TRIGGERnometry - Andrew Sullivan: "Leave Kids the F*ck Alone!"

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Andrew Sullivan is a British-American political writer who has worked for such publications as The New Republic, The Atlantic and New York magazine. He has authored and edited several books and can currently be found at Substack. (andrewsullivan.substack.com) Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Do whatever you want. But don't do it in front of children. Is that so hard? Is it really so hard? I'm not in favour of pulling anybody's sexual activities or kinks or whatever under some kind of prohibition. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say, let's not expose children to it. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today who we've been after for a long time, and we're delighted to have him on the show. He's an American journalist, Andrew Sullivan. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here.

It's a great pleasure to have you on the show. We know who you are, and we love your writing and your work. A lot of our audience do as well. They've been asking us to have you on the show for a long time. But for those who don't know you or your backstory, who are you? How are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

It's a wild and willy story, really. I grew up in East Quinstead in Sussex. I know it well. You do? Yes. I live close to that. I play basketball there. Oh really? How wonderful. And I used to go to school in Red Hill for a bit.

You did? Well, I went to Ryegate Grammar. I went to some beads. Well, there you go. It's just a small... Right, let's end the interview. We can just exchange locations. So I grew up there, I went to Rageg Grammar. I was sat next to Kirstama,

for five years. And we notoriously fought each other every day on the 428 bus. He was a lefty communist. I was a young Thatcherite and we went at it. We were, that's, I mean, that's another part of my story. Then I went to, got a scholarship to go to Oxford studied history, got a scholarship to go to Harvard, did political philosophy there. And then I got an internship at the New Republic magazine, which at that time was kind of like the spectator in London or fusion of the spectator in New Statesman, which was an incredible opportunity for me to understand America. I fell in love with the place. I went back and forth with my PhD.

Then, surprise, surprise, at 26, they made me the editor of the New Republic, which I did for five more years, which was an exhilarating, if crazy experience. 2000, I started my blog, Daily Dish. I now have a substack, the weekly dish. It worked for the Atlantic and New Republic and New York. New York Times Magazine, and I was the first person to really put marriage equality on the map, I guess, and wrote the first book in defense of marriage equality for gays and lesbians, called Virtually Normal. And later I wrote a book called The Conservative Soul. My dissertation was on Oakshart, the British conservative philosopher who died a year after I finished my dissertation.

Is there a causal link there? Is that what you're suggesting? Yes, one last look at my dissertation. He thought it was all over. It was actually the only second dissertation ever written about him. And he actually invited me at the end of it to talk to him in his cottage in Dorset, which was really a wonderful day to meet your idol, to meet the person you've been reading for a year and a half.

And he didn't disappoint. And Andrew, as I hear you talking, I hear someone who is in love with journalism, who has spent a lifetime in this profession. I'm afraid if you were to poll the general public, I would suggest that that love is not currently widely shared. And we've seen over a long period of time now that some strange things have been happening

in the world of mainstream media and journalism in particular. What is going on in your opinion in that world? Well, it's been in a serious crisis, I think, for quite a while. My own experience with what happened was that it kind of shifted in the mid-20 teens. Something around 2014, 2015. Something seemed to happen. I think it was a combination of two things. One, the media was in trouble economically.

I mean, they were terrified of going under. They couldn't afford what they had been doing. So they then reached out, and they were terrified by the web, so then they reached out to young college graduates to come and help them out. And they let a hell of a lot of them in. And they were all freshly indoctrinated in various elements of critical theory and had the habits of elite college campuses. And they swiftly began to turn newsrooms into the equivalent of these nightmarish college campuses,

which have a kind of reign of terror, fear of wrongthink, fear of contrary ideas, a belief that speech itself, writing itself, words somehow how harmful that they are the equivalent of sticks and stones. And the dynamic emerged in these newsrooms in which these younger staffers would be incredibly absolutist about what they were demanding, wanted a totally different staff based on different gender, sex, race, et cetera, et cetera, wanted stories written again now without any attempted objectivity. The goal was to change the world through the methods of critical theory. And the desperate, aging, allegedly liberal editors caved. There's something about calling

an older liberal person in America a racist that will make them do anything you want them to do. And once they figured this out, once they figured out the absolute insecurity of these of this older generation, that they just went to town. I mean, I personally, I was at New York Magazine. I went back into the MSM after being an independent blogger for a long time. And I began to write what I thought

about some of the sort of excessive tactics of, for example, the Me Too movement. Not that I was in any way opposed to changing the atmosphere about sexual harassment and treatment of women in the workplace, which I supported entirely. But the notion that you could just simply slander people

without evidence as rapists and sexual assault artists without any actual proof struck me as terrible. So I wrote pieces saying I disagree with that. And sure enough, pretty soon, a young swath of staffers decided that simply publishing my columns created an unsafe work environment for them and went to HR to get rid of me. And I didn't even work in the office.

I work at home hundreds of miles away from where they are. But I was creating an unsafe work environment because my ideas were harming them. Now, this went on for a while until eventually summer of 2020, when I could not and would not praise the rioting after the BLM movement or the violence and when they write a column criticizing the violence, they asked me not to write. and I said, okay. But at that point, it was beginning to unravel, and eventually they turned around a couple of weeks later and fired me.

And so then I started the weekly dish, which is a sort of weekly version of what I used to do. And the good news is it's great. It's doing really well. I enjoy it. I don't have to worry anymore about putting my foot in it. If readers don't like what they're reading, they can always unsubscribe.

every week to create a sort of atmosphere of liberal open debate, I have dissents, strong, powerful dissents against what I wrote the previous week, which I am required to answer, which are selected by my colleague Chris. So it's a, and we're doing great. My salary, actually, this is why I'm not whining about council culture because even though I was cancelled, I did incredibly well from it. I tripled my salary overnight. But you see.

this dynamic in the newsrooms. You see an urge for what they call moral clarity, which means abandoning any pretense of presenting both sides. You have a younger generation using journalism as a form of social justice activism, not actual relaying of news or a diversity of opinion. Now, I haven't to think at this point, things may be beginning to shift back. And I think we've seen some signs this week of that actually happening. The Washington Post, which is one of the wokest of the woke, they finally had it and fired, one of the most trouble-making and passionate and fanatical social justice activists on staff after she had engaged in a week-long to raid against her colleagues accusing them of many, many different crimes,

but especially that of being white, which was apparently the one thing you're allowed to demonize. people for. So eventually she was fired as of Friday, last Friday, which would be early June. And I sense a little bit of a vibe shift. I sense the fact that readers are really not only kind of offended by some of this screechy, partisan, subjective journalism in replacement of others, but a bored by it. You look at the New York Times and you'll see a dozen different columns. So basically, they're all saying the same thing. And ultimately, this has kind of led people to move away and has led to the great flourishing of Substack.

And the existence of Substack and independent source of information is beginning, I believe, to affect the judgment of some of these other organizations. And they're beginning to restabilize. The thing that I always find, and let's look at the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, a man who has been, in my view, legitimately criticized for the treatment and the conditions of the people in his factories and depots. And we've actually had independent journalists come on and criticize him and criticize the practices of Amazon. Yet these people who describe themselves as woke work for the Washington. Post, and they see no problem at all in working for Jeff Bezos, whereas the traditional

old school left that I used to identify with, they wouldn't work for him, because they would say your treatment of workers is incorrect, wrong, inhuman, whatever word they wouldn't want to use to describe it, and they wouldn't do it. But these people have no problem taking Bezos Dola, and yet purporting to be more moral than you, or I or anybody else. Well, they're not that interested in the plight of working class people, actually, in terms of economics. If Jeff Bezos didn't have enough African-Americans on his staff, or if he didn't have enough women, then they might get angry about it. But that's the real twist of this. And, of course, Jeff Bezos, by going woke in this way, of course, I'm not entirely sure how fully aware he is of what's going on in his media properties.

But if he if it's this is the dynamic isn't it of woke capitalism is that you You you you you you you distract people with this Identity politics in order to justify and defend your own exploitative Sometimes incredibly almost Victorian work policies because you but now you're a good person because you you're politically You're politically correct and you are woke and you are have have more African Americans Americans on your staff and you run stories that are full of references to white supremacy and the rest of it. So it's a kind of laundering, as it were, of a certain kind of economic inequality, of a protest against that in favor of this identity politics.

And that's a struggle that the left is going to have to figure out for itself. There's a beginning of it. You know, the Marxists over here, the best critique of the 1619 project was done by the old school Marxists. And increasingly, even though I'm a conservative, I kind of like those people because they're talking about something real. They're talking about economics. They're talking about inequality. Talk about how do you protect workers of any race. And I think there's a sense that there's been a complete distraction from that.

And that's beginning to be why when you look at the polling in America and you look at the election results in the last few years, you were seeing a really quite interesting shift towards the Republicans from minority groups. because the best example of luxury white, woke beliefs hurting African Americans, for example, is the defund the police movement and the decision to demonize the cops in America. The people who have suffered from that, who have suffered from the drawback of policing, a black, Latino, often immigrant communities that are facing crime every day on their own streets, crime that has soared in the last two years, while white wealthy liberals in their gated estates tell them it's good for them that we need to overhaul our white supremacy system.

They're dying because of that. The kids are being shot. The murderation has gone up staggeringly, and it's concentrated in these particular areas of poverty, which tend to overlap with racial discrimination, too. And so you're beginning to see, I think, a real shift underneath, politics in this country. And I think the whole notion that, for example, the Democrats will

ultimately win in America because they represent the non-white and the non-white are growing proportionally is slowly being dismantled as an idea. We can see that Latinos are no different than previous ways of immigrants who just want to assimilate, want to take part in the American dream, didn't come here from places like Venezuela or Cuba to set up. up socialism. They've despised it. They know what it means. And, you know, a little side, Richie Torres, he's a brilliant young congressperson from New York City, Puerto Rican, I think, I hope I got that right, actually openly gay, who came out the last week and said, can we please stop using this term Latin X? It just completely,

you're trying to tell Latin culture that there's no male and female. Are you out of your fucking mind? I mean, the language is divided into male and female. It's binary language. And so instead of saying Latino or Latina, they have to say Latinks. And you have Biden, Joe Biden saying Latinx in a speech. I'm like, that dude has never said that word in private in the entire history of his life. well not least because he hasn't existed for most of his life

but Andrew it's interesting to hear you describe yourself as a conservative because when I read your column I get quite a strong liberal bent from a lot of what you say too and of course during the Trump era you were widely accused of having Trump derangement syndrome and all of that so what do you mean when you describe herself as a conservative of someone who believes in avoiding drastic ideological change, someone who believes in the organic development of society, someone who believes in the defense of institutions, of the rule of law,

of tradition, generally speaking. And that is why a conservative defense of Trump is simply impossible. He was a direct radical threat to very basic democratic. norms. We now know this person try to ferment a, essentially, preventing a peaceful transfer of power uniquely anti-institutional, radical, subversive attack on the practices that make a country work and that define a country. When someone is attacking the very heart of a liberal democracy, what do you mean specifically? Sorry to interrupt, because Francis and I haven't followed the hearings that are going on right now particularly closely. When you're talking about him undermining these institutions, what do you mean specifically?

I mean insisting that the rule of law applies only to him, that if the rule of law goes against him, he will fire the attorney general. I mean, clearly plotting to have electors from the states that had already selected Joe Biden to reverse their votes, actually helping organize violence to stop the passing of power from Trump to Biden. This is staggering. Sending violent, armed men into the sacred citadel of American democracy to bully and coerce people into reversing a legitimate election result. There is no greater crime.

to be done against a liberal democracy. And there may be, and there are, and I've said too, that there are some issues that Trump raised that are important that liberals have failed to raise. For example, obviously immigration, the effect of free trade on whole sections of the American society. These are things that he was right to point out

and he deserves credit for pointing those things out. But that cannot legitimize the way he conducted himself in office, his attempt to undermine our democracy, which places him uniquely as the most destructive president in American history. And I say that as a conservative, no conservative wants to destroy the institutions of liberal democracy or wants to impugn the entire system as a fraud. Andrew, can I – yeah, go on. I'm glad we have this strong critique of Trump on the show. I think it's really important, particularly from your position.

And Francis and I were both very concerned as outside observers about what happened on January 6th. We were unquestionably critical of those events. What do you say to the counterpoints? And I think there are two counterpoints to what you're saying. The first is, yes, Donald Trump was a radically transformational candidate, but the reason people voted for him was that they felt that the status quo was not working and the Republican Party, such as it was, this hold, the chokehold that the two parties had

without offering actual genuine change that people were concerned about. That is why Trump was elected. And so in attempting to deliver some of that radical change, she was being democratic, the first point. And the second point, you know, I agree with you that I think sending or encouraging people or even allowing people to be in a position

to storm the capital in the way that they did was attempting to interfere with the democratic process. and I think that's completely wrong. What about the banning of the Hunter Biden story from being shared on the big tech platforms? Was that not election interference? I mean, the studies showed that it had an impact on people's voting preferences, for example.

There is a clear and bright distinction between stories. I mean, first of all, I agree with you. That was a disgraceful act. The idea that it was also function of Russian. Intelligence was also bullshit. I did not buy a lot of the Russian conspiracy bullshit that went on for a long time. And you can check my record on that. I was always skeptical about that.

But they're not equatable. There is nothing that can be equated with an attempt to undermine knowingly. Because now we know that every single person around him told him he'd lost this election. He still went on to attempt to, and could have, if it in any way succeeded, destabilized. this country massively and would have welcomed that destabilization. There is no restraining instinct in Donald Trump. He would destroy anything rather concede he was wrong. He is manically going around the country still insisting not only he won the election, but he won it by a landslide. He is trying to get a political party to invalidate the results of a democratic election. This is so far outside anything

acceptable, that it must be forbidden. He is a stain on American history and on the American Constitution. Listen to him. He's out of his mind. You can't let someone like that in a position of power. We were lucky to get away with it for four years. In fact, we weren't lucky because he nearly destroyed the whole system. You can be and should be, in my view, a great critic of the way that liberal elites, neo-liberal elites, right and left, forgot a lot of human beings in our society and enacted policies and refused to correct them that hurt people. You can say that some of the issues that Trumpism represents should be represented,

and I think the Republican Party is moving in that direction. But you can't get around this crazy person. You know, human, individual humans do affect history. And I do think he's the most uniquely dangerous person who's arrived in American politics in my lifetime by, easily. Hey KK, do you believe in spring cleaning? Yes, but only when my wife does it.

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The symptom of the fact that the system no longer works for the average American voter. There are huge swathes of people in America who look at left and right and go, this isn't working. You're not going to help me. You don't represent me. You represent the interests of big business and corporations. And whoever I vote for, I'm going to end up in the same position. So it doesn't matter if I vote for the crazy radical. Because even if I vote, because even if the system goes to pot, I'm going to still be in the exact same place. Yes, except you'll notice that Biden, for example, has largely adopted most of the trade policies that Trump pursued. Biden has pulled out of Afghanistan, something that Trump promised but never did.

There are continuities here because policy issues have shifted. And you'll see Republicans themselves actually prepare. to engage in some minimal redistribution, some controls on trade, and it has made a difference. And Trump deserves credit. I'm not going to deny this for bringing those issues to the fore.

But characterologically, he is incapable and proved himself incapable to be president of a democratic society. He just is incapable of it. Well, you don't, you know, don't you see how this monster this person is? I mean, aren't you, I'm ashamed to be.

a country which had this person as president. It's a massive embarrassment. I would say as well, look, there's things that I disagree with Trump, absolutely. And I thought, ultimately, he was a very toxic individual. And the divisiveness that he brought to America was dangerous. But I also look at the system that created him, and I blame the system. And I blame the left above all for saying that they represent people. and represent working-class people, whilst deep down, if I'm being honest, and I'm going to use industrial language, not giving a flying shit about them. And it's their fault.

Well, they definitely bear a great deal of responsibility for this, and also in the media in obscuring and eliding the real questions that people had. I agree with you totally. But I don't believe the whole system is finished. I do think that in America there are plenty of ways in which this can be, changed through democratic elections. We're seeing, for example, all over America's school board elections in which some of the craziest indoctrination that's been proposed is being reigned back in by ordinary people using democracy. We're going to have an election and midterm election very soon,

which will probably show, I think, a Republican landslide in both houses forcing Biden to some correction. I do not believe that a system that has been through rocky patches but has survived over 200 years. is to be junked because we've hit a moment where our elites have been out of sync with what most people want. That is to be expected in any country in periods of time. Trump deserves credit for breaking that. But now we have to move forward with our system, find a Republican who could represent them and not be insane and hostile to our very democratic system, and a Democrat who can possibly be what Biden said he was going to be, which is take the, the country back to the center. And I think the center in America is there still, it's quiet,

but the party that can occupy it first is going to win big. That's very true. And look, we weren't actually planning to spend a huge amount of time talking about Trump. But it comes back a little bit to the conversation we were having about journalism because another perhaps point that I would agree with Francis where Trump was a bit of a symptom is he was really the only guy who could survive what journalists do to Republican leaders when they run for office, which is he's the only guy who could survive being called a racist,

a sexist, a homophobic, and all those things, and still win, because everybody else just gets labeled as a Nazi and they never recover. And that was, again, one of the points that I thought was accurate about Trump is, I thought he was a very toxic personality. and you could see it, you know. We were actually sitting in, just a quick anecdote,

we were sitting around at the studio on our YouTube. We were watching something on YouTube and without us knowing the next video it came on and it was like a compilation of Trump put downs. And I think a lot of people were watching it with like enjoying the, but it was all about him like going, go back to mummy or something.

And he just, it was very, very dark. It was dark. I don't question that at all. I just wonder whether a more moderate person was able to break through the chokehold that the liberal mainstream media have on deciding whether you're an evil bigger or not? Well, it all depends whether people buy that description.

And over the long time, unfortunately, Trump in some ways was not innocent of some of the things he was charged with. Whereas you look at someone like Glenn Yunkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, who won an election. No, he wasn't. You could call in these things, but he didn't give them ammunition. In fact, there's evidence that you, and what Trump did in so many ways was give credence to the left.

Look, they're a bunch of racists. Look, he hates immigrants. Look, he says all these things. The fight against wokeness was, in my view, crippled by the fact that he was against it. Because he seemed to legitimate every single left-wing idea of what a right-wing person was. if you can have more moderate conservatives come forward and say, for example, yes, I'll give you one simple example. Transgender people exist. They deserve absolute civil rights.

They already have them, actually, under Bostock. We need to respect transgender people. But we shouldn't at the same time forget that they are biological differences. And in some areas, a few that makes a difference like sports. And we should be extremely careful in having children make lifelong decisions about whether they're a boy or a girl before they've even hit puberty. Now, you are more credible, I believe, if you can make those nuanced distinctions. Defend trans rights, but engage some of the difficult questions that they bring up than if you just become this a person who says that all these trans people are just mentally ill, making shit up,

there's nothing there, it's bullshit. And I think that the nuanced message actually has more traction in the country at large, because I actually don't think most people hate trans people. Oh, of course. The concept of hate is ridiculous. They're comfortable, but they can come to terms with it, and generally speaking, they support the rights of trans people. They have issues with their kids.

being taught at the age of three that they can choose to be a boy or a girl or both or neither or something else entirely, like a alien. This is insane. And it's being pushed back and it should be pushed back.

And a lot of us within the gay community, I won't use that term LGBTQIA++ because it's bullshit. It is. Sometimes people call me LGBTQ person. Yeah, why do you say that? Why is it bullshit? Because,

because first of all, no one can be an LGBTQ person, literally. I mean, you can't be a lesbian and a gay and a trans and a cruel, whatever. Secondly, there is no community as such. Even with gays and lesbians, I'm talking you from Provincetown,

which is about as gay as you can get. Yes, lesbians are gay men, live here happily alongside each other. But the way the oil and water can be mixed up together, you know, they have completely different ways of life, very different subcultures, huge different problems, because one of them, almost all men, you know, with the effect of being a man quadrupled,

which means you try getting a long-standing monogamous relationship. Straight man can't manage it. When you've only got, when you have other men in the relationship, good luck. Similarly, there are no big STD outbreaks among lesbians. We're not worried about them getting monkeypox right now because they have a completely different way of life. And transgender people are a completely different set altogether. The transgender experience could not be more different than the gay experience. One simple illustration of this, when you're a little gay boy, you're growing up, it seems to me one of the most important things you need to do is to own the fact that you are

boy, you are a man, and you can love other men. That's crucial. If you're a trans kid, the important thing is disowning that you're a man or a boy. And if you give the same message to gay boys and trans boys, you're actually engaging in some horrible kind of conversion therapy for gay kids. The last thing you want to say to a gay boy, for example, is, you know, maybe you're a girl. When you hear it that way, doesn't it affect you? Does it make you feel? I mean, I will never forget at Christmas. I was at my grandparents and my, my uncle brother, I was eight, he was kind of four, he was bashing a truck around and I was reading a book and my grandmother looked at the two boys and looked at my mother

and she said, well, pointing to my brother, well, at least now you have a real boy. and that is roughly what some of these trans activists are effectively telling young gay boys. It's what some people are calling trans away the gay, yeah. Yes. And it's so true because when I was a teacher and towards the end of my stint as a teacher, the last time I taught in a school was 2020, and I'd been teaching at this point for around, well, about 12 years. and kids now started to identify as, you know, trans or gender fluid, etc.

And I remember I taught one boy and I got informed that he's seeing himself as trans. And I started teaching him and I go, oh, no, you're not. You're just gay and you're just having to come to terms with it. That's what it was. Which is why Francis has never taught in the school again. Yeah, exactly. That was, no, no. But it's very worrying.

It's incredibly worrying because. Children are vulnerable. They just are, that's why there's safeguardings in place, that's why we protect them, but especially a child who is becoming aware of their own sexuality, which is incredibly difficult and painful for everybody. Adolescence is awful for everyone, and yet now we've got this extra thing on top?

Yeah, it's bewildering for kids, I think. And they've also been told they can call themselves basically anything. You can invent a million different genders for yourself. I think it's particularly tough on gay children myself. And I cannot understand why gay organizations are not concerned about this. Can't even acknowledge that there is a trade-off here. 80% of kids with gender dysphoria, we find out, end up gay. Puberty itself is itself a real affirmation of your actual biological sex.

I remember being a little worried. word. I was a gay boy. I did not. I was a nerd. I was a swat. I definitely didn't like contact sports. They forced me to play rugby. I really did not like it. And where was I got? I'm saying now I've lost my turn. Hold on. I was going to say. You were saying how gay kids are the most affected by all of it. Yeah. I was going to say something else. Sorry. It's all good. Do you mind if I ask you a different question? Yes. And if it comes back to you, we'll recover it. So one of the things you're talking about is actually a concern of mine, because as you start to see this so-called LGBTIQI-plus, plus, minus, up, down, left, right, whatever it is, community, start to get involved in things that would concern a lot of people.

We've seen images of drag shows, which no one had a problem with in the last 10 years. now start to be performed to children. We had a show here in the UK called The Family Sex Show, which involved full frontal nudity, targeted at children from the age of five upwards, and other components of that nature within that. And one of the things you're starting to see now, I think from some of the research I've shown,

is acceptance for sexual minorities, going down, including among young people. Now, to me, for someone like you, not only because of your sexuality, but because you were at the forefront of legitimizing marriage, equal marriage for sexual minorities, you've got to be concerned about this, don't you? I am. I mean, I've been concerned. And I'm also worried that the atmosphere that these activists create

terrorize gay people into accepting every single crazy thing. Look, I take the view of Mr. Slave on South Park, which is that do whatever you want, but don't do it in front of children. Is that so hard? Is it really so hard? I'm not in favor of pulling anybody's sexual activities or kinks or whatever under some kind of prohibition.

but I don't think it's unreasonable to say, let's not expose children to it. And to be honest with you, the vast majority of gay people feel the same way. We do. I feel like we're being grotesquely misrepresented by LGBTQIA plus-plus organizations who are essentially at this point

incapable of doing anything but react tribally to any criticisms, of any aspect of the culture of minority sexualities, although I wouldn't call transgender sexuality. It's not. Yeah, I mean, I know lots of drag queens. I'm surrounded by them here. They're like carpenter ants. And they're friends of mine.

And, you know, the best ones are totally not risque in sexual terms at all. They're like clowns. They're like a pantomime dame. I mean, we take children to pantomime. to, which are essentially drag shows, at least in some aspect, musical drag shows, and we don't think that's abusing them. So there's a fine line here. You know, you can have a fun, completely family-friendly drag queen, who can be funny,

who can engage just like a pantomime dame or a clown. And then you have the more less talented, frankly, more vulgar and more sexualized versions. And again, I took my seven-year-old and five-year-old niece and nephew to see one of these drag queens a few years ago. She didn't, they loved it. It's hilarious. There was no sexuality. Unless you saw the back of this guy's dress, which was full of back hair. I mean, it's deliberately done to just kind of send up drag queens.

So, again, it's complicated. and I wish the more responsible ones push back against some of this. You know, and RuPaul did a huge... I mean, I don't think it's... I don't think drag queens are the great, terrible threat people saying they are, is what I would say. I do think that public authorities, public schools, telling children that they can pick which sex they are

is infinitely more concerning. Oh, I agree with you, Andrew, but I... The thing is, though, and I think you'll appreciate this, the general public are not as into these issues, and they're not as involved in the details and the nuances and whatever. So I'm going to ask you quite an unpleasant and layman question about it, which is, look, if I am a parent, which I now am of a child, and I'm looking at this without delving deeply into it, I'm not going, there's these drag queens and that drag queens, and there's a spectrum and some of them do this. You're just looking at it and going, why are, as you said yourself, children being so shown sexualized material, right? Where is this coming from, in your opinion? Why are people doing this at all? Well, I think there was a genuine good faith idea that drag queens are like clowns,

that children relate to them in that way, and that having somebody read in the library, which I think is where the stuff started, to children. in funny outfits might actually be a completely banal and rather benign thing. But some have exploited it. And I think also this concept of LGBTIQIAA++ whatever has created a culture, which is now something that people are saying they can choose. So the majority, it turns out, the biggest proportion of the people calling themselves LGBTQIA plus plus in America are straight people,

mainly straight women calling themselves bisexual. Some 40% in one poll of people identifying as LGBTQ are straight. So it's become this kind of all-purpose, trendy catch-all. And there are some lefty liberal parents that sort of want their kids to be part of the LGBTQIA, because at least that's not straight. I mean, look, I'm not defending this. I can't defend it. I think it's whacked.

But, you know, parents have control over the church. children if they want to take them there. If some kid is taken to a sexually explicit thing, which they haven't explicitly had consent for from their parents, I think it's an outrage. But I do think most drag queens are not like that. Andrew, we're not saying that, and we're not trying to pin it on you. We're just trying to have a conversation because the reason is that you see,

and you will know this because you are online and you see the discourse and the way it moves, there is this concern, particularly on the right, this whole groomer conversation, which I find kind of like difficult and I don't get what's going on exactly. But there is a growing concern that as part of this increasing tolerance, we're now tolerating things that just frankly shouldn't be tolerated. I think that's a completely legitimate concern. But there is a distinction between that concern and saying that any teacher that teaches the syllabus is attempting to sexually abuse your child. That seems to be be to be a reach that is ugly. You know, calling someone a pedophile is a bit like calling them a

racist. It's something you just can't defend yourself against. It is a totally totalitarian tactic. I think if you don't think people should be called racist because they have different views than you, which are legitimate views, then you shouldn't be calling people who have a different view than you do on the question of sexual minorities to be a pedophile. The first word, out of your mouth. And look, there is a long history of gay people being called pedophiles and being equated with them. And we have it in, and, you know, not so long ago, the 70s, there was an attempt to get all gay teachers fired, which would, in California. And the politician that actually did most to prevent that coming into force, it was called the Briggs initiative, was

Governor Ronald Reagan, who said, no, you make a distinction. You judge people by the way they teach, not who they are. If there is some abuse and there is abuse in schools, we know this. I mean, but it's not always associated with gay people and it shouldn't be associated with a particular kind of curriculum. I think it's cheap and ugly and I think we can avoid it. But you can still make the case. Let us keep children out of politics.

Let them see the world for what they're. Leave them the fuck alone. Let them grow up. I've stopped getting into their heads about this, that, and the other. In the private sphere, you can do that. You can bring up your kids as Jehovah's Witnesses. You can do whatever you want. But in the public sphere, public authorities,

teaching kids things that are extremely dubious for political motives, no. And I'm sorry, it's a little wishy-washy. I don't mean to be wishy-washy. I'd mean to be fair. Andrew, it's a really, really, really important point. Thank you for putting that across with nuance. Do you have a website or do you plan to have a website? Because if you do, then EasyDNS is a company for you.

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Move your domains and websites over to EasyDNS right now. All you've got to do is go to easydns.com forward slash triggered. That's easydns.com forward slash triggered. Use our promo code, which is also triggered, and get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, Access of Easy, which tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. I think the problem is, Andrew, I think we're politicising everything.

And this is the inevitable result of what happens when you politicise sexuality and sex. Yeah, I mean, at some point, when gay people had no very few civil rights and were subject to a great deal of persecution. Yes, you have to be political to get to equality. But the point of that politics was to let go of politics afterwards, was to get on with our lives.

Once you have formal civil equality, I think you should let the world evolve in its own way without trying to coerce it, indoctrinated, move it in any which way. That's why I consider myself a conservative. And if people, I mean, honestly, if people understand what I mean by that, I do have a book called The Conservative Soul, which is available. And it is my attempt to kind of explain exactly where I think that conservative temperament belongs.

And it is present in conservatives in Britain and America. But currently it's in eclips to more radical and revolutionary movements, I think. And the problem is, as well, when you politicize, you create, like we've touched on before. this idea of community. The gay community thinks this. No, they don't. Gay men have a variety of different political opinions, left, right, center, and so they should. They're individuals. You can't just put them under this umbrella. This is part of my problem with the left. It is, the left told me, you can't exist. How can you be a homosexual and believe in God? How can you be a homosexual and adopt a conservative politics. You know, the thing about gays, especially, is that we are born randomly across

every country. So we're going to have lots of gays in red states and blue states. There's many gays being born in Oklahoma as there are in New York state per capita. So of course you're going to have the most diverse political community. A third of gays voted for Trump. Many of us, many of the most important homosexuals in American history have been on the right. Of course, this is the who, as someone rather crudely put it to me, what makes you hard has nothing to do with what your politics are. It's a completely involuntary thing, whereas your politics have to be constructed.

So of course, if it irritates you to hear the LGBT community is offended by this, they imagine what it does to people like me. We're absolutely fucking livid. Of course we're not offended. We're not offended by Dave Chappelle. We love Dave Chappelle. If you look at the people fighting back against some of this crap, Glenn Greenwald, Barry Wise, all these people meant disproportionately gay people are fighting back against this.

And this is part of what the gay tradition is. We were never the senses. We were never the scolds. We were never telling people what to do with their lives. Our message for so long was, do what you want to do. Just leave us alone. Let us do what we want to do on some equal footing. under the law. That's all. The idea that it's turned

to this puritanical, censoring, scolding, humorless movement is so depressing and it so violates our traditions, violates our ultimate culture, which is one of celebration of variety, of the treasure of the eccentric, the support of the outsider, the love of art that can subvert and change, tell you, it's still here. Not to offend you, but I went to a good drag show one here that comes every week.

There's a sort of talent process. Andrew, we're not offended by drag shows. No, I know, you know. I'm just kidding you. I'm kidding you. We're two comedians. We used to perform with drag people. I know.

I know friends who do drag shows. I know. I'm just kidding. We were talking about this. Yeah, all right. I was just whining you are. I'm not homophobic, all right? No, of course you're not.

He's Russian. It's not his fault. It's his identity. It's my culture. My view as a homo is that I assume. everyone's homo-friendly and less proven otherwise. Yeah. And my view as a member of minority is that I do not get up every day wondering who hates me. I get up every day seeing who loves me and who I can be with and how I can best

live my life. And there are many, many more of us out there. And boy, you, you know, the truth is that when you do what I've done, the most vicious hostility comes from the gay left. I have, I mean, my first book on marriage equality was picketed by lesbian Avengers. I've had drinks thrown at me. I've been called the Antichrist. My second book was reviewed and said, if you hate gay men, you'll love this book. The attempt to delegitimize non-leftist gays is so well-organized and well-oiled. It can take a huge amount. Look what happened to Barry Weiss, for example. You, that you are particularly vulnerable to, attack. So that's how they enforce the orthodoxy, but people should not believe that gays and

lesbians, not necessarily part of the same community, but that they do not have an incredibly variety of views, they disagree with each other. And the conversation privately, for example, about getting kids to change their sex among gay men, it is, it is not happy. People are people are actually concerned. We've got lots of gay friends here that we talk to about. this, men and women, none of them are happy about this whole thing, about what's going on. So I suppose that begs the question then, Andrew, how do we get to a position where we go to what you're talking about, which is let us be who we are and do no damage to children and leave everybody the fuck alone? How do we get to that position?

One way, I think, is to remind people of history and of geography. When certain elements are screaming that they need this, that, and the other, and they want to push boundaries further and further and further, my response is to say, have you ever read any history? Do you have any idea of what it's still like to be gay, for example, in the vast majority of countries on the earth, from the Palestinian authorities to Russia, to Iran, do you have any idea where we've come?

In the 1950s, 10,000 gay men were fired from the federal government in a purge of all homosexuals. The government had surveillance on all of us in the nation's capital. The police had a list of anyone who had ever had any homosexual connections. People were committing suicide upon being purged from the feds. It was illegal. People were being arrested. If you were a gay person, ask yourself, is there any other time in place you would ever have wanted to live except for now in the West?

And the answer is no. So can we please get some perspective? Can you please see that we are actually where we always wanted to be? That we now have the equality we long sought. Our predecessors would be amazed at what we've done. the idea that we should further corral, coerce, and lecture the whole world and how they have to do even more to acknowledge our existence. It's a form of narcissism that is self-defeating. It's a historical and it's an insult for the vast majority of gay people in the world.

But who are also affected by this? The more the extremists in the West push things like everyone. is trans and less proven otherwise or you don't think that that is being broadcast in Russia. You don't think that the extremes are being used to actually hurt gay people in other countries who are under much infinitely greater pressure than we are. I find it morally unsurious, to be honest with you, and a luxury belief. You know, I grew up in my 20s watching hundreds of thousands of thousands of my peers to die, agonizing difficult death.

We endured that. We saw things that I hope no one has to see. And the idea that today someone misgenders you and you're traumatized, it's an insult to those of us who actually went through real pain. And I am incredibly depressed by a younger gay generation that does not even acknowledge that contrast. And I'm, to be honest, fed up with it. Andrew, I've got a tremendous amount of sympathy for your position

because my family is South American. I have, there's a saying in my family, L'HPalises, as they're known. And there's a saying in my family whereby the palisasas, they're either gay or they're ugly, right? So we've got a lot of gay men in my family. I had a cousin who passed away from AIDS when I was nine years old. And this cousin of mine, we never said, he was, it's actually upset me now talking about it.

When he died, they said that he had throat cancer because they didn't want to say to the family that he died of AIDS. And I still, and even as a kid, I remember being angry because I felt that when he died, he died. died of shame because he couldn't even be honest about his death. So I've always had a tremendous amount of sympathy for gay movement, gay pride. And it's one of the things that gets me really angry because I just see how corporates have just jumped on this movement and co-opted it. And then at the same time, you know that they don't care because in the Middle East, they drop, you know, the rainbow flag from their logos. You know that FIFA don't care because they hold. You the World Cup in Qatar, and you just think, you know, that's disgusting. It's utterly disgusting.

Yeah. I don't want to in any way counter what you just said. I do remember in my adult lifetime that we were frustrated that no corporation would ever touch us. Yeah. So be careful what you ask for. And I think, but I, you know, part of what you. What has sustained gay people is our economic power. And insofar as our ability to buy and sell things can help integrate us into the community, then I don't have a huge issue with it. I agree with you that the idea that it's anything but utterly cynical on the part of these corporations is ludicrous. But also that they're more enthusiastic than many of us, these bloody flags.

I mean, please, can you stop the flags? I have no idea what all of them mean. We had something called a rainbow flag, which was excruciating enough. But the whole point of it was that it was a metaphor, including everyone. We weren't defending green gays and white gays and purple gays. It was a rainbow, right, a metaphor. Now they put this brown and black stripe in it to represent brown and black people. They have pink and blue in it to represent trans people.

It looks like a licorice old sort. And again, who? who determined that? Who the hell decided we all had to have this new flag? I didn't. It wasn't a vote. It's done by these organizations and they are captured by these activists and these activists have been captured by critical theory. And it's hard to push back, especially when you tribalize, you know, when you're a small community and someone says something hostile, or you perceive as hostile, even though it might just be a counter argument, your rights close. And you're, you, understand how that dynamic could occur. But I agree with you. More of us need to speak up.

Many of us are. And I think of Katie Herzog, for example, who's a fantastic lesbian. So I'm not totally gloomy because I think we're going to take our identity back. I don't want to take a movement back. As far as I'm concerned, the movement is done. We won our core rights. Our job now is to ask ourselves, what lies do you want to live? How do we as gay people contribute to our society? How can we recognize the great people that were gay in the past? These things, positive, constructive, contributive things, not this constant yelling of people who've already said yes.

It's as if these people cannot take yes for an answer. And we are in a much better place. And look, I've lived, I'm not that old, but I've lived through this extraordinary change. Does it make me depressed? I think we're going backwards right now, but I know how much further forwards we went. And we won, again, this is what they don't understand. We didn't win marriage equality by saying,

if you don't support us, you're a bigot. We actually made the arguments. I went out there, I went, I don't know how many people. I went to churches. I went to fundamentalist organizations. I went to Catholic universities. I went anywhere in what he asked me to make an argument respectfully. And you know, did that for a couple of decades,

and we persuaded the middle. and we won. And we should remember how we did that. We did not do that by hating on people. We did that by assuming good faith. And that also, you see, the other thing about this is that if you're really secure as a gay person, you're not constantly waging war on the world of everybody who might not be totally okay with you. You let it go.

it's the fundamentally insecure, the young and the activists who actually believe that they have some duty to do something that they cannot do because it's already done. I call this MLK envy. People always want to be the Martin Luther King Jr. of my generation. Well, sorry, but it's done. The Civil Rights Act is finished. You're too late. And you can invent other ways in which you think you're changing the world, but at this point, you're not. You're just coercing other people.

So let it go and get on with your life. What a beautiful message, Andrew. I'm so glad we had you on the show to talk about this aspect of things because it's not a position you hear very often. And I just think that is such a powerful way of looking at the world, not only in terms of the political issues that we talk about, but actually at the individual level. And it doesn't apply just to gay people. It applies to all of us. Like, you know, the book I've just written called An Immigrants Love Letter to the West, this is a point I'm trying to make to people. It's like, you've got, this is the best place ever to be alive.

and all we spend our time doing is complaining about how terrible everything is. It's mind-boggling. So I'm glad we've had you on. It's such a pleasure talking to you. As you know, the last question we always ask is what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be?

It's a very good question, and I've been trying to think of it since you started asking. Don't give away the sequence that we brief people. Oh, I'm sorry. No, it's joking. Everybody knows it. Everybody knows. I mean, I was immediately thinking I don't want to be too gay because this has been too gay anyway.

Too late. Too late, all right. Just going to have a rainbow flag on the cover of the thumbnail. Yeah. There is, this is something that people will not talk about. That there is a methamphetamine epidemic among gay men that is killing large numbers of gay men. It is the most hideous drug. It is taking people's lives away.

It is rampant. No one talks about it. Certainly the gay press barely talks about it. It's implicated in a whole bunch of things that you can see. I mean, for example, it's the real story of Matthew Shepard. Not that he was assaulted by two complete redneck strangers of hated gays, but he was assaulted by his own boyfriend who was on meth for five days. That makes much more sense of the situation than these other things.

But the ability and the need to suppress this reality because it's dirty laundry, because it's telling the truth about problems that we have, is not helping gay men either. And I really would like to see this treated with the seriousness it deserves. Andrew, why is it happening? I've not heard about this at all. I don't know if you have for us. You have. Well, maybe you're more informed than I am. But why is it happening? Why is it specifically in the gay community? It's a good question because there are other communities, for example. In America, it's very much a sort of working class white rural epidemic as well.

It's used in conjunction with sex. It's apparently a fantastic sort of experience temporarily when you're on this thing. You feel great and powerful and all the rest of it you have sex, but days on end. And people talk about that experience as super wonderful. And they can't go back to having sex without. it. I've just seen it destroy people. Friends, and it goes on. Everyone acknowledges it privately. It reminds me of the early days of AIDS in which people refused to actually acknowledge because they were scared that the facts of the matter would alienate people from gay people. Well, we are

alienating ourselves. We are committing suicide in a way as the community. And you can barely see a word written about it. And I think, again, it's partly the media's attempt, well meant, but cowardly, not to air dirty laundry about minorities, when in fact that dirty laundry needs to be aired in order to help minorities, in order to have minorities help themselves. So, for example, denying that in America that the terrible toll of violence on black people is something that is a function of white supremacy when it is clearly a function of criminals killing them is an important thing to remember. Infinitely more black Americans are killed by civilians than by cops, and yet we barely mention

the former and we obsess on the latter. And I'm not saying that killing by cops is something we should not be concerned about. We should. But the perspective is all skewed. Similarly, in terms of the... of where gay people are, instead of talking about the hatred other people have for us, which they generally don't, except for a few nutters, let's talk about how we can take care of ourselves.

What issues of self-esteem are still buried within us that makes it preferable to go on these drug benders than just get on with your life, building a relationship, or setting up a home or getting a productive career going. It happens to be a very potent drug, too, which seems to hook people very quickly and be incredibly hard to recover from. It has taken a real toll.

It's still going on. Andrew, thank you for bringing that up. There's not an issue that we've heard anyone else, Ray, so we really appreciate it. We're going to ask you a couple of questions from our local supporters that only they will get to see. But for now, thank you so much for joining us.

I read the weekly dish every week. It's a Monday. It comes in Monday, I think afternoon, my time. I really enjoy it. Recommend people check it out. Where else should people find you online? Well, the WikiDish is the most. I'm on Twitter, Sully Dish.

I have a book, a collection of my essays of the last 30 years, which came out in the US last year called Out on the Lim, which traces my writing for the last 30 years, from the first arguments of marriage equality through my arguments against trans extremism. But also, Obama, the entire play, political world. I'm not, I don't want people to think that I'm just a gay journalist. I do write about this topic, but primarily, I'm really in the thick of American political, cultural, and religious

discussion. So, but out in the limb gives you a sense of who I am and where I've been. It's on Amazon. Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure. Don't log off, because we'll ask you questions for our locals. And thank you for everyone watching. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. It's been absolutely brilliant. If you want to watch our episodes, they're available on Wednesdays and Sundays,

always coming out at 7pm in the UK time. Our raw shows are on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. I am now told by Critical Fulis that if I am not attracted to someone with a vagina, I'm a bigot.