The Megyn Kelly Show - Andrew Sullivan on America, the Media, and Fighting for Freedom ｜ Ep. 33

00:00:00.440 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.220 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:14.580 Today on the program we've got Andrew Sullivan, journalist, commentator, and all-around brilliant guy.

00:00:22.300 He is a Brit by birth, but has made this his adopted country.

00:00:26.820 He's become a U.S. citizen, and he has been writing for publications like The New Republic and New York Magazine for years,

00:00:34.900 even though he's a conservative and may have some unorthodox conservative views,

00:00:40.320 but has been sort of fighting some culture wars for a long, long time and is just brilliant in the way he approaches tough issues.

00:00:47.820 He was pushed out of New York Magazine not long ago,

00:00:51.340 is having similar problems to those, I'd say, experienced by Glenn Greenwald, by Matt Taibbi and others, Barry Weiss,

00:00:59.240 where his views didn't necessarily align with the wokesters at his company, and he effectively got pushed out.

00:01:08.020 And now, in a happy end of the rainbow story, he's killing it on Substack.

00:01:13.600 So if you want to subscribe to him directly and help make him uncancellable, which he pretty much already is,

00:01:18.760 you can check him out there.

00:01:20.020 But I think you're going to appreciate the interview because he's at the place now where he really can say anything about anything,

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00:03:00.280 And now a man with whom I have had some public battles in the past, but with whom I have much more in common than I do not in common.

00:03:08.220 He is the founding editor and co-owner of The Weekly Dish on Substack and also host of The Dish Cast, Andrew Sullivan.

00:03:17.320 Thank you so much for being here.

00:03:21.100 You're so welcome, Megan.

00:03:22.160 It's a great pleasure.

00:03:23.540 Okay, so let's start with this.

00:03:24.880 We are about a week out from Thanksgiving.

00:03:28.080 And I don't know about you, but I've been thinking about our country a lot lately.

00:03:32.100 Just through this podcast, through the election, and always at Thanksgiving when you think about what you're thankful for.

00:03:38.700 I know that you became an American citizen in 2016.

00:03:43.380 You were born in England.

00:03:44.860 So what are you thankful for when it comes to this country?

00:03:49.660 What do you still love about America?

00:03:51.940 Oh, so much, Megan.

00:03:53.860 And 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.

00:04:06.060 I mean, I came here in 1984, a very long time ago, as a student.

00:04:12.080 And I fell in love within weeks.

00:04:15.880 I remember telling my writing to my folks that, I know this sounds strange, but I feel like I've finally come home.

00:04:23.300 And 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.

00:04:33.840 But without constraints was always, for me, the most thrilling part of it.

00:04:39.240 Now, Britain has a lively culture of free speech, but nothing like the United States.

00:04:43.840 And it also had a structure of class and of assignment of people to various categories, upper, middle, lower, middle, upper, middle, upper, lower.

00:04:53.420 It went on like that, in which everybody wanted to ask you, where are you from when you first arrived?

00:04:59.700 They needed to put you somewhere.

00:05:01.100 And especially someone like me, who came from a pretty modest, low, middle class kind of background and got myself into Oxford.

00:05:07.960 That was a constant theme.

00:05:11.060 And it always felt one had to justify oneself.

00:05:13.580 And I got here, and I didn't feel I had to justify myself at all.

00:05:17.720 In fact, people back in Britain would always ask me when I was doing something particularly enthusiastic or ambitious, who do you think you are?

00:05:27.140 And in America, they just said, good for you.

00:05:30.880 And I know that sounds very simple, but that energy, that individualism, that dynamism, that's what I love about this country.

00:05:40.340 And also, I came to understand its constitution, its separation of church and state, its brilliant dispersal of power.

00:05:49.400 It 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.

00:05:58.940 And HIV prevented me for quite a while, and then eventually they lifted that, and I was able to become an American.

00:06:04.800 Is that right?

00:06:05.340 There was a restriction on folks who are HIV positive from becoming American citizens?

00:06:09.180 Yes.

00:06:10.340 I didn't know that.

00:06:12.620 For many years.

00:06:14.060 No, people didn't.

00:06:15.980 1993 to 2011, I think, is the time.

00:06:20.420 Yes.

00:06:20.900 And, of course, people with HIV didn't want to protest it because they were kind of private about their health.

00:06:27.120 And it was invented by Jesse Helms.

00:06:30.360 It's the only disease actually to be legislatively put in to immigration law to prevent anyone with it.

00:06:37.560 And, of course, it was not enforceable.

00:06:39.340 How do you test everybody to come off a plane from anywhere in the country?

00:06:42.740 You can't.

00:06:43.760 But it acted as a kind of threat to people with HIV who weren't citizens.

00:06:49.060 And I lived in considerable tension and nerves and worry that they might attempt to get rid of me.

00:06:55.740 And so finally making it was a real achievement for me, and it took a long time.

00:07:03.340 But I love this place a lot, and I wanted to belong to it fully.

00:07:07.100 Well, 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.

00:07:18.120 And to his credit, George W. ended the ban.

00:07:23.380 He didn't.

00:07:24.140 I mean, it was the end of his term, but he put it in the PEPFAR legislation.

00:07:30.420 And so Bush himself actually ended that immigration restriction, for which I'm immensely grateful.

00:07:36.060 You know, I wanted to start with that because I think you and I are very similar on this in that we love America.

00:07:44.380 And 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.

00:07:57.040 And the truth is, there are people fighting against that right now.

00:08:02.840 There are people pushing the country toward what I consider to be a very dark turn.

00:08:08.120 You 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.

00:08:18.440 I mean, liberals, moderates, conservatives, they're all being silenced.

00:08:21.080 Most people don't feel comfortable expressing their views.

00:08:24.660 The only ones who do are the progressives.

00:08:25.980 I know you've pointed that out and like sort of the left, left progressives.

00:08:29.880 But I know you think that you wrote that you felt they were dealt an astonishing rebuke in the last election.

00:08:37.460 How so?

00:08:38.720 The 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.

00:08:51.420 That's what the polling suggested, an eight point lead for Biden in most cases, which ended up being something like four.

00:08:59.320 But what was also interesting was that the Republicans did pretty well, actually.

00:09:05.000 I mean, they gained in the House.

00:09:07.080 They'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.

00:09:19.500 That 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.

00:09:38.160 Most 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.

00:09:55.940 You saw after four years of what we were told was white supremacy, that non-white votes for Republicans actually increased.

00:10:04.040 What 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. 0.99

00:10:16.800 Latinos, as a bloc, is a kind of dumb idea. 0.98

00:10:21.200 It's, in fact, very diverse, rather like the old immigrants from Italy or Ireland or Poland or Germany. 0.99

00:10:30.320 Yes, they have similarities, but they're also extremely different in their background.

00:10:34.040 And 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.

00:10:57.320 And 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.

00:11:09.760 And 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.

00:11:23.420 And 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.

00:11:37.820 And 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.

00:11:45.080 And 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.

00:12:00.960 And 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.

00:12:10.300 I mean, that is not a country that is a function of bigotry.

00:12:14.280 It just isn't.

00:12:15.520 It's not a country that's white supremacist.

00:12:18.080 It's not a country that's homophobic.

00:12:22.180 It's a diverse and open country that has resistance to change and also support for it.

00:12:27.980 So 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.

00:12:41.340 And 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.

00:12:56.460 There's elements of challenge for particular minorities.

00:12:59.940 You'll always feel a little out of it if you're a tiny minority.

00:13:02.980 But the story is the success, not the failure.

00:13:06.840 And 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.

00:13:21.060 And they were willing to think about other issues and get out of their identity trap.

00:13:24.800 I 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.

00:13:46.760 And I do think it's a problem, though, when you have you have these groups like the New York Times repeatedly pushing that narrative.

00:13:55.520 And 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.

00:14:06.260 And 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.

00:14:21.200 But he's been speaking out against BLM as a black man in America.

00:14:25.760 He doesn't buy their their narrative about cops.

00:14:29.240 So anyway, folks had their say at the ballot box, which is really the best the best way to have it.

00:14:35.960 No, Trump didn't win, but they kept divided government.

00:14:39.200 He increased his share.

00:14:40.740 And the question now is really, will they listen?

00:14:44.740 I know what I think.

00:14:47.100 I suspect that they're not listening, although there has.

00:14:50.760 There'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.

00:14:59.680 I 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.

00:15:09.620 But, you know, the conservative, the proper conservative is always waiting for reality to assert itself.

00:15:14.980 And the reality of America is that we don't live in a brutal, oppressive country.

00:15:21.140 We 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.

00:15:33.060 And 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.

00:15:47.200 Conservatism is not populism.

00:15:50.560 Conservatism does not want to destroy our institutions.

00:15:54.100 Conservatism doesn't want to uproot everything we have long believed in.

00:15:59.040 It 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.

00:16:16.820 So, I do feel that there needed to be a conservative resistance to Trumpism, and I was happy and proud to do that.

00:16:26.260 I didn't vote for him.

00:16:27.140 I never could.

00:16:27.900 I never would.

00:16:29.460 But I voted for Biden with the sort of queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach about the people who might come in with him.

00:16:36.180 But, you know, Biden, I wonder whether anybody else in the Democratic Party would have won that election.

00:16:41.660 I really do.

00:16:42.420 There's something almost uniquely fitting about Biden right now, and he has changed himself.

00:16:50.700 He 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.

00:17:05.660 And now he's become this sort of, like, this sort of rather statuesque, elderly figure.

00:17:10.120 Oh, boy.

00:17:10.700 Who represents – that's what he's come to represent.

00:17:14.900 Statuesque!

00:17:15.380 I'm being polite here, but yes, he's kind of – come on.

00:17:19.320 He's – for someone his age, he's amazingly fit and lean and quiet.

00:17:28.260 I mean, that's –

00:17:28.980 That's because they stuffed him in his basement and wouldn't let him out for a year.

00:17:32.940 He was saying things to just no one was listening because he was down on the beanbag in the basement with his Diet Coke.

00:17:38.340 No, I'm joking because –

00:17:39.540 No, he wasn't saying much at all.

00:17:40.480 He was gaff-prone.

00:17:41.540 Like, I couldn't understand half of what the guy said in the race.

00:17:45.760 And I don't think you're wrong that he's probably the only Democrat who could have gotten it done.

00:17:50.660 I know my friend Crystal Ball would yell at me and say, Bernie could have gotten it done. 0.97

00:17:54.600 I don't think so, given the way we saw the left vote on socialism.

00:17:59.140 They're not in favor of it, and he's open about his policies there.

00:18:03.120 So I don't disagree with you that Biden was the right man for the time on the Democrat side, but gaff-prone.

00:18:10.680 And, you know, I couldn't understand half of what he said.

00:18:12.860 He was – I think it's pretty clear he's having some age issues, some old age issues.

00:18:17.060 And it's scary.

00:18:19.640 It's a little scary to have him at the helm at the moment.

00:18:22.480 I don't – to be honest with you, I can't really tell if that's going on or if he was always a bit like this.

00:18:28.360 I mean, if you try and follow him in the past, just following the syntax is a little hard.

00:18:34.540 And he's rambling.

00:18:35.660 There is a certain Abraham Simpson quality to him at this point.

00:18:39.200 But what I was saying really is that not that he's necessarily changed, but whoever is around him, whoever he has chosen to be around him,

00:18:47.060 have really been shrewd in keeping him away from the public – I mean, COVID helped a lot –

00:18:52.120 preventing his tendency to go off on tangents.

00:18:57.380 And also for him to assume this rather stolid old establishment demeanor, which I think is reassuring to people right now.

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00:20:16.120 You call yourself a conservative.

00:20:22.680 You're not, obviously, pro-Trump.

00:20:24.300 But what did you think of the, like, the Lincoln Project guys who are unleashing all those vicious ads on Trump?

00:20:33.060 And it seems to have morphed into vicious ads on Republicans writ large.

00:20:37.460 I don't know what they stand for, to be honest, but I know they loathe him.

00:20:40.740 What do you think of them?

00:20:41.420 Well, I kind of enjoyed it at the beginning.

00:20:45.120 I think a certain amount of tweaking this absurd person is definitely worth doing.

00:20:52.440 And I also felt they had a sort of killer instinct that often Democrats and lefties don't really have in terms of political advertising.

00:21:00.380 But over time, I don't know, it felt like they were running it a little thin.

00:21:04.960 And 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.

00:21:30.460 And 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.

00:21:54.220 I 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.

00:22:04.320 Max Boot just seemed to, didn't just chuck some things, but chuck everything that he once believed.

00:22:09.820 And look, it's hard in this tribal movement.

00:22:12.760 Yes, they just flip.

00:22:14.100 They go to MSNBC and become part of that propaganda, the task.

00:22:20.380 And I don't, it's hard.

00:22:22.100 It 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.

00:22:31.760 I don't think I've changed that much except on foreign policy.

00:22:34.900 And yet not be tempted to become a resistance crazy.

00:22:38.440 Right.

00:22:38.800 And I've tried to do that.

00:22:40.580 I 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.

00:23:01.180 But I didn't jump into wokeness like a lot of these other people did.

00:23:05.600 I didn't jump into support of the Democratic Party.

00:23:08.800 I found it important to double down on resistance to the way the left was exploiting the polarization that Trump represented.

00:23:20.080 And 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,

00:23:37.660 Oh, screw it, I will, I will just, I'll just utter this, these tribal slogans or the other.

00:23:42.480 And I, I managed to piss off all the Trumpies. 0.97

00:23:46.620 And 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.

00:23:58.040 Um, and, you know, that's hard.

00:24:01.520 It'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.

00:24:10.320 Um, as if these were terms you just tossed off in the wind and they're not true.

00:24:17.420 But 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.

00:24:43.120 And, and, and, and I think it just requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to resist that.

00:24:50.440 It'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.

00:25:02.360 Because 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.

00:25:19.120 And I understand why that can become incredibly difficult to tolerate.

00:25:23.840 Yeah. 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.

00:25:36.520 You're either a racist or an anti-racist.

00:25:38.740 There'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.

00:25:52.180 You 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?

00:26:01.260 If 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.

00:26:10.160 And I was sort of laughing about it on the show saying, that's so absurd.

00:26:13.200 Why 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?

00:26:20.460 Why does he have to have exactly the same values and the exact same priorities as Sonny Hostin does?

00:26:26.620 Especially when their view, their core view is that this whole place is a function of bigotry.

00:26:31.100 Right, the whole place.

00:26:31.440 And most people know that's not true.

00:26:34.040 Or 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.

00:26:43.520 That's, that's not, that's, that's a completely legitimate and, and, and eternal view of first generation immigrants.

00:26:51.160 People want to also create your identity in such a crude way.

00:26:55.820 I mean, so I'm slotted into, at this point, the, the white cis.

00:27:00.780 That's, I'm, I'm gay men, by the way, at this point are certainly not the oppressed, according to these people.

00:27:05.380 We are, we are part of the oppressors, especially if we are, God help us, white. 0.99

00:27:10.160 But, um, I'm, I'm not just that.

00:27:12.840 Um, 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.

00:27:22.360 I might have an economic view of the world which isn't that compatible with Bernie leftism.

00:27:28.800 I might have a whole range of personal experience, unique to me, that make me vote a certain way.

00:27:37.960 I 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.

00:27:50.560 And if they don't, you change your mind.

00:27:52.280 Whereas 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.

00:28:09.600 And that is then, what is inferred from that is a completely monolithic political view.

00:28:15.920 This is just not reality.

00:28:17.500 And as you point out, now there's a hierarchy of whose views matter the most.

00:28:21.680 So 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.

00:28:32.860 As you point out, where the last thing you want to be as a white male.

00:28:35.980 Now, 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.

00:28:44.760 And I was making my points and he was making his points and they were all the same points.

00:28:48.780 And he said, well, you know, you're lucky.

00:28:51.760 At least you're a woman. 1.00

00:28:53.280 I 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. 0.97

00:29:08.460 It's absurd.

00:29:09.580 No, 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.

00:29:26.160 And there's a hierarchy of white men, white women, blah, blah, blah, it goes all the way down.

00:29:30.600 And, well, what is wokeness except exactly that, but just turned on its head? 0.83

00:29:36.620 And wokeness is in which white male are always the bottom, the people most despised. 0.89

00:29:42.380 And on the far right, it's there always at the top.

00:29:44.920 You just reverse it.

00:29:45.860 They don't even begin to see that they are copying the worst kinds of bigotry that they claim to be opposing.

00:29:55.520 If 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.

00:30:16.280 Never a vowel, always a consonant.

00:30:17.520 So many.

00:30:19.160 And, you know, no, absolutely no.

00:30:22.740 So there is an individual human being there who may or may not be typical of their various characteristics.

00:30:29.900 You don't know their life.

00:30:31.560 You don't know their story.

00:30:32.720 You don't know their struggles.

00:30:34.200 You don't know their pain.

00:30:35.960 You don't know their happiness or their success.

00:30:39.420 And treating people as individuals is, for me, a moral non-negotiable.

00:30:45.180 I 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.

00:31:00.800 So these things are very important.

00:31:03.660 People tell me all the time, you know, you're just worrying about these bunch of loopy and loony students and their wonky professors.

00:31:12.080 It really doesn't matter.

00:31:14.040 And I'm like, well, it does matter when all major corporations have internalized this as part of their human resources.

00:31:21.040 When 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.

00:31:43.260 And there is no time out from that. 0.52

00:31:45.980 That is a core assumption of this ideology.

00:31:49.100 And it is completely soaking our culture.

00:31:53.100 I 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.

00:32:06.280 There's no conservative institution that is immune from this.

00:32:12.040 Certainly no liberal.

00:32:14.620 And we all, in that sense, as I said a few years ago, live on campus now.

00:32:20.000 Well, I don't want to live on that campus.

00:32:21.660 No.

00:32:21.740 I want to live in America.

00:32:24.060 That's right.

00:32:24.740 And 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.

00:32:36.540 They're complicated.

00:32:37.480 And he's right.

00:32:39.200 Honestly, that, like, sums up whatever I'm paying this guy per hour.

00:32:42.500 And that's pretty much what he says in response to a lot of the stuff.

00:32:44.640 And it's exactly right, though.

00:32:46.140 It is.

00:32:46.880 You can't. 0.86

00:32:48.240 The 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. 1.00

00:33:02.380 No, it's you're terrible. 0.99

00:33:05.400 And 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.

00:33:17.320 And I know you're Catholic.

00:33:18.840 I'm Catholic.

00:33:19.960 Most Christians, they believe in forgiveness.

00:33:23.220 You know, our Jewish friends believe in forgiveness.

00:33:25.180 And yet the woke left, the religion of the wokesters, there's no such thing as forgiveness. 0.98

00:33:30.000 One sin and it's over.

00:33:33.820 And they want us to sit back and be quiet about it.

00:33:36.680 But 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. 0.73

00:33:54.280 Not 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.

00:34:02.940 And 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.

00:34:11.160 I get to speak up and it doesn't make me a bad person.

00:34:14.080 No, it doesn't.

00:34:15.580 And by the way, I think that I would be okay if people demonized my ideas.

00:34:21.460 That's fine.

00:34:22.420 You know, I mean, I don't want them to demonize them.

00:34:24.580 I want them to engage them and rebut them or something else.

00:34:28.560 What I don't like is demonizing me as a human being.

00:34:31.300 I 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.

00:34:44.080 If I was someone else in a different identity, it would be okay.

00:34:48.640 And that is, you know, Ayanna Pressley had this awful quote, which said, we don't want any black faces without black voices. 0.98

00:34:56.800 We don't want any Muslim faces without Muslim voices. 1.00

00:35:00.600 We don't want anyone in these minority communities to think for themselves or to dispute this ideology. 0.83

00:35:08.820 And they're able to intimidate people a lot.

00:35:12.680 They're able to bully us because they're claiming the high ground.

00:35:16.780 But in fact, they don't really persuade.

00:35:20.560 And that's their weakness.

00:35:21.820 They're not interested in persuasion.

00:35:23.280 They're interested in bullying.

00:35:24.380 And that in the end prompts the kind of resistance and the resilience that you saw in the last election.

00:35:30.420 And when you saw these people still didn't buy this and wouldn't buy this, including members of these minority groups. 0.91

00:35:37.380 Now, we don't, you know, the exit polls aren't perfect and they're bound to be revised.

00:35:42.140 And we take this with a certain amount of skepticism.

00:35:44.980 But I think of the gay community, which rallied to the right in the last election, this election.

00:35:53.580 And no one would have predicted that.

00:35:55.960 Have you seen anywhere any piece that explored that?

00:35:59.700 Have you seen any articles that help you understand the diversity of views among gay, lesbian, transgender people?

00:36:08.920 Do you know any of this stuff?

00:36:11.520 But in fact, it is complicated, as your therapist puts it.

00:36:16.540 And the gay world is just as politically diverse.

00:36:20.940 Well, not quite as politically diverse as outside, but definitely has a whole range of opinion.

00:36:25.920 Much of which really is quite resistant to wokeness.

00:36:30.880 And 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.

00:36:44.620 And there's also a sense that you can't ever accept success.

00:36:49.640 You can't ever take yes for an answer.

00:36:51.220 I 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.

00:37:02.240 We just had, this summer, a Trump-nominated Supreme Court justice give and write gays and transgender people into the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

00:37:14.620 Well, no wonder some gays decided that we weren't that oppressed anymore.

00:37:19.820 Maybe 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.

00:37:32.420 Well, but no, as that happens, as you gain power, I mean, it's true for women, too. 1.00

00:37:37.020 It's true for Asians. 1.00

00:37:38.320 You get kicked out of the, you know, quote unquote, minority club, and you're really just a traitor. 1.00

00:37:44.220 You're a traitor to your sexuality, to your gender, to your race. 1.00

00:37:47.960 You know, the white women, they're adjacent to power because they're with the white men. 1.00

00:37:52.680 Asians, same, they're white adjacent. 0.91

00:37:55.140 Gay 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. 0.96

00:38:12.880 Yeah, and the truth is, it's not like gay men who have not fought for other people's rights. 0.95

00:38:18.740 Again, what more do you want?

00:38:20.580 We have the Civil Rights Act applying to everybody.

00:38:23.060 We have marriage equality.

00:38:24.640 There are a few small issues around transgender people that we need to figure out, but we've come a long way in that.

00:38:31.140 I mean, who are they to call us not progressive?

00:38:34.180 I 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. 0.96

00:38:41.300 And marriage equality is not for gay white men.

00:38:44.280 In 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. 0.99

00:38:53.180 It was poor black women. 1.00

00:38:54.360 It was poor Latino women. 1.00

00:38:56.080 It was women who didn't have custody of their children that wanted this and benefited from it. 1.00

00:39:02.120 And so I'm just, again, sick of being told that because of the color of my skin, I don't care about people from other minorities.

00:39:09.660 Or that I suddenly got mine and now I don't want anybody else.

00:39:12.760 Not true.

00:39:13.940 Absolutely not true.

00:39:15.220 Well, unless you believe America's awful and systemically awful, then, you know, they see you as continuously bigoted yourself.

00:39:22.580 I know that, by the way, the audience should know that you were calling for marriage equality long before anybody was seriously calling for it.

00:39:32.920 I mean, you were writing about it and pioneering it at a time when people were like, ha ha, that's cute or crazy.

00:39:38.820 And so, yeah.

00:39:39.720 I was also out as a gay man before anybody was out in the media.

00:39:44.280 I mean, from the very get go.

00:39:47.280 Do I get any credit for that?

00:39:49.000 Absolutely not.

00:39:49.500 I've been openly HIV positive since 1996.

00:39:54.120 You know, again, people are complicated.

00:39:58.060 Putting 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.

00:40:08.160 I know, but you shouldn't have to.

00:40:10.000 But it wears you down, Megan.

00:40:12.980 I mean, it has to in the end.

00:40:14.880 And 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.

00:40:36.660 You haven't written something crappy, you haven't written something crappy, you can't get your pieces read, but because you're simply unacceptable.

00:40:44.600 And, you know, I was asked to leave New York Magazine.

00:40:48.960 The following week, they ran an 8,000-word piece from me about plagues through history.

00:40:55.640 So it wasn't about the quality of my work.

00:40:59.580 It 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.

00:41:12.240 And, you know, America's weird like this.

00:41:13.620 It's a part of American history that Americans have tended to enforce orthodoxy through civil society, not through government.

00:41:20.880 So this is the country that gave us the Salem witch trials.

00:41:23.900 It's the country that gave us the Hollywood blacklist. 0.96

00:41:28.260 It's the country that gave us the scarlet letter. 0.91

00:41:31.160 It's the country that gave us McCarthyism. 0.84

00:41:34.880 And it's the country that's given us wokeness.

00:41:38.500 These 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.

00:41:49.460 This is a deep puritanical strain within American history, which is not the equivalent in many other countries.

00:41:56.720 This moralizing attempt to persuade and coerce and to save your fellow citizens.

00:42:02.900 If America were as bad as the establishment left now believes, why would all these people want to come here?

00:42:13.220 Why would all this 86% of our immigration is non-white at this point? 0.96

00:42:18.600 That's a huge, I mean, what white supremacy invites 86% of its immigrants to be non-white?

00:42:24.860 Right. 0.99

00:42:25.280 I mean, it's completely bonkers.

00:42:26.600 We're so bad at it.

00:42:27.260 It doesn't make any sense. 0.96

00:42:28.380 We're so bad at our white supremacy.

00:42:29.840 We've got to – apparently they need to try harder. 0.99

00:42:32.260 We're the less incompetent white supremacists in the history of the world. 0.68

00:42:35.900 More with Andrew Sullivan in just one minute. 0.97

00:42:39.920 He and I get into it over Donald Trump.

00:42:42.180 You're going to want to hear that.

00:42:43.680 And 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. 1.00

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00:44:50.960 And now before we get back to Andrew, I want to do a feature that we call Asked and Answered here on The Megyn Kelly Show

00:44:56.300 where we take your questions, and our executive producer, Steve Krakauer, will tee them up, and I'll do my best to answer.

00:45:02.540 Steve, what's the story?

00:45:03.580 Hey, Megan.

00:45:03.960 Yeah, this one is a great question.

00:45:06.140 We've been getting a lot of great questions at questions at devilmaycaremedia.com.

00:45:10.720 Also, guest suggestions being sent in there, and love to see those and hear those.

00:45:14.880 So keep those coming as well.

00:45:16.340 This one is a question that comes from someone who calls himself G, and he has a question about vaccines and coronavirus

00:45:21.820 and really used it as the Pfizer news, and now we have a Moderna news, and getting FDA approval and getting these vaccines over to people.

00:45:29.460 He wants to know, what's the FDA doing?

00:45:31.740 Are they taking their time?

00:45:32.800 Because he says every dose helps, and every day counts in terms of cost to our economy and standard of living.

00:45:37.600 So his question is, what gives?

00:45:39.060 Isn't this worth pulling an all-nighter for?

00:45:41.140 What's taking so long?

00:45:42.060 Hmm, I think it's actually going pretty quickly, all things considered.

00:45:47.020 These, I know, like Moderna and Pfizer, they submitted their request to the FDA for approval back on November 20th,

00:45:54.000 and both of them are scheduled for possible distribution and approval for December 21st.

00:46:01.660 So that's pretty good.

00:46:03.060 It's going to happen, I guess, Pfizer's December 10th and Moderna's December 21st.

00:46:08.500 Anyway, pretty fast.

00:46:09.760 It can't go much faster, because you've got all these scientists at the FDA who will take a look at it.

00:46:15.840 They'll have these boards meet.

00:46:17.280 It's kind of complicated.

00:46:19.160 And what they said is that they're using this expedited process for the coronavirus vaccine

00:46:25.660 so that it can be given to hundreds of millions of people.

00:46:28.300 And normally, they wouldn't do the expedited process for something that's going to go to that many people,

00:46:32.120 but they're doing it, given the pandemic and how much damage it's causing to our country.

00:46:37.060 So, look, the director of the FDA says it's going to be roughly equivalent, this review,

00:46:43.100 to what's needed for a full licensure.

00:46:44.840 But they are putting the pedal to the metal so they can get it out there as fast as possible.

00:46:48.520 Some people get it.

00:46:49.320 The first responders and sort of people who are at risk, they're going to start getting it in December.

00:46:54.520 And they're saying it could be a couple hundred million people who are going to get it in December, January, February.

00:46:59.480 And then the rest of us, folks who are not in the high-risk group, are going to have to wait until spring.

00:47:03.940 Fauci says maybe April, May, June.

00:47:06.800 That will be, you know, if you don't have an underlying condition or something that makes you a priority,

00:47:11.600 that you could get the shot.

00:47:12.940 So, look, to me, it's good news.

00:47:15.060 Seems like next summer should be pretty normal.

00:47:17.080 And I think the country's ready to get back to normal.

00:47:19.400 And I'm really hoping well before next summer, we're going to see the ability to go around

00:47:24.940 without constantly wearing these masks and staying six feet away and not hugging our loved ones

00:47:29.900 who happen to be in their senior years.

00:47:32.120 And it's just, it's been a lot.

00:47:34.200 And I think the vaccines, they got to them pretty quickly.

00:47:36.580 But the sooner, the better, right?

00:47:39.500 So we can get back out there.

00:47:41.740 One of the questions we have, though, is, A, are they safe, the vaccines, right?

00:47:45.460 And are they going to work?

00:47:46.440 They're saying 90 to 95% effective.

00:47:49.280 And B, will people take off the masks?

00:47:51.520 Is that going to be OK to do?

00:47:52.820 And C, what the hell do we do the next time this happens?

00:47:55.940 Have we learned anything?

00:47:57.260 Well, on Monday, we're going to be joined by a group of doctors.

00:48:00.260 They call themselves the Great Barrington Doctors.

00:48:02.660 And these are the folks who have been saying, we got to hope for herd immunity.

00:48:05.840 We got to just protect the elderly and the most at risk and get people back to real life, 1.00

00:48:12.680 ASAP, even without a vaccine.

00:48:14.520 So we're going to ask them and one of their opponents, somebody who doesn't see

00:48:18.480 it their way, who's more in favor of what we've been doing and shutdowns and so on.

00:48:22.660 Going to have a full-threaded debate on all of it, COVID, and what's next next week in

00:48:28.500 the program.

00:48:28.840 So I'm looking forward to that.

00:48:29.780 In the meantime, back to Andrew Sullivan.

00:48:31.760 Let me ask you about the New York Magazine thing.

00:48:38.120 Let's talk about that for a minute, if you don't mind.

00:48:40.380 Because, you know, you were one of, I think you were the most respected writer at that

00:48:45.280 magazine.

00:48:46.080 And you were read by people on the left and the right, even though New York Magazine is

00:48:49.800 a left-leaning publication.

00:48:51.160 And it wasn't anything you did.

00:48:52.840 It's normally not something you did.

00:48:54.580 Normally, they just use something you did or said as an excuse to eject you based on your

00:48:59.920 larger views, but in this case, they just ejected you.

00:49:02.840 They didn't even have an excuse.

00:49:04.980 And you wrote very openly about it after you left saying, what has happened, I think, is

00:49:09.960 relatively simple.

00:49:11.340 A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer

00:49:15.520 want to associate with me.

00:49:17.260 They seem to believe that any writer not actively committed to critical theory and questions

00:49:21.980 of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming 0.97

00:49:27.620 co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space.

00:49:34.500 How did that feel?

00:49:36.080 Because you'd been there for a long time.

00:49:38.640 And I know you're doing well now without them.

00:49:40.940 But in the moment, it can be very destabilizing.

00:49:44.860 Well, of course.

00:49:47.520 If they have every right to do what they did, I'm not denying that.

00:49:51.140 I don't have a right to a job.

00:49:52.380 Um, and they're, they're, they're in a free society magazine can hire a fire whoever it

00:49:58.660 wants.

00:49:59.340 Um, and, uh, so I'm not really, I don't know.

00:50:05.560 I, I, I feel also that I have enough of an audience that it doesn't matter what I find.

00:50:10.280 And I'm, I'm reaching as many people now with the weekly dish, which is my weekly newsletter

00:50:15.220 and earning more money because of it, uh, than I was before.

00:50:19.740 But, you know, I'm just miss the idea of a liberal order where a magazine can have differing

00:50:29.380 views within it, in which writers can actually argue with each other, uh, take different

00:50:36.500 steps.

00:50:37.280 And in so doing, the magazine itself says something.

00:50:41.080 It says, we're open to debate and argument.

00:50:44.460 Now I grew up at the new Republic magazine, um, under Michael Kinsley, uh, Marty Peretz,

00:50:51.260 Rick Hertzberg, Leon Wieseltier, some of the, the really great, uh, editors and writers.

00:50:56.440 And I, I had an incredible time there.

00:50:59.820 Um, you know, you have people like Leon Wieseltier fighting with Charles Krauthammer every week.

00:51:04.100 Now that's, that's fun.

00:51:06.420 Uh, and at the new Republic, I tried to broaden it even more to have a really roiling free debate

00:51:13.660 within its pages.

00:51:15.260 Uh, and I was editor there as you know, for, for, for, for the bulk of the nineties.

00:51:20.120 Um, I, I love that.

00:51:24.320 I don't want to read people.

00:51:25.860 I already agree with.

00:51:27.380 I don't want to see a magazine that feels as if it's just preaching at me.

00:51:31.340 I want to read institutions that can have internal diversity of view, not just internal identity,

00:51:39.960 uh, the diversity of superficial identities.

00:51:43.340 And, and, you know, you can feel that when you read a lot of media now, it's especially

00:51:48.660 online.

00:51:49.400 It's just, it all reads the same because it's all coming out of the same worldview.

00:51:54.240 And that worldview was partly the change happened so quickly, partly for economics.

00:51:59.200 I mean, the media was dying and it was expensive and, and writing became, uh, because supply

00:52:06.280 became almost infinite with the internet.

00:52:08.480 How did you, uh, pay for it?

00:52:10.680 And what happened is that a lot of these magazines decided to go online by hiring lots of young,

00:52:16.540 cheap writers that could keep them afloat.

00:52:19.320 But in so doing, imported a disproportionate number of people just recently indoctrinated

00:52:24.940 in the Ivy League with critical theory.

00:52:27.260 And in that period, the entire culture was upended and old liberal editors, when I say

00:52:33.920 liberal, I mean, conservative and lefty, but liberal types just were besieged.

00:52:39.880 And sooner or later, the other thing that happens is that liberals, I mean, good liberals

00:52:45.360 are just too wussy to stand up to this and just say, no, we're going to run this.

00:52:52.300 Now, wait, I want, because I want to get to, I do think talking about the solution to this

00:52:56.680 is important.

00:52:57.640 I don't know that anybody's got it exactly, but before I get to that, can I ask you to

00:53:01.680 respond to the New York Magazine, the editor in chief, David Haskell?

00:53:05.700 I thought it was crazy what he said, because there was pushback on him.

00:53:09.140 People were mad that you, that New York Magazine lost you.

00:53:12.260 And he said, look, we will continue to publish work that challenges liberal assumptions, the

00:53:18.240 liberal assumptions of much of our readership.

00:53:20.140 But this is a quote, publishing conservative commentary or critiques of liberalism and the

00:53:27.640 left in 2020 is difficult to get right.

00:53:34.240 It's so absurd and so naked in its partisanship.

00:53:37.540 You can do it, but you really have to do it if you're under the, under the moniker,

00:53:42.800 Jen Rubin or Steve Schmidt, or, you know, it's like you can criticize conservative or liberalism

00:53:48.840 just as long as you do it with kid gloves in a way that pleases the woke left and doesn't

00:53:53.360 cross any boundary.

00:53:54.480 I mean, Andrew, when you heard that, what did you think?

00:53:57.180 I really don't want to get into a fight with people whom I've worked with in the past.

00:54:01.840 I didn't make it personal, but I will say a more general point is if you're a writer and

00:54:08.080 you want to write something, I'm just talking about the act of writing, whatever your political

00:54:11.440 view, you have to be able to start by wanting to write whatever you want to write. 0.83

00:54:16.960 Now, eventually when you write it out, you'll see, oh, that was kind of crap or I need to

00:54:20.760 change that or that went on a bit or that was good. 0.74

00:54:23.480 Let's, let's, let's.

00:54:24.360 But if you start from thinking, well, I can't say that and I can't say this, and if I say

00:54:30.060 that, I have to say it in this particular way, you just cripple yourself as a writer.

00:54:36.300 You, you can't write that way.

00:54:38.560 You have to have freedom to write.

00:54:41.180 I think this core thing of this, this, this completely unchallengeable freedom is, is so

00:54:49.060 central to what the West has always believed in, what the West really specializes in, what 0.89

00:54:55.100 we fought the fucking Cold War to defend.

00:54:59.720 Almost no civilizations have championed freedom of speech the way the West has historically. 0.98

00:55:06.960 It's just rare.

00:55:08.420 And it's happened for a very short period of time in human history.

00:55:11.520 It's fragile.

00:55:13.000 It can be broken.

00:55:14.180 It's against human nature.

00:55:15.480 We don't want to hear things we don't want to hear.

00:55:17.400 We don't like to be dissuaded.

00:55:19.720 You have an emotional response to it to begin with.

00:55:23.340 But if you, if, if you don't fight against that, you lose a free society and, and it's

00:55:29.880 precious.

00:55:30.400 And I just feel that to some extent, those of us who grew up in the knowledge of the Cold

00:55:35.260 War compared with those who didn't is that we actually saw this kind of atmosphere being

00:55:42.220 perpetrated by the state to have it perpetrated by our society.

00:55:47.400 That is, seems to me to be a terrible misreading of history and of what makes the West strong.

00:55:53.920 That's one of the things I've been saying is that as people start to whisper their viewpoints,

00:55:57.740 it feels like East Germany.

00:56:00.620 I mean, it feels like what I imagine East Germany felt like.

00:56:03.240 And let's not, let's not let the ride off the hook.

00:56:05.700 I mean, if you, what you certainly notice here is in, in Washington, the distinction between

00:56:10.920 the public conversation and the private conversation is massive.

00:56:14.480 Yes. 0.99

00:56:16.060 That Republicans knew and know what a maniac, what a crazy person this president is and 1.00

00:56:24.380 has been. 0.97

00:56:25.240 And they will talk openly about it, but publicly they won't challenge him even when he's trying

00:56:29.600 to bring down our electoral system. 0.99

00:56:32.500 Well, let me ask you about Trump though.

00:56:33.760 Let me just ask you a question about that.

00:56:35.240 Because as you were talking about, you know, how important it is to say what you feel and

00:56:40.580 be able to, you know, offer viewpoints that may not align with what people, certain people

00:56:45.920 want them to align with.

00:56:47.280 I was thinking about Trump because I do think this is, this is a big reason a lot of people

00:56:52.000 voted for him.

00:56:52.860 I mean, yes, like Glenn Lowry said, Trump's an avatar, right?

00:56:55.400 Like he, he, people, people voted for Trump because they didn't want to see oil and gas

00:56:59.460 and the industry ruined, right?

00:57:01.060 They did, they were pro-life.

00:57:02.500 They, they wanted limited government.

00:57:03.780 They wanted a more isolationist foreign policy, whatever it was.

00:57:07.820 He doesn't see it all in terms of these identity politics wars, but I do think a lot of people,

00:57:13.400 what they liked about him is something I would think you would like about him, which is as

00:57:17.720 he famously said to me on a debate stage, what I say is what I say, right?

00:57:24.140 Like we have fun, we'd say things it's, that's the way it's going to be.

00:57:28.500 And even I understand that very, very much in, in, in my own life, you know, even before

00:57:34.920 the Trump debate and my experiences with him, I, I almost wrote a book called cupcake nation

00:57:39.100 because I was so concerned about what was happening to the country when it came to viewpoints

00:57:43.020 and positions that various people held that didn't conform with what the, what the wokesters

00:57:48.720 back then wanted.

00:57:49.420 But I see Trump and his fighting on this and I like it.

00:57:53.940 And I think a lot of people like it, even though he's an imperfect messenger.

00:57:57.400 So can't like, can you see that?

00:58:00.800 Yes, he busted institutions and he's, he doesn't push any norms.

00:58:05.380 He busts the norms that we might otherwise want in place.

00:58:08.480 Some, some we don't, some we do.

00:58:10.260 But what about his willingness to fight these wars?

00:58:12.760 And look, I think Trump was a kind of middle finger to a certain kind of elite that most

00:58:22.500 people recognized was condescending to them and ignoring them and in some ways despising

00:58:28.200 them.

00:58:29.400 And Trump's manner of speaking freely without fear or favor felt refreshing.

00:58:38.540 It felt like a blast of fresh air.

00:58:42.020 He talked in language that most people could recognize in their everyday lives.

00:58:47.420 A lot of politicians don't.

00:58:49.800 You know, for all of Obama's strengths and abilities, most people in the world don't deliver

00:58:55.640 their thoughts in perfectly crafted paragraphs and sentences with lots of, you know, lots of

00:59:01.200 long words, Trump was just the spirit of it felt as if it was a rebuke to a lot of the

00:59:09.620 complacency, smugness, elitism, and failure of those elites in that it is completely understandable

00:59:18.360 where that sensibility would be so attractive.

00:59:22.600 When that person says, I just won the election by a landslide and attempts to delegitimize our

00:59:31.600 democratic system with no evidence, that becomes dangerous.

00:59:37.960 When someone like that uses that freedom to enforce lies from the very get-go, like from

00:59:45.500 insisting that what we saw with our own eyes, his inauguration crowd, was bigger than what

00:59:49.820 we saw with our own eyes with Obama, and insisting that you believe that, that's not freedom of

00:59:55.320 speech. 0.99

00:59:55.580 That is a form of mental illness. 0.84

00:59:57.440 That is a form of power mongering.

01:00:00.120 That is a way in which you get people to obey you by repeating what is untrue as a form of

01:00:07.020 loyalty.

01:00:08.240 Now, that is a deeply, deeply illiberal and profoundly wrong viewpoint.

01:00:13.520 So I think that people were right about the manner, the refreshing nature of it, and the

01:00:19.160 importance of pricking that bubble.

01:00:21.600 I agree with them.

01:00:23.100 I think they were right to do that, especially when it was represented by Hillary Clinton,

01:00:27.020 probably the worst example of the kind of elitism that has rightly come into disrepute.

01:00:33.720 But at the same time, no, you can't just say anything.

01:00:39.540 You can't lie.

01:00:41.180 You can't deny reality.

01:00:43.240 You can't abuse people.

01:00:47.520 You can't denigrate people on the basis of their identity, which is exactly what the left

01:00:52.140 does in reverse. 0.98

01:00:53.900 He was terrible, a terrible model, a terrible human being, and a terrible president. 0.86

01:01:00.180 And I'm sorry, but you're not going to push me off that, however sympathetic I am. 0.81

01:01:06.120 I have no desire to push you off of that.

01:01:08.200 I think in the way that you want a diversity of viewpoints in your column and whatever publication

01:01:14.320 you may be working for, I feel the same here.

01:01:16.760 All viewpoints are welcome.

01:01:18.420 And to pretend Trump is not an incredibly controversial figure is to deny reality.

01:01:23.880 But I do think, you know, I read in one of your pieces something similar to what you're

01:01:28.540 saying now.

01:01:29.000 And the way you wrote it there was that that that Trump is guilty of an unprecedented assault

01:01:35.440 on American democratic legitimacy.

01:01:37.580 You said he's threatening to create a new normal.

01:01:40.200 Don't concede a loss.

01:01:41.920 Claim without proof that there's massive fraud.

01:01:43.920 Resist a transfer of power.

01:01:45.140 Try to overturn results.

01:01:46.840 Delegitimize the winner.

01:01:47.800 Sabotage the victor's ability to govern.

01:01:49.800 And I was like, I feel like I'm reading about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

01:01:53.980 Right.

01:01:54.560 She she claimed he was an illegitimate president.

01:01:57.860 She and the Democrats focused on the popular vote as though that meant anything in terms

01:02:03.100 of winning or losing.

01:02:03.900 And it doesn't claim without proof there's a massive fraud. 0.96

01:02:06.620 That's what they did in the whole bullshit Russiagate conspiracy for a year. 0.89

01:02:11.160 Try to overturn the results. 0.93

01:02:12.620 Well, how many times do they threaten to or actually try to impeach Trump?

01:02:16.480 Delegitimize it, like sabotage his ability to govern.

01:02:19.760 Oh, my God.

01:02:20.240 That's what they did his entire four years.

01:02:22.260 I'm not saying it was right in either case, but it's not unprecedented.

01:02:27.880 He's coming off four years of having this done to him.

01:02:31.000 Yes, it is unprecedented.

01:02:32.300 And I'll tell you why, because there is a distinction between those two things.

01:02:35.400 There are several.

01:02:36.120 There are commonalities.

01:02:37.180 You're absolutely right.

01:02:37.960 Hillary and, for example, someone like Stacey Abrams, who continue to say that they were

01:02:45.220 really they were really elected or they were the real president or that that they really

01:02:50.740 won the governorship of Georgia.

01:02:55.400 But Hillary Clinton conceded the election a day later. 0.98

01:03:00.960 Barack Obama invited Trump into the White House for the transition that week.

01:03:05.580 Hillary Clinton showed up at the inauguration.

01:03:10.460 No one actually attempted to deny Trump the legitimate powers that he had when it were when

01:03:17.620 they were challenged, like on immigration with the courts.

01:03:20.200 The courts eventually were slapped down.

01:03:23.460 He and the investigation of a genuine question and worry about foreign intervention in election

01:03:30.060 is a legitimate process.

01:03:32.460 That impeachment attempt was legitimate. 0.94

01:03:34.220 The impeachment attempt was not.

01:03:35.580 So, I mean, what my so Trump is going to go begrudgingly is how it looks now.

01:03:39.580 And he's going to sort of be him, his normal self on the way out.

01:03:43.040 Right.

01:03:43.420 He's not going to be cooperative.

01:03:44.640 He's going to be ornery.

01:03:45.620 And he's going to he's going to claim that the system didn't work.

01:03:49.180 But what I'm saying, I'm not saying it's presidential, but I'm saying is it is it is

01:03:54.400 it dignified?

01:03:56.000 Is it American?

01:03:56.800 Is it precedented to use impeachment as a political tool to bring down a legitimate president, which

01:04:03.860 is absolutely what happened during the Trump presidency?

01:04:06.260 So I'd much rather as a president have the previous guy go reluctantly and, you know,

01:04:12.300 throw out some claims on his way and then leave me alone, not try to get me impeached for a nonsense

01:04:18.120 phone call, not to mention a whole long year of Russiagate conspiracy, which was made up.

01:04:24.700 And in fact, they knew was made up when they launched it, you know.

01:04:27.460 So it's like I get I'm not championing what Trump is doing right now, although I do think he's

01:04:32.420 entitled to have his legal challenges played out.

01:04:35.000 I just think, you know, you have to keep it in perspective, you know, to given what they

01:04:40.100 have done to him.

01:04:41.020 Yes, if you think politics is is tit for tat, but you keep upping the ante, then then sure.

01:04:46.620 Where do we end when that tribalism continues?

01:04:49.640 What we end with is the collapse of liberal democracy, because if you can never negotiate,

01:04:55.940 if you can never compromise, if you can never put your own partisan interest behind that of

01:05:01.480 the system itself, you will eventually end up with completely delegitimized liberal democracy.

01:05:07.540 And that is where we have gone.

01:05:09.160 And I'd like to see it restored.

01:05:12.660 And it's very hard to restore it.

01:05:14.600 No president, no president.

01:05:17.020 The history of the United States has behaved this way after losing an election.

01:05:21.880 And and the ability to also act as he did in the presidency, as if the separation of powers

01:05:29.400 did not exist.

01:05:30.520 The idea that he doesn't have to send anyone to report to to follow a congressional subpoena,

01:05:37.100 the idea that he can simply switch funding depending on what he feels like, that he can

01:05:42.580 declare national emergencies fakely if he wants to if he wants to build a border wall that

01:05:50.200 he never figured out how to build in the first place.

01:05:52.540 The 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.

01:06:08.040 These were dangerous trends.

01:06:11.320 This this very I alone can fix it.

01:06:13.640 I alone can do certain things.

01:06:15.580 And the way in which he acted as if he was not subject to the rule of law, if he was not subject

01:06:22.280 to congressional oversight, as if he could do whatever he wanted, if he could he could

01:06:26.800 trade, he could use his powers as commander in chief to leverage dirt against his opponent

01:06:33.500 in the election.

01:06:34.280 These things are not within the tradition of liberal democracy.

01:06:37.680 I'm not going to defend what Hillary did or what Stacey Abrams has said and what the Russiagate

01:06:44.120 fanatics did.

01:06:44.940 And in my defense, I didn't I didn't go there on the Russia stuff.

01:06:49.020 I was I was a skeptic, but I was open minded.

01:06:51.920 I thought, well, the thing to do with this is if there's any doubt, let's let's find someone

01:06:56.580 like Mueller.

01:06:57.120 Let him look into it.

01:06:58.740 That's not illegitimate.

01:06:59.880 And it's not illegitimate to inquire into whether a president did misdeeds.

01:07:05.120 No, but they knew they knew he didn't.

01:07:08.200 The evidence was stacked up in his defense before they even got it started.

01:07:12.920 And they willingly overlooked it and misrepresented their evidence to the FISA courts.

01:07:17.700 I mean, we could get back into all that.

01:07:19.340 It's if they had a good faith belief, that would have been one thing.

01:07:22.100 But they didn't.

01:07:23.440 They used it.

01:07:24.320 I'm not sure about that, Megan.

01:07:25.860 Well, OK, we can we can agree to disagree because that's ancient history.

01:07:29.140 But I know you've even you've even said Rachel Maddow is a disgrace.

01:07:33.100 Yes.

01:07:33.340 No, I'm not.

01:07:34.180 I was not.

01:07:35.600 I am not a defender of the Russiagate conspiracy.

01:07:39.020 I wasn't at any point.

01:07:40.040 You can go back and check it.

01:07:41.720 I was always like, well, let's look into this.

01:07:44.100 And if it's when it's resolved, it's resolved.

01:07:46.240 So I didn't engage in that hysteria.

01:07:48.100 I always believe that he was a legitimate president.

01:07:51.100 I do believe in the Electoral College.

01:07:54.960 But Hillary didn't behave this way after losing an election. 1.00

01:07:58.920 And and it's it's dangerous to say that the entire electoral system is rigged by shadowy

01:08:06.620 forces when lots of people are going to agree with you.

01:08:09.840 That's incredibly dangerous and and should be resisted.

01:08:14.500 So let's let's talk about solutions, because I read everything you write on the woke stuff,

01:08:21.560 and I think you're such a good spokesperson for why it's so pernicious.

01:08:25.480 And I know you think we should stand up for our values and push back against it.

01:08:31.840 But how how does one meaningfully do that?

01:08:36.040 What is the solution to fighting this battle?

01:08:38.680 You defend the individual.

01:08:42.580 You resist the idea that we are defined by groups.

01:08:47.360 You return to the basic political philosophy of the American experiment, which is that we

01:08:53.180 have individual rights that are protected.

01:08:56.060 We're protected from each other and from the government, most importantly, from government

01:09:00.580 coercion, indoctrination, religious control.

01:09:04.700 And that this is a model that has is actually the only model that can work for a multicultural, 0.92

01:09:12.860 multiracial society.

01:09:14.780 When you're this diverse, trying to enforce orthodoxy or trying to have one group control 1.00

01:09:21.200 another group is a recipe for complete chaos and disorder.

01:09:25.020 What you have to do is to take it back down to the to the level of the individual human being

01:09:30.820 and take that as the basis of our civil order, then make arguments for this policy or that

01:09:37.740 policy, make arguments for this change or that change.

01:09:42.060 But within that context and also in which anybody has a right to say anything at any time about

01:09:48.700 anything. 1.00

01:09:50.260 And there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. 1.00

01:09:54.100 And that the ability to say what you believe is critical to the success of liberal democracy, 0.99

01:10:01.560 because if we don't, we don't have the range of views that we need to make the right decision.

01:10:06.700 So how do how do how do regular Americans put that into effect?

01:10:10.280 Right.

01:10:10.460 Like my imaginary viewer or listener is Madge.

01:10:12.860 She's in Iowa.

01:10:13.660 She works all day.

01:10:14.700 She comes home.

01:10:15.640 She consumes the news and then she goes back to work the next day.

01:10:18.600 But how does she do it? 0.98

01:10:20.100 She doesn't have a pen with the power of yours or a mic with the power of mine, but she wants

01:10:25.560 to fight these battles without getting fired.

01:10:27.880 How what should she do?

01:10:30.260 If you're if you're put into a woke indoctrination session.

01:10:34.740 One of these critical race theory sort of programs is supposed to tell you how to behave

01:10:41.480 in the workplace.

01:10:42.020 Just ask specific questions.

01:10:45.700 Don't take the whole general view.

01:10:47.460 Just say, how am I?

01:10:48.540 Why am I racist?

01:10:50.100 Why is that something I can't and haven't recognized in myself?

01:10:54.320 What do you mean by racism?

01:10:56.300 Constantly ask them, what do you mean by this?

01:10:59.860 Because one of the great weapons of the work has been distortion, abuse of the English language.

01:11:06.040 So the word racism, for example, we all knew what that meant.

01:11:09.800 It meant that if you were prejudiced against someone on the basis of something that had

01:11:13.760 nothing to do with who they were, I mean, prejudiced against someone because of their race

01:11:17.420 or gender, it does not mean some neo-Marxist system of racial control in which you are always

01:11:28.340 complicit unless you revolt against it.

01:11:32.020 No.

01:11:33.140 No, that's not racism.

01:11:34.480 Sorry.

01:11:35.000 I'm not going to accept your definition of that word.

01:11:37.620 When you use the term white supremacy to refer to America, sorry, no.

01:11:42.180 What do you mean?

01:11:44.240 I mean, I find that there's so little thought behind these concepts.

01:11:48.920 Most people are just mouthing them as if because it's trendy or fashionable to do that.

01:11:55.380 But the answer to that is always the skeptical question.

01:11:59.260 What exactly?

01:12:00.340 How exactly?

01:12:01.660 How does racism work?

01:12:02.980 What do you mean systemic?

01:12:04.740 What does systemic mean?

01:12:06.180 Just keep asking the difficult, ordinary, simple questions, querying this entire structure.

01:12:13.560 What you realize when you start to do that is like all these grand ideologies.

01:12:18.580 Once you start poking bits of reality at it, it tends to crumble.

01:12:22.500 And so I have confidence that because woke ideology is a lie, this is not the way the world works.

01:12:30.160 It's immensely more complicated than somehow perennial racial gender warfare against one another. 0.98

01:12:36.600 It's much more interesting and positive and diverse than that.

01:12:40.660 Then it will collapse.

01:12:43.800 All lies collapse in the end.

01:12:45.600 It all depends upon all that matters is the damage that's done in the meantime.

01:12:49.300 Just don't let them push you around.

01:12:50.860 Don't let them read, write the English language. 0.94

01:12:56.980 Trust yourself and your own instincts about whether you are a disgusting person or not. 0.96

01:13:02.400 You're probably like all of us, flawed, difficult. 1.00

01:13:04.840 We're all racist, yes. 0.90

01:13:06.400 Complicated.

01:13:07.520 All them.

01:13:08.780 We're complicated and also we're able to overcome that.

01:13:11.920 And we have overcome that.

01:13:13.240 And we do that on a one-to-one personal basis.

01:13:16.100 Again, 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.

01:13:30.660 Reject it.

01:13:32.080 Insist that you are not what they say you are.

01:13:35.420 Speak for yourself.

01:13:36.560 And don't be intimidated by these people.

01:13:40.060 I mean, they're very intimidating.

01:13:42.400 But stare them in the eyes and tell them, I don't believe it.

01:13:45.820 But 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.

01:13:57.680 And 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.

01:14:11.280 Well, 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.

01:14:21.760 That's also not okay.

01:14:24.200 And so if accused, based on those things, which are immutable characteristics, you have a leg to stand on, too.

01:14:32.240 It's not right to demonize a guy just because he's a white male.

01:14:37.760 If 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.

01:14:50.680 Don't accept that.

01:14:54.320 And look, in California, they had this new proposal.

01:14:59.020 Every left-wing organization supported it.

01:15:01.500 It was to reimpose affirmative action.

01:15:05.060 And in the most liberal state in America, a majority-minority state, it went down in flames, even though it was massively funded as well.

01:15:14.320 People 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.

01:15:27.060 Understand that this new ideology is a form of race discrimination.

01:15:30.800 It's a form of gender discrimination. 1.00

01:15:32.860 It's just an inverted form.

01:15:35.260 And fight it.

01:15:36.820 Constantly fight it.

01:15:37.740 And you can win, because I think, actually, as we found out in this election, the majority of people agree with you.

01:15:43.900 Yeah, even minorities.

01:15:44.840 Don't.

01:15:44.920 This is this.

01:15:45.320 Even minorities are agreeing more and more.

01:15:46.720 Especially minorities. 0.79

01:15:47.480 Right?

01:15:47.640 Coming over to Team Trump.

01:15:49.200 Of all presidents coming over to Team Trump at a time when they're told they're awful if they do it.

01:15:54.260 Now, you've been fighting for years.

01:15:56.760 I love how you've never bent the knee.

01:15:58.820 You've always said, this is how I believe, how I feel.

01:16:01.500 I don't really care if you don't like me.

01:16:03.060 If it costs me a job, it costs me a job.

01:16:05.420 And it really is easier said than done.

01:16:08.100 You're doing it now at Substack.

01:16:11.160 And so, how do people, first of all, how is that going?

01:16:13.880 I know it's very successful, but can you elaborate?

01:16:16.500 And second of all, how can people find you there?

01:16:21.100 Just go to Substack.

01:16:22.160 Just type in Substack Andrew Sullivan, and you'll get the page.

01:16:26.700 And it's every week.

01:16:27.980 I'll send you a newsletter, and it's a variety of stuff.

01:16:30.240 But the one thing I do always with my column is the next week I am required to address readers' disagreements with it.

01:16:37.820 Call it the dissents of the week.

01:16:39.880 We have a contest of trying to guess where someone is from the view from their window every week.

01:16:47.740 And it's a lively, fun thing based on my old blog, The Daily Dish.

01:16:53.240 And it's doing really shockingly well.

01:16:56.060 I mean, to be honest, I'm incredibly touched by the way readers have come through.

01:17:01.460 I mean, we're about, all together, coming up to 100,000 people who want it to come to their boxes every Friday, their mailboxes.

01:17:10.560 And we have a hefty chunk of those now paying.

01:17:14.740 And so, it's working.

01:17:15.960 And 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.

01:17:27.740 People are hungry for thinking outside of the current boxes.

01:17:32.900 They're really eager to think more deeply about some of these issues in ways that the current orthodoxies prevent.

01:17:39.500 And 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.

01:18:04.320 Not 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.

01:18:13.160 If they don't make sense, we'll rip them apart.

01:18:15.820 But if they do, we'll give you credit.

01:18:18.180 And that's what I brought up.

01:18:21.220 I grew up in an Irish Catholic family where everybody shouted at everyone else all the time, in which argument was constant.

01:18:28.440 I grew up in the debating society at Oxford, which I loved.

01:18:33.480 I've been a contentious journalist because I just enjoy disagreeing with people.

01:18:39.740 I think it's huge fun.

01:18:41.440 And 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.

01:18:55.860 And 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.

01:19:10.800 And where we can rebuild liberal democracy from the ground up.

01:19:15.860 The 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.

01:19:37.640 And so that's what I'm trying to do.

01:19:40.420 The Weekly Dish, it's doing really well.

01:19:42.700 I'm so grateful for you helping me get the word out about it.

01:19:47.020 And yeah, I was cancelled by the right in the early 2000s because of my turn on the Iraq war and my hostility to torture.

01:19:57.040 And I've been cancelled by the left and I'm still here.

01:20:02.420 So, 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.

01:20:10.720 And 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.

01:20:28.260 I love that.

01:20:29.260 I'll tell you something in exchange that in the mornings I get a bunch of different newsletters sent to me by different journalists.

01:20:36.380 It's, you know, sort of one of the things people are doing now is putting together the news and mailing it to you.

01:20:40.720 And one of the people in my inbox is Katie Couric, who I know a little.

01:20:45.600 And 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.

01:20:59.280 So 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.

01:21:18.120 And I think the truth is, I'm much more like you.

01:21:22.380 I, I am pugilistic by nature.

01:21:24.840 I would not be happy not in the fight.

01:21:27.680 I tried that.

01:21:29.200 I was miserable.

01:21:31.020 And there is, it may not be bump free.

01:21:34.440 It may not be easy to be in the fight, but it's important.

01:21:38.500 And, and if you're built to do it, then you must, even, even if you get some bumps and bruises and cuts along the way.

01:21:46.660 Absolutely.

01:21:47.560 I look, I, I, I've had a wonderful career.

01:21:51.280 I continue, hope to continue to have it.

01:21:53.460 Either you have that or you don't.

01:21:55.020 And the alternative, you would be, you would have been bored silly doing soft morning TV forever, for God's sake.

01:21:59.940 I mean, it would have driven you up the wall.

01:22:02.400 And, you know, there's a place for it.

01:22:04.560 Absolutely.

01:22:04.920 But I'm either person to come into a room and, and, and tell everybody what they want to hear.

01:22:11.640 No, that's not me.

01:22:12.740 I have, that's just not my personality.

01:22:15.440 I've broken up more dinner parties.

01:22:17.220 I've upset more people, uh, than you can imagine.

01:22:21.000 But, uh, and so we know yourself.

01:22:23.660 That's the other thing.

01:22:24.600 Know yourself.

01:22:25.220 I also, I wanted at one point to go into politics. 0.93

01:22:28.040 Uh, but I know enough about myself to know I, I, I'd suck at it.

01:22:32.100 And, and cause I, I alienate way too many.

01:22:34.900 Right.

01:22:35.220 You'd never tell anybody what they want to hear.

01:22:37.800 No, but you know, we all have different roles.

01:22:40.060 And I think the, but I do really believe the role of the media and journalists is the role you're talking about.

01:22:45.200 It's get in there, raise questions, make trouble, uh, insist upon good answers from people in power.

01:22:53.100 And, and, and that's, that's what I love to do.

01:22:56.960 And that's, and I think within the mainstream media, that was becoming harder and harder.

01:23:01.340 So I'm really thrilled to have this new platform that's free, that's open to criticism, but that is full of verve and fun.

01:23:09.440 And I'm sure your listeners would, would, would love it.

01:23:12.700 Free at last.

01:23:13.760 Andrew Sullivan, such a pleasure, such a pleasure to finally connect with you.

01:23:17.120 All the best in it.

01:23:18.120 Thank you, Megan.

01:23:18.960 I really appreciate it.

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The Megyn Kelly Show - December 04, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on America, the Media, and Fighting for Freedom ｜ Ep. 33

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