed it whole.

I mean, this is not the way students were when I was there. We were constantly against our professors. But no, these people are like children being mothered by these ideological people. So I do think there's an element in which at some point the American urge to say, screw it, we'll come along and undermine this.

The other way is it'll be mocked, that humor will take its edge away. And that's why it's so important to defend comedy. It's so important to defend the right of the jester in these moments. And it's also why they're obsessed with humor. Humor is the corrosion, is corrosive of orthodoxy, because it immediately just gives you another perspective. So humor is another thing. But in my more gloomy

moments, I sort of think that the one thing that's missing, which we used to have, and the 21st century has really seen a collapse, was a shared, even if it wasn't completely sincere, but a shared Christian inheritance that understood that everybody was an individual under the eyes of God and answerable to God alone, and that we are all equal in the eyes of God. Now, that very basic belief that is part of all Christian beliefs, which is very much founding of America, is a great solvent to tribalism. And just as Jesus was, in fact, the first anti-tribalist, the first person who was of his tribe and said, no, the other tribe is just as good, sometimes better. That was a revolution in human consciousness. From that came Europe. From that came the possibility of the individual soul.

From that comes individual rights, this notion of the individual is the most important person, most important factor, not families, not nations, not tribes, individuals. And take that away, take that infrastructure of thought and spirituality and understanding of the world away as Christianity has collapsed in America. And you may have taken away the foundations of the liberal order and without realizing it. And of course, when you've done that, people seek meaning elsewhere. They create new religions. I mean, if you looked at that summit, it was so fascinating because you could see a spontaneous new religion taking shape.

People need it. So they create it if they don't have it. We used to have it as part of our inheritance. And we thought, ah, fuddy-duddy Christianity, it's all, we don't need it anymore. And we take it away. And suddenly we begin to realize what we, we only realized what we had until it was going. And that's my concern, which is why I honestly believe, and I know this sounds cheesy or pious, but I do actually think that the only real long-term project to rescue liberalism is a revival of Christianity. Wow. That's my next book. No, no, no.

I love that because even I, as I am Christian, I'm Catholic, but I've said openly I'm not so great about getting to the church these days, but I've been making an effort. I have been making an effort recently to get there and bring my kids. And I will say, obviously I'm not woke, but whenever I leave, I'm always resolved to try harder, right. To, to be more generous in my opinions and my lens that I look at other people with, you know, to sort of get back to kindness, forgiveness. And that's what I mean by morality, not judgment of others, but non-judgment, support, love, understanding that we're here for a limited time, understanding of what Jesus wanted for me, wanted for the world. You drift too far from that. And no matter, even if you're not woke, your behavior can sort of stray from where you want it to be. It was just a good reminder to me that it does matter.

Even if you're not totally connecting with the hymns, with what the priest is saying on any given day, just being with your fellow citizens, standing, kneeling, sitting, peace, the communion, all of it does something positive to you. Yes, it absolutely does. It also, you know, Our lives are full of choices, and that's almost a definition of freedom. We choose everything. And that's wonderful in so many ways. We're empowering, and we have an extraordinary number want not to choose. We need as humans to just obey and to submit in some way. And the safest, best, and psychologically and spiritually most productive way of doing that is going to a church in silence and kneeling and accepting that you're not everything. There's something greater than you and something that you're now required to do because you're just a human being at that service. Stand up now, kneel down, bow your head. It's a place where there are silences, where no one is behind the camera saying, pick that up, pick that pace up.

We can't have that because it's, it's giving you a different understanding of what time is too, which is time is not about being productive in the next hour. Time is about spending time with God. And also by, by, by inference, it is spending time with those you love and the people around you and not living abstractly in your head or constantly around your own wants and needs. And just, we're human, so we forget it. And we want to run our lives. And we like power.

We like choice. But the discipline to go every week and to say, nope, there's something else. I need to remember that. And, you know, that's also what having Sunday, the Sabbath, did, which is also gone. We had a whole day where shops weren't open, where choice ended, when you actually had a whole day where shops weren't open, where choice ended,

when you actually had a day of quiet and rest. And you can trace, I know this sounds very fogeyish. And of course, I'm one of these people that's happy I can go out and get something on a Sunday afternoon. But we're missing something, missing something something important a moment of calm a quiet on our our our world is so full of noise so there's a piece in the book called i used to be a human being which is which is about my basically my breakdown of after blogging for 15 years after living online for 15 years and how this is not a way of really living that you think oh i'm just doing all my online stuff on top of my life it's all again and then at some point you realize no i'm not this is my life now i don't have those hours i wasn't with that person i wasn't with my kid even when i was with my kid. Even when I was with my kid, I was on my phone.

And that wears you down. It's not good for people. It's just not good for the way we live. And so mitigating the technological challenges to spirituality and to sanity is also incredibly important. That technological shift. I mean, I also think it's true that the way in which social media has altered the context of our discourse is incredibly bad. And I feel enormous concern about that. To create a communication structure

that is designed to distract us and make us emotional and reactive is the worst context for any kind of public discourse at all. Which is why, you know, on Substack, we're actually trying to have a place where people can disagree, but at length, the context and nuance necessary and, and with, which we used to have in the old blogosphere when we started. I was going to say you, you've always been doing that, but I admire that too. I can relate to that. Just having left cable news after, you know, 14 years or so cable and Facebook are kind of in the same business, you know, foment rage, deep emotional swings that no one really gives a damn whether it's healthy for the participant. What they give a damn about is will the advertisers pay for this particular audience? And it feels, I don't know, somehow cleaner to not be doing that, right? To be in a business that allows for nuance and more fruitful discussion and

intellectual massaging and not just like you know you on fox news i don't know i think i don't know whether the whether roger ailes would have allowed that and couldn't have had the discussion that we had today right i love almost certainly not it would be they don't want to complicate things for people that's right that's right and add it got to the point where I was thinking. Just show somebody's layer of humanity. Yeah. Or that you have some doubts about something. No doubts are allowed.

One of the things I make a point of doing every week on the weekly dish is I always run dissents to the column that I ran the last week. And I am forced to answer the substantive, well-crafted arguments against me. In other words, I'm not just having an easy hit, an easy riposte or something. My colleague at The Dish, a man called Chris Bonin, he edits it so I don't rig it. And I am put on the spot every week. And you know what? People, if cable news did that, if cable news did, okay, now we're going to deal with all the toughest things that people have said about what i said last night and go through them and defend yourself you know i think people will find that interesting no instead what we do is not we because i honestly i pride myself on not having done this but they'll put up a liberal

shell right an empty suit who you can just beat up on easily i i loved always putting on really smart liberals against really smart conservatives and letting them go at it. The frustration was they only had three minutes to do it. Okay, nothing gets solved in three minutes. Right.

But just the gesture to understanding that we don't know everything and that more views are always better. Yeah, right. And a contrary view is not, I mean, if it's in good faith,

if it's a stupid, silly one, fine. But if it's in good faith, it's a stupid, silly one, fine. But if it's a good faith, real critique, don't treat, don't immediately impugn the motives of the person making it, which is the usual move. Don't impugn the identity of the person making it. Oh, well, you're a woman. You would say that, or you're a man. You would say that, or you're Jewish. You would say that, whatever. Actually take the argument seriously. I mean, and if it has some cogency to it, it's going to improve your point of view, to nuance your point of view, to integrate that idea or that point into your own position. What's there to lose?

What's there to lose, of course, is our pride. And so we create this thing called Twitter where our pride is the most important thing. How many followers do we have? How can we appeal to these people? And it's corrosive, as you say. But I, again, rather than getting too depressed, I see examples of writers resisting this, of leaving the mainstream media, of starting these new ventures like you're doing, like Bari is doing, or people like Matt tybee or glenn greenwald or these people who are setting up new forums and you know what we are not collapsing in traffic this year

we are going up and uh and and and i feel the energy coming into the blog from the sense that we are in a period where it does matter it does matter how we debate and argue right now, because these are important issues. And I do feel a slight revival in energy against this. Oh, that's a great time. I do. I wish to leave it. Honestly, Andrew, thank you for your insight, for your analysis, for your wisdom,

your ability to put it in terms that we can understand. Andrew Sullivan, a big, beautiful, brilliant bear. No, I don't have enough back hair. I'm not hairy. I still have the circuit training. Okay, good to hear. No, I'm a daddy now. I've turned into a daddy.

That's what happens to you when you turn 50, whether you like it or not. When they first start calling you daddy, I'm like, oh, please, no. But there I am. It's a fate, not a calling. That was a pleasure. Good luck with it out on a limb and everybody should go buy it. Don't miss tomorrow's show because we are going to take you in depth on the eviction moratorium. The Biden administration has admitted they don't have the authority to do this. They admitted that right before they did it.

And they're basically just flouting the law. I mean, it's really kind of insane. They're doing it anyway. And these same people who told us that Trump was behaving in extra legal ways don't seem to care, right? Because they like the cause, not evicting people who can't pay their rent. Well, why? Why can't they pay their rent? What about the landlords? These are not all wealthy Mr. Potter types from It's a Wonderful Life. These are hardworking people who are trying to pay their own bills, who didn't understand they'd be subsidizing somebody else's life forever as a result of the pandemic.

So we're going to take a hard look at it tomorrow with two people directly involved in this decision, in the aftermath and the effects of this decision. And I think you're going to enjoy this discussion. See you then. Don't forget to subscribe, download, rate, and give us a review while you're there. Go to Apple Podcast Reviews. Let me know your thoughts. Still reading them all, still enjoying them all, and still getting great guest suggestions from you guys. Talk to you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. Talk to you tomorrow.