Andrew Sullivan is a Brit by birth, but has made this his adopted country. He s become a U.S. citizen, and has been writing for publications like The New Republic and New York Magazine for years. Even though he s a conservative, and may have unorthodox views, Andrew has been fighting some culture wars for a long, long time, and is just brilliant in the way he approaches tough issues.
00:03:53.860And I think that's partly why I'm a little resistant to people's desire to totally transform it and also really protective of what makes it unique.
00:04:06.060I mean, I came here in 1984, a very long time ago, as a student.
00:04:15.880I remember telling my writing to my folks that, I know this sounds strange, but I feel like I've finally come home.
00:04:23.300And I think many Americans don't realize how special this place is, how the freedom, especially, to be who you are or want to be and to express yourself.
00:04:33.840But without constraints was always, for me, the most thrilling part of it.
00:04:39.240Now, Britain has a lively culture of free speech, but nothing like the United States.
00:04:43.840And it also had a structure of class and of assignment of people to various categories, upper, middle, lower, middle, upper, middle, upper, lower.
00:04:53.420It went on like that, in which everybody wanted to ask you, where are you from when you first arrived?
00:05:11.060And it always felt one had to justify oneself.
00:05:13.580And I got here, and I didn't feel I had to justify myself at all.
00:05:17.720In fact, people back in Britain would always ask me when I was doing something particularly enthusiastic or ambitious, who do you think you are?
00:05:27.140And in America, they just said, good for you.
00:05:30.880And I know that sounds very simple, but that energy, that individualism, that dynamism, that's what I love about this country.
00:05:40.340And also, I came to understand its constitution, its separation of church and state, its brilliant dispersal of power.
00:05:49.400It struck me as an incredibly vital political model, and I fell in love with it and tried to become a citizen for a long time.
00:05:58.940And HIV prevented me for quite a while, and then eventually they lifted that, and I was able to become an American.
00:06:43.760But it acted as a kind of threat to people with HIV who weren't citizens.
00:06:49.060And I lived in considerable tension and nerves and worry that they might attempt to get rid of me.
00:06:55.740And so finally making it was a real achievement for me, and it took a long time.
00:07:03.340But I love this place a lot, and I wanted to belong to it fully.
00:07:07.100Well, thank God those days are past when Jesse Helms was issuing policy on gay rights and, you know, what it takes to be and make an American.
00:07:18.120And to his credit, George W. ended the ban.
00:07:24.140I mean, it was the end of his term, but he put it in the PEPFAR legislation.
00:07:30.420And so Bush himself actually ended that immigration restriction, for which I'm immensely grateful.
00:07:36.060You know, I wanted to start with that because I think you and I are very similar on this in that we love America.
00:07:44.380And one of the things we love about it, as you mentioned, is the ability to say what you want here, to have the opinions and viewpoints you want, and to express them freely, both as an individual and as a member of the press.
00:07:57.040And the truth is, there are people fighting against that right now.
00:08:02.840There are people pushing the country toward what I consider to be a very dark turn.
00:08:08.120You know, the woke left, the people who are trying to silence marginalized voices or heterodox voices or any voice that's not a far left progressive.
00:08:18.440I mean, liberals, moderates, conservatives, they're all being silenced.
00:08:21.080Most people don't feel comfortable expressing their views.
00:08:24.660The only ones who do are the progressives.
00:08:25.980I know you've pointed that out and like sort of the left, left progressives.
00:08:29.880But I know you think that you wrote that you felt they were dealt an astonishing rebuke in the last election.
00:08:38.720The striking thing for me, Megan, I don't know whether this is true for you, but the election results really surprised me in the way that they seem to have surprised the president, which is that we were expecting a big wave of some sort.
00:08:51.420That's what the polling suggested, an eight point lead for Biden in most cases, which ended up being something like four.
00:08:59.320But what was also interesting was that the Republicans did pretty well, actually.
00:09:07.080They're probably almost certainly going to retain the Senate, that people turned out to be actually quite supportive of the police, not least minorities who need the police to be protected.
00:09:19.500That the notion that this country right now, this multicultural, chaotic, amazing, diverse place is somehow the equivalent of a KKK run white supremacy, which is now literally the words used by people to describe America in 2020.
00:09:38.160Most people don't buy it, and when they were actually given a chance to affirm some of those left ideas, such as in California, where there was a proposal to enable the government to discriminate on the basis of race, it went down in flames.
00:09:55.940You saw after four years of what we were told was white supremacy, that non-white votes for Republicans actually increased.
00:10:04.040What you found was that people, believe it or not, despite their, or whatever their identity, have ideas of their own, and they have views, and they're not all identical.
00:10:16.800Latinos, as a bloc, is a kind of dumb idea.
00:10:21.200It's, in fact, very diverse, rather like the old immigrants from Italy or Ireland or Poland or Germany.
00:10:30.320Yes, they have similarities, but they're also extremely different in their background.
00:10:34.040And we see in many Latino voters a wide variety of opinions, including those who really don't like illegal immigration, including those who want to assimilate, want to integrate, want to succeed in America, and have quite traditional American ideas, want to actually be part of this melting pot, as I want to.
00:10:57.320And so there was really, you realize that a lot of this notion that we live in this oppressive, racist society is entirely something concocted in the heads of very wealthy left liberals.
00:11:09.760And in reality, although obviously in every society, prejudice exists, bias exists, racism exists, but America actually is a story of overcoming of that rather than the entrenchment of it.
00:11:23.420And as someone who, you know, in my lifetime here, my adult lifetime here, I went from a country where I was barred for HIV, where I was, if I had a relationship, it would actually be criminal in the district of Columbia when I came in here.
00:11:37.820And when you came in as an immigrant in the 80s until 91, you had to declare that you were neither a communist nor a homosexual.
00:11:45.080And through campaigning and writing and talking and thinking and persuading within a quarter of a century, we have a revolution in civil rights for gay people and the centering of gay people once again into our own families and our communities.
00:12:00.960And a country that can do that in a quarter of a century that can go at that speed and also arrive at a settlement about it, including marriage equality.
00:12:10.300I mean, that is not a country that is a function of bigotry.
00:12:22.180It's a diverse and open country that has resistance to change and also support for it.
00:12:27.980So I can't personally, in my own experience, coming here and seeing that change, believe in intransigence intolerance that the left wants to argue is the reality of America.
00:12:41.340And so when I see things like the 1619 Project or I see things, the rhetoric that we now hear among critical theorists of the permanence of oppression in America, my feeling is, of course, there's elements of discrimination.
00:12:56.460There's elements of challenge for particular minorities.
00:12:59.940You'll always feel a little out of it if you're a tiny minority.
00:13:02.980But the story is the success, not the failure.
00:13:06.840And I think that that implicit argument that America is failing you, that America is systemically racist and bigoted, which is something people didn't buy and people among the minorities themselves didn't buy.
00:13:21.060And they were willing to think about other issues and get out of their identity trap.
00:13:24.800I know you wrote that that the election revealed the New York Times woke narrative of America, the centuries long suffocating oppression of minorities and women by cis white straight men is simply a niche elite belief invented at a bubble academy imposed by bullying, shaming and, if possible, firing dissenters.
00:13:46.760And I do think it's a problem, though, when you have you have these groups like the New York Times repeatedly pushing that narrative.
00:13:55.520And and I when I saw those results, too, of, you know, the Republican Party, Trump, of all people, increasing his share of minority votes beyond what any Republican has gotten.
00:14:06.260And it really did feel like them, the voters themselves having the last say they may not get on the pages of The New York Times or on CNN that that CNN won't put on people like Coleman Hughes, who's a he's a liberal, but he's not woke.
00:14:21.200But he's been speaking out against BLM as a black man in America.
00:14:25.760He doesn't buy their their narrative about cops.
00:14:29.240So anyway, folks had their say at the ballot box, which is really the best the best way to have it.
00:14:35.960No, Trump didn't win, but they kept divided government.
00:14:47.100I suspect that they're not listening, although there has.
00:14:50.760There's been a little bit of a sort of withdrawal since there hasn't been many aggressive attempts to defend that position since, given the results of the election.
00:14:59.680I mean, some of us have taken a certain amount of I wouldn't quite call it glee, but certain satisfaction in seeing their vision of the world kind of just fracture upon reality.
00:15:09.620But, you know, the conservative, the proper conservative is always waiting for reality to assert itself.
00:15:14.980And the reality of America is that we don't live in a brutal, oppressive country.
00:15:21.140We did, however, I think for four years, and this is important to note, have a president who really didn't believe it, didn't have a real understanding of what liberal constitutional democracy is.
00:15:33.060And he's currently proving that he still has no idea and has done immense damage to a whole variety of democratic norms that required, I believe, as a conservative, strong pushback.
00:15:50.560Conservatism does not want to destroy our institutions.
00:15:54.100Conservatism doesn't want to uproot everything we have long believed in.
00:15:59.040It believes, actually, in continuity, in gradual change, in moving in tune with the times that are never ahead of them, always slightly a little bit behind, in case we make mistakes and we do things that turn out to be completely foolish, as we have done and as humans always will.
00:16:16.820So, I do feel that there needed to be a conservative resistance to Trumpism, and I was happy and proud to do that.
00:16:42.420There's something almost uniquely fitting about Biden right now, and he has changed himself.
00:16:50.700He is not the Biden I remember, the garrulous, constantly blathering, somewhat incoherent, overly passionate, gaff-prone man with logorrhea, diarrhea of the mouth most of the time.
00:17:05.660And now he's become this sort of, like, this sort of rather statuesque, elderly figure.
00:20:41.420Well, I kind of enjoyed it at the beginning.
00:20:45.120I think a certain amount of tweaking this absurd person is definitely worth doing.
00:20:52.440And I also felt they had a sort of killer instinct that often Democrats and lefties don't really have in terms of political advertising.
00:21:00.380But over time, I don't know, it felt like they were running it a little thin.
00:21:04.960And they seem to miss, I think, the challenge, which is that if you are a traditional conservative, if you believe in limited government, if you believe in prudence, if you believe in liberal democracy and its norms and procedures, if you believe in gradual change, then you're not eventually going to become a cheerleader for the left, which is what the Lincoln Project, I think, eventually became.
00:21:30.460And there's a kind of weird moment where people who were on the right, who reacted to Trump, I think, in the right way, in the instinctually right way over time, found it impossible to stay where they were as moderate conservatives and were pulled by the sheer power of tribal loyalty into somewhat parodic left wing ideas and left wing language.
00:21:54.220I think, I mean, I'm thinking now, I don't want to be rude to people, but Jen Rubin, for example, I find almost indistinguishable now from a hardcore lefty.
00:22:04.320Max Boot just seemed to, didn't just chuck some things, but chuck everything that he once believed.
00:22:09.820And look, it's hard in this tribal movement.
00:22:22.100It has been hard because you tend to be without friends and without support to stick to a rather moderate conservative position, which I feel I've always held.
00:22:31.760I don't think I've changed that much except on foreign policy.
00:22:34.900And yet not be tempted to become a resistance crazy.
00:22:40.580I think I, in some ways, overreacted to some of Trump's seemingly authoritarian moves because I didn't realize that he was actually, even though he might want to, he was kind of incapable of being an effective authoritarian, simply by virtue of his haphazard management style, which is really not a management style at all.
00:23:01.180But I didn't jump into wokeness like a lot of these other people did.
00:23:05.600I didn't jump into support of the Democratic Party.
00:23:08.800I found it important to double down on resistance to the way the left was exploiting the polarization that Trump represented.
00:23:20.080And I'm not patting myself on the back, but I think the truth is that retain a nuanced position in a tribal world means that you're subjected, especially with social media now, to vilification of such constancy and viciousness that you're tempted to say,
00:23:37.660Oh, screw it, I will, I will just, I'll just utter this, these tribal slogans or the other.
00:23:42.480And I, I managed to piss off all the Trumpies.
00:23:46.620And I also obviously seem to be a figure of real hatred by the woke left, especially the younger generation that regards me as some kind of Nazi.
00:24:01.520It's hard to wake up every day and be who you think you are and write arguments and be called a white supremacist or a racist or a misogynist.
00:24:10.320Um, as if these were terms you just tossed off in the wind and they're not true.
00:24:17.420But I think the weapon of broadcasting calumny against individuals across social media has been a very effective bullying tool, not just on the left, but also on the right, in which people who are Republicans or conservatives have stood up or at some point disagreed with Trump and been torn apart instantly by the right-wing machines.
00:24:43.120And, and, and, and I think it just requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to resist that.
00:24:50.440It's hard to explain what it's like to write columns every week and have them constantly have to fight for every word to, uh, to have them say what you want them really to say.
00:25:02.360Because your, your, your peers, often not your editors, because the editors are often kind of saying great people, certainly at New York Magazine they are, but the staffers and the social media on this, they are, they, they have one goal to destroy you.
00:25:19.120And I understand why that can become incredibly difficult to tolerate.
00:25:23.840Yeah. I think you're right that there's, I know you've pointed out that there's sort of this crude moral binary that the woke left has created where, you know, you're either a good person or a bad person.
00:25:36.520You're either a racist or an anti-racist.
00:25:38.740There's really no, there's no room for the complicated nature of human beings and the different value placed on different, I don't know, things in your life.
00:25:52.180You know, we were talking about this last week when, or right before the election, when Sonny Hostin and The View was suggesting, how could anybody not, not vote against Trump?
00:26:01.260If you vote, if you vote for Trump, it means you don't care about his bigotry, his racism, his sexism, his transphobic nature, all that stuff.
00:26:10.160And I was sort of laughing about it on the show saying, that's so absurd.
00:26:13.200Why can't it just be that, you know, some guy who works in the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania was worried about putting food on the table?
00:26:20.460Why does he have to have exactly the same values and the exact same priorities as Sonny Hostin does?
00:26:26.620Especially when their view, their core view is that this whole place is a function of bigotry.
00:26:34.040Or you're, you know, you're a first generation Honduran immigrant who's legal, who really doesn't want all this massive illegal competition for your job.
00:26:43.520That's, that's not, that's, that's a completely legitimate and, and, and eternal view of first generation immigrants.
00:26:51.160People want to also create your identity in such a crude way.
00:26:55.820I mean, so I'm slotted into, at this point, the, the white cis.
00:27:00.780That's, I'm, I'm gay men, by the way, at this point are certainly not the oppressed, according to these people.
00:27:05.380We are, we are part of the oppressors, especially if we are, God help us, white.
00:27:12.840Um, you know, I have a religious faith which might make me think about, uh, moral issues, uh, that are slightly different than people on the left.
00:27:22.360I might have an economic view of the world which isn't that compatible with Bernie leftism.
00:27:28.800I might have a whole range of personal experience, unique to me, that make me vote a certain way.
00:27:37.960I still believe in the old liberal, classical liberal idea that in a democracy you make your arguments for your case and you back it up with evidence and you see if those arguments work.
00:27:50.560And if they don't, you change your mind.
00:27:52.280Whereas this current view is that you're permanently placed, you have what they call positionality, which is that whether you like it or not, whatever is in your head, you are defined by one salient aspect of your identity.
00:28:09.600And that is then, what is inferred from that is a completely monolithic political view.
00:28:17.500And as you point out, now there's a hierarchy of whose views matter the most.
00:28:21.680So in an attempt to sort of reposition this, the powers, uh, uh, the structure of power in the, in the country, they've, they've morphed into a new kind of racism, a new kind of sexism.
00:28:32.860As you point out, where the last thing you want to be as a white male.
00:28:35.980Now, I remember talking to a guy at my school, a great guy, and we were talking about some of the problems that we were seeing there with the, you know, sort of this far left ideology being pushed on kids.
00:28:44.760And I was making my points and he was making his points and they were all the same points.
00:28:48.780And he said, well, you know, you're lucky.
00:28:53.280I thought, oh my God, that's so crazy that he feels accurately, by the way, that his viewpoint will be valued less by, in this case, school administrators, because he happens to be a white guy.
00:29:09.580No, when you think of, you think of our notion of the far right, you know, they have these odious notions that people who are white men are at the top of this racial hierarchy and have been empowered to rule over other races and other genders.
00:29:26.160And there's a hierarchy of white men, white women, blah, blah, blah, it goes all the way down.
00:29:30.600And, well, what is wokeness except exactly that, but just turned on its head?
00:29:36.620And wokeness is in which white male are always the bottom, the people most despised.
00:29:42.380And on the far right, it's there always at the top.
00:29:45.860They don't even begin to see that they are copying the worst kinds of bigotry that they claim to be opposing.
00:29:55.520If you are woke, you have to, first of all, whenever you encounter someone, immediately view them as black, white, male, female, cis, trans, gay, straight, or LGBTQ, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, or whatever number of consonants we've added.
00:30:35.960You don't know their happiness or their success.
00:30:39.420And treating people as individuals is, for me, a moral non-negotiable.
00:30:45.180I mean, it's what a Christian is demanded to do, not to see the surface identity, but to see the individual soul and to feel compassion and solidarity of that person as another human being.
00:31:14.040And I'm like, well, it does matter when all major corporations have internalized this as part of their human resources.
00:31:21.040When the media is run by people who believe that, in fact, this free discourse of ideas is bullshit, that it's all a mask for the power of the white males, et cetera, to control others, and therefore must write everything with a view to dismantling and deconstructing that power.
00:31:45.980That is a core assumption of this ideology.
00:31:49.100And it is completely soaking our culture.
00:31:53.100I mean, you know, the News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's corporation, is having, throughout the same time, the place he used to work for, Megan, is having struggle sessions around race.
00:32:06.280There's no conservative institution that is immune from this.
00:32:24.740And the inability to see human beings, as my therapist always says when we talk about these issues, whether it's, you know, sexuality or gender or race, people are complicated.
00:32:48.240The knee-jerked jerk willingness to demonize people for having, quote, the wrong views as opposed to embracing different viewpoints and debating them, which is inherently American.
00:33:05.400And not only that, for people who actually do misstep, you know, somebody who says something bad, who uses a bad word, who, you know, sort of has an offensive moment, there's no forgiveness.
00:33:33.820And they want us to sit back and be quiet about it.
00:33:36.680But meanwhile, it's like, well, I might sit here and be quiet if you didn't just, you know, I got back to New York City after quarantine and they took a billion dollars away from the police department that's supposed to protect my family and my neighborhood based on a lie that was pushed by the BLM folks that cops are hunting black men in the streets, which isn't true.
00:33:54.280Not to say that no reform would be welcome, but they're the whole purpose of their movement, which is to defund police, is based on a lie.
00:34:02.940And if you're going to take a billion dollars away from the police department that's meant to protect my community, my friends, my children, I get a say.
00:34:11.160I get to speak up and it doesn't make me a bad person.
00:34:22.420You know, I mean, I don't want them to demonize them.
00:34:24.580I want them to engage them and rebut them or something else.
00:34:28.560What I don't like is demonizing me as a human being.
00:34:31.300I don't like being demonized because I hold these, not because I hold these views, because I'm a white, male, cis, gay man who is expressing these views.
00:34:44.080If I was someone else in a different identity, it would be okay.
00:34:48.640And that is, you know, Ayanna Pressley had this awful quote, which said, we don't want any black faces without black voices.
00:34:56.800We don't want any Muslim faces without Muslim voices.
00:35:00.600We don't want anyone in these minority communities to think for themselves or to dispute this ideology.
00:35:08.820And they're able to intimidate people a lot.
00:35:12.680They're able to bully us because they're claiming the high ground.
00:35:16.780But in fact, they don't really persuade.
00:36:11.520But in fact, it is complicated, as your therapist puts it.
00:36:16.540And the gay world is just as politically diverse.
00:36:20.940Well, not quite as politically diverse as outside, but definitely has a whole range of opinion.
00:36:25.920Much of which really is quite resistant to wokeness.
00:36:30.880And especially the gay white men who have pioneered, ran and funded a lot of this movement, being told that you're evil by the people you're paying gets to be a little much after a while.
00:36:44.620And there's also a sense that you can't ever accept success.
00:36:49.640You can't ever take yes for an answer.
00:36:51.220I mean, gay people have had an astonishing ride the last quarter of a century for incredible pain and suffering, but also extraordinary redemption and success.
00:37:02.240We just had, this summer, a Trump-nominated Supreme Court justice give and write gays and transgender people into the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
00:37:14.620Well, no wonder some gays decided that we weren't that oppressed anymore.
00:37:19.820Maybe they could take their eyes off that ball and think about other things like their personal well-being or their views of foreign policy or their understanding of immigration or these other issues.
00:37:32.420Well, but no, as that happens, as you gain power, I mean, it's true for women, too.
00:37:55.140Gay men, well, you've gotten so powerful, you're out of the minority club, and if you don't continue to fight for other minority groups, then you're a traitor and you're now a big, I mean, it's like, at some point, the argument falls apart that maybe people just have different priorities and maybe they don't see the country in as awful terms as you do.
00:38:12.880Yeah, and the truth is, it's not like gay men who have not fought for other people's rights.
00:38:24.640There are a few small issues around transgender people that we need to figure out, but we've come a long way in that.
00:38:31.140I mean, who are they to call us not progressive?
00:38:34.180I mean, I probably, I mean, I don't want to toot my own horn, but I was working for marriage equality since the 1980s and 90s.
00:38:41.300And marriage equality is not for gay white men.
00:38:44.280In many ways, gay white men were the people with the resources and the means to come up with elaborate legal documents that could protect their relationships.
00:39:15.220Well, unless you believe America's awful and systemically awful, then, you know, they see you as continuously bigoted yourself.
00:39:22.580I know that, by the way, the audience should know that you were calling for marriage equality long before anybody was seriously calling for it.
00:39:32.920I mean, you were writing about it and pioneering it at a time when people were like, ha ha, that's cute or crazy.
00:39:49.500I've been openly HIV positive since 1996.
00:39:54.120You know, again, people are complicated.
00:39:58.060Putting me in the position of some oppressor who's never done anything or cared about anyone other than myself, which is the general line, it's just you get used to it.
00:40:14.880And then, of course, the actual machinations to get rid of you, to put pressure on your editors, wherever you're working, to fire you, not for anything you've done wrong, insofar as you haven't made a huge mistake in your work.
00:40:36.660You haven't written something crappy, you haven't written something crappy, you can't get your pieces read, but because you're simply unacceptable.
00:40:44.600And, you know, I was asked to leave New York Magazine.
00:40:48.960The following week, they ran an 8,000-word piece from me about plagues through history.
00:40:55.640So it wasn't about the quality of my work.
00:40:59.580It was about their desire, not the editors again, but other people's, their desire to just simply say, I don't want to be associated with this person, that he's morally awful.
00:41:12.240And, you know, America's weird like this.
00:41:13.620It's a part of American history that Americans have tended to enforce orthodoxy through civil society, not through government.
00:41:20.880So this is the country that gave us the Salem witch trials.
00:41:23.900It's the country that gave us the Hollywood blacklist.
00:41:28.260It's the country that gave us the scarlet letter.
00:41:31.160It's the country that gave us McCarthyism.
00:41:34.880And it's the country that's given us wokeness.
00:41:38.500These are attempts to enforce morality upon people in every part of their life, the language they use, the mannerisms they have, the places they work.
00:41:49.460This is a deep puritanical strain within American history, which is not the equivalent in many other countries.
00:41:56.720This moralizing attempt to persuade and coerce and to save your fellow citizens.
00:42:02.900If America were as bad as the establishment left now believes, why would all these people want to come here?
00:42:13.220Why would all this 86% of our immigration is non-white at this point?
00:42:18.600That's a huge, I mean, what white supremacy invites 86% of its immigrants to be non-white?
00:42:43.680And also we're going to talk about solutions to this nonsense when it comes to the wokesters and how regular folks can fight back, folks without a microphone, because there are meaningful things you can do as well.
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00:43:59.820Once your mail is ready, you just schedule a pickup or you drop it off.
01:05:30.520The idea that he doesn't have to send anyone to report to to follow a congressional subpoena,
01:05:37.100the idea that he can simply switch funding depending on what he feels like, that he can
01:05:42.580declare national emergencies fakely if he wants to if he wants to build a border wall that
01:05:50.200he never figured out how to build in the first place.
01:05:52.540The way in which he treated the system, challenging everything legally and constitutionally, really assuming the presidency is, as he put it, you know, a place where he can do whatever I want.
01:13:13.240And we do that on a one-to-one personal basis.
01:13:16.100Again, you need to just question these notions of systems that have really been invented in the minds, certainly originally, of French intellectuals that you don't have to accept as a regular American in regular American society.
01:13:42.400But stare them in the eyes and tell them, I don't believe it.
01:13:45.820But I think particularly those of us in institutions where freedom of thought is important, the universities, the media, journalism in general, we have to start fighting back aggressively.
01:13:57.680And in doing that, we can focus on the specific reality that they're describing, which is, in fact, just a fantasy, just an ideology to make themselves feel more powerful than they actually are.
01:14:11.280Well, I think people need to remember it's also not lawful for them to discriminate against you because of the color of your skin, because of your gender, because of your sexuality.
01:14:24.200And so if accused, based on those things, which are immutable characteristics, you have a leg to stand on, too.
01:14:32.240It's not right to demonize a guy just because he's a white male.
01:14:37.760If you were a young Asian American kid, first generation, parents didn't speak English, and you got into a good university through high grades, don't let them tell you you can't go there because of the color of your skin.
01:14:54.320And look, in California, they had this new proposal.
01:14:59.020Every left-wing organization supported it.
01:15:01.500It was to reimpose affirmative action.
01:15:05.060And in the most liberal state in America, a majority-minority state, it went down in flames, even though it was massively funded as well.
01:15:14.320People come to America, especially minorities, because they believe in the individual, they believe in hard work, they believe in things like merit, and they believe in things like fairness and non-discrimination.
01:15:27.060Understand that this new ideology is a form of race discrimination.
01:17:15.960And it keeps growing, and it's proof, I think, that people will respond to individual writers who are just telling the truth as they see it.
01:17:27.740People are hungry for thinking outside of the current boxes.
01:17:32.900They're really eager to think more deeply about some of these issues in ways that the current orthodoxies prevent.
01:17:39.500And what I'm trying to do is create a space, just like the old liberal media, in which there is a clear diversity of opinion, in which I grapple with alternative arguments, in which I have podcasts with people I disagree with, and in which we begin to re-energize and re-discover the fun, the exuberance of debate, different ideas.
01:18:04.320Not telling you you can't be part of this because you're white, black, male, whatever, but saying anybody can say this as long as your arguments make sense.
01:18:13.160If they don't make sense, we'll rip them apart.
01:18:15.820But if they do, we'll give you credit.
01:18:41.440And I think that the seriousness and the glumness and the authoritarian dullness of the current conversation really, if you have something new to say, get out there and you'll find an audience.
01:18:55.860And increasingly, I think you're going to have a mainstream media that is increasingly dull and uniform and left liberal and the beginnings of an alternative media landscape where all sorts of people are popping up, where talent really has its day.
01:19:10.800And where we can rebuild liberal democracy from the ground up.
01:19:15.860The key thing, I think, and it's hard, is to be a model of this, is not to get defensive, not to get offensive, but to be open and with conviction and showing openly the ability that you yourself can be persuaded by a better argument if you have it, if they have it.
01:19:42.700I'm so grateful for you helping me get the word out about it.
01:19:47.020And yeah, I was cancelled by the right in the early 2000s because of my turn on the Iraq war and my hostility to torture.
01:19:57.040And I've been cancelled by the left and I'm still here.
01:20:02.420So, you know, I think it's what Winston Churchill once said, that there's nothing more exhilarating than being shot at and not getting hit.
01:20:10.720And that's how I see myself in a way, with a determination also to enjoy democracy, not be so dour about it and also so extreme about it.
01:20:29.260I'll tell you something in exchange that in the mornings I get a bunch of different newsletters sent to me by different journalists.
01:20:36.380It's, you know, sort of one of the things people are doing now is putting together the news and mailing it to you.
01:20:40.720And one of the people in my inbox is Katie Couric, who I know a little.
01:20:45.600And I read her newsletter and it had little synopses of things in the news and it had very cheery, positive, like, here's my interview with Nicole Kidman about the undoing, which I did look at because I was into that show.
01:20:59.280So I thought I had a moment reading the newsletter thinking, you know, this, this, this is a path I could have taken where I send in the cheery newsletter, synopsizing news and sort of, I don't know, just interviewing people like Nicole Kidman and doing that kind of thing.
01:21:18.120And I think the truth is, I'm much more like you.