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

00:00:00.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.880 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today on the program, Andrew Sullivan.

00:00:17.800 This guy's brilliant. He just has such an ability to take what's happening in the country and condense it into understandable bits.

00:00:24.440 And he's been writing about America. He is now an American citizen, but he's originally from Great Britain.

00:00:32.740 And he loves his country. He has a deep, deep love of America. He understands how important a religious foundation is here.

00:00:41.040 And he's been able to put his finger on how we've fallen so far from what our original ideals were and whether we can get back.

00:00:49.460 And actually he has some promising thoughts on that. So I think you're going to love his insights.

00:00:53.940 We're going to kick it off with what's happening with the Cuomo aide who wants you to feel sorry for the difficult past couple of years she's had.

00:01:02.260 Okay, Melissa. And go through a bunch of stuff happening in the news.

00:01:06.180 So we'll get you caught up on the news today and also sort of a greater picture on what's happening in the country with one of my favorite people, Andrew Sullivan, in one minute.

00:01:15.120 First this.

00:01:15.660 I want to start with Governor Cuomo because I'm just interested in the whole in the whole subject and what's happening with him in the news this morning.

00:01:28.720 The only thing is that his top aide, this woman, Melissa DeRosa, has resigned.

00:01:33.780 This is basically last week I called her like his jackal.

00:01:37.820 You know, the movie The Omen where little Damien is protected by the jackal.

00:01:41.780 You have to get through the jackal.

00:01:43.300 That's what she's been.

00:01:44.180 And she's been his strong arm enforcer when it comes to the nursing home scandals, when it comes to the women.

00:01:50.200 And there's been a lot of testimony to this effect.

00:01:52.240 So this woman, I just my jaw dropped this morning, I have to say, because she resigned and she said, yeah, I'm leaving.

00:01:59.020 It's been a great honor to serve the people of New York.

00:02:01.300 The past few years have been emotionally and mentally trying for me, for me, for me.

00:02:08.940 It says something about our broader culture, does it not?

00:02:12.780 Well, it does, because immediately there's any blowback on anything.

00:02:17.140 People are constantly saying, well, look at all these people attacking me, regardless of who ultimately is responsible for anything.

00:02:24.400 And it's the calling out of bullying people and then claiming you're being bullied instantly when someone actually responds to it is the current easygoing technique.

00:02:35.920 Yeah.

00:02:36.260 I thought, you know, obviously the Maureen Dowd piece this weekend was so brutal that she probably felt she had no option.

00:02:43.840 But it's generally been scandalizing, isn't it?

00:02:49.400 I mean, it's not just Cuomo himself.

00:02:51.480 For me, of course, it's his brother, too.

00:02:55.460 This absurd propaganda in favor of this guy.

00:02:59.140 I mean, only a little over a year ago, he was being touted as the most significant Democrat in the country.

00:03:06.420 And everybody was going to be a Cuomo sexual, if you remember.

00:03:10.540 That was the line.

00:03:12.380 That's right.

00:03:12.780 But what an ugly person.

00:03:13.980 What a very nasty man, it seems, in retrospect.

00:03:16.560 Well, don't you feel like some of the fallout has been because we knew he was a bully and and signs of that kept emerging?

00:03:24.740 And then once the dam started to break on the nursing home scandal, all these people started coming out with their Cuomo bullied me stories.

00:03:31.560 Andrew Cuomo bullied me stories.

00:03:33.440 And it just made, you know, the public opinion on the guy start to turn.

00:03:36.880 You start to see who he really is.

00:03:38.320 It is amazing.

00:03:40.200 If I've learned anything in the last, you know, five, six years in Washington, it's cowardice is the norm.

00:03:48.340 You know, you might.

00:03:49.340 I used to think that politics was full of kind of rather, you know, flawed people and people do things for good reasons.

00:03:54.940 And they enter careers for out of public service or whatever.

00:04:00.580 But watching how no one has said privately, publicly what they tend to say privately in Washington, that everyone seems terrified of getting fired or terrified of having their career upended in the slightest way.

00:04:16.520 The absolute adherence to your career over any other principle and your own vanity over any other value.

00:04:25.260 It's really it's definitely a sign of our times, is it not?

00:04:29.440 Yes.

00:04:29.840 Your vanity over any other value.

00:04:31.980 Gosh, that embodies America right now in the saddest way.

00:04:36.700 Let me switch to COVID on a larger matter.

00:04:40.000 Obviously, Andrew Cuomo had a COVID scandal on his hands, but in addition to the sexual harassment scandal.

00:04:45.220 But COVID and the Delta variant and so on.

00:04:48.200 Now, there's no question that Delta has not been great and that the number of cases are rising.

00:04:53.580 But more importantly, the latest news is that the number of hospitalizations are rising and the number of deaths are rising on a relative basis.

00:05:01.300 Though, again, it's ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of people suffering from this are the unvaccinated.

00:05:08.260 So if you've been vaccinated, your your chances of being hospitalized or, God forbid, dying of COVID are still absolutely minuscule, a point the media needs to continue to emphasize.

00:05:18.900 But now what we're seeing is the Biden administration looking at governors in the states of Texas and Florida in particular, who I think he accurately perceives as a potential threat in twenty twenty four.

00:05:31.720 DeSantis trying to blame them for what we're seeing.

00:05:35.420 Let's say in Florida, where there are rising hospitalization rates and overcrowded hospitals where people with non covid emergencies are having trouble getting beds.

00:05:44.140 And to me, it's kind of interesting because when Trump was president, it was all Trump's fault.

00:05:49.080 This is all a problem of the executive.

00:05:51.280 Now that Biden's president, you've got rising rates and it's just a state by state problem.

00:05:56.640 But they don't mention states like Louisiana where the hospitalization rates are going up because that's run by a Democrat.

00:06:04.160 Well, it also reminds one of, you know, Kamala Harris saying she wouldn't take a vaccine if it were delivered by Trump back last year.

00:06:12.820 I mean, I have to say, you know, if you think of a fundamental problem right now, one of our fundamental problems is is tribalism.

00:06:20.500 And just watching something like a public health crisis and that's just that's what we've had.

00:06:26.960 It happens every now and again. And you would think a matter of life and death would help us suspend our tribal loyalties and just accept that we all want to live.

00:06:38.220 Do we not have that in common? And we all want to be safe.

00:06:41.540 And yet we were incapable as a culture, as a culture of doing that.

00:06:47.480 That is how deep this tribalism has gone.

00:06:49.820 That it it's it's immune to empirical data and it's immune to empirical data, even if you're looking at people dying in front of you.

00:06:59.040 And then there's a kind of amazing cognitive power of a tribal mentality.

00:07:05.340 And you want sort of always remembers that the natural state of affairs for human beings, the default is tribal.

00:07:12.800 That's how we were organized for one hundred and ninety five thousand years of our two hundred thousand years on the planet.

00:07:20.080 That's how we operate. We are so deeply tribal.

00:07:22.520 So the achievement in the West over the last four or five hundred years to actually conceive of societies which are not purely tribal,

00:07:31.700 that actually value the individual and actually value reason over the loyalty is such a first of all, such a great achievement.

00:07:40.140 Secondly, such an obviously fragile one.

00:07:43.180 And and what we're watching, if you look, I think if one looks more deeply, is the collapse of that capacity.

00:07:49.560 And that is truly problematic for a liberal democracy.

00:07:54.380 It's truly impossible to have a liberal democracy unless we all consider ourselves when we enter into politics as equal citizens, regardless of identity, deliberating upon our common good.

00:08:07.200 It's as simple as that.

00:08:08.200 If we can't get there, if we're still a fundamental argument is we want to find a way to demonize and and and and and and attack the other tribe, then then no politics is possible.

00:08:21.060 It becomes a form of tribal war.

00:08:24.820 It really has become a deadly war, in a sense, when you look at how that dynamic has affected the nation's reaction to covid.

00:08:32.180 Yes, it's you can say at this point it's killing people, this tribalism that now I don't mean to say that there aren't some legitimate people who might legitimately have some worries about a vaccine or there are there is there is a good faith skepticism.

00:08:50.840 Sometimes I don't want to dismiss that. But in this case, it seems that there's no doubt.

00:08:56.300 I mean, there's obviously a tiny amount of doubt and the potential to save yourself, but also to save your fellow citizens is so immediately available to you.

00:09:05.880 Not to do that is is really quite an achievement of tribal thinking.

00:09:10.580 Well, I mean, one good thing, if you want to find some silver lining to the Delta variants spread, is that as one would expect, the vaccination rates are going up naturally, naturally, not not because of mandates necessarily, but because people see what's happening.

00:09:27.540 And then they go to the hospital, they go to the CVS or they go to the Kroger and they get vaccinated because whereas before they thought the risks of covid did not outweigh the risks of the vaccine, their calculation is naturally changing as they see death come to unvaccinated people in their area.

00:09:46.340 And so that makes sense. But of course, we we aren't trusting that instinct as a people right now, our government with the mandates, you know, it's spreading, you know, from industry to industry, from local government to local government, the vaccine mandates, the mask mandates and on and on it goes because they think that's the solution.

00:10:06.360 Well, one thing is to look at previous epidemics in a way in history and to see how this is the first time the world has essentially shut down for an extended period of time to prevent transmission of a virus.

00:10:21.140 The first time it didn't happen even in 1918. There were some occasional shutdowns in various cities.

00:10:26.560 And what you learn from these previous plagues, which is they're horrifying.

00:10:30.840 But the only silver lining of a plague is that it runs out of people to infect at some point and blows itself out.

00:10:37.900 And the sooner that happens, obviously, the better.

00:10:41.180 And the downside to although I support before we had a vaccine, I think some measures to prevent transmission were totally sane and sensible and should have been done.

00:10:51.340 I have no problem with it. But once you have a vaccine and it's available to everyone,

00:10:56.020 and a critical mass of people have got it, it's it's counterproductive to just nag people.

00:11:01.780 You know, nagging nagging can drive them crazy and it can create a counterproductive response.

00:11:07.780 But reality, the actual reality of death and sickness is is concentrates the mind and the heart remarkably.

00:11:15.700 And it will happen. And if this takes picks up pace, then more people are going to get vaccinated.

00:11:21.240 We're going to get ever closer to the kind of thing you're beginning to see in Britain and in Israel, to some extent,

00:11:28.680 who are slightly ahead of us on the curve here, which is that Britain had its Freedom Day, opened up everything and was warned that the Delta variant,

00:11:37.080 which was thriving, take off and it collapsed.

00:11:39.960 The Delta variant is under is sick.

00:11:42.900 The positivity rate in Britain is collapsing so that because they may be running out of healthy, younger people to infect and transmit also.

00:11:54.220 And so the sooner it's over, the less time it has to evolve into more different strains that might be more problematic.

00:12:01.680 But notice this strain is not we don't know exactly if it has a worse clinical outcome than normal COVID, if it were than the previous COVID.

00:12:13.080 If it were an unvaccinated person, we don't know.

00:12:15.400 But we do know it's much more transmissible.

00:12:18.420 And one of the things that's interesting about viruses is when they mutate, they almost always mutate into less harmful forms.

00:12:25.220 Because it's in their interest not to kill off their hosts, to keep in their hosts as long as possible to keep replicating.

00:12:32.540 So I don't think we should be as scared of variants as we have been.

00:12:37.440 They're more likely to become more transmissible than more deadly.

00:12:41.580 And we just, I think, need to get through this.

00:12:44.180 The only way past this is through it.

00:12:47.480 And let's, as I wrote this piece saying, let it rip.

00:12:50.000 Let people deal with the consequences of their own actions.

00:12:53.200 This is a free society.

00:12:55.160 At some level, the government says, we've given you the tools to help yourself.

00:12:59.280 Now help yourselves and help your fellow citizens.

00:13:02.580 I mean, and at that point, let this thing take its course.

00:13:07.080 That's exactly right.

00:13:08.020 I loved your piece on that letter rip.

00:13:10.220 It's not to be insensitive to death.

00:13:12.840 It's to say, this is America where we're allowed to handle the natural consequences of our own decisions.

00:13:18.340 We do it every day when we get behind the wheel of a car,

00:13:20.660 when we live in a building where people don't get measles, vaccinations, whatever it is.

00:13:25.540 We all make decisions on our own personal risk calculation and what's okay with us.

00:13:30.240 And that's what we're doing right now.

00:13:32.740 As you point out, the government's job is done.

00:13:35.480 They did it.

00:13:36.200 They gave us a vaccine.

00:13:37.220 If we can't, if we won't go get it, right, what are we supposed to do?

00:13:43.400 Stay in masks forever?

00:13:45.320 Have every industry mandate a vaccine that people may not want to get for very good medical reasons or emotional reasons of their own?

00:13:54.000 Yeah.

00:13:54.300 I mean, this is the thing.

00:13:55.000 If you hate, as I do, lockdowns, you hate social distancing, you hate masks.

00:14:01.120 Well, the one obvious response to prevent all those things is to get vaccinated.

00:14:05.080 So the idea that you have to be against all of the above seems completely crazy.

00:14:09.520 No, be for the vaccine and then do your best to get rid of these masks and rid of these shutdowns.

00:14:15.140 I mean, I think that's the one other point I would like to make.

00:14:17.600 You know, viruses, they live with us.

00:14:20.360 We share the planet with them.

00:14:21.620 I've had a virus in my bone marrow now for 28 years.

00:14:27.980 HIV, which was killing people and killed people for a very long time, had 100% fatality rate.

00:14:35.580 But I've managed, thanks to the miracles of technology, and let's praise the miracle of the Myrna vaccines.

00:14:42.520 I mean, the technology here is staggeringly good.

00:14:45.820 And take advantage of it because the point is to get on with your life.

00:14:50.560 The point isn't to defeat the virus.

00:14:53.140 The only point of defeating the virus is to get back to your life.

00:14:56.300 And when you fight these viruses, you can get too fixated on that idea without realizing this broader context.

00:15:02.800 Well, can I see my friends?

00:15:04.760 Can I see my family?

00:15:06.040 Can I go out and have fun?

00:15:08.120 Can I go to work?

00:15:09.200 All those things are things we need to be getting back to as soon as possible because the toll that has been taken on the kids, for example, in terms of their educational loss, in terms of teenagers, in terms of their mental health, in terms of all of us, is huge.

00:15:25.780 And that's the other thing people don't take into account.

00:15:28.620 These shutdowns and lockdowns are terribly damaging to people.

00:15:32.920 They force us into a place where we are alone, isolated.

00:15:37.360 We are more able to be manipulated because we're online all the time.

00:15:41.020 We're more frustrated and getting out of that as soon as possible should be our primary objective.

00:15:50.080 And I don't understand why people on the right can't see that.

00:15:53.400 To get back to normal, we just have to get this vaccine.

00:15:56.020 Well, but it's not just the right.

00:15:58.900 For sure, there's a greater reluctance among Republicans than Democrats as a whole.

00:16:04.480 But, you know, the black community doesn't want this vaccine.

00:16:07.040 Only 20, less than 25 percent of the black community has been vaccinated.

00:16:10.960 There's real hesitancy for various reasons.

00:16:14.600 And, you know, to your point, there's a lot of blame to go around on that.

00:16:19.060 Kamala Harris saying she wouldn't take it and Joe Biden getting it and then wearing the mask everywhere, telegraphing that the vaccine didn't really work.

00:16:28.580 And the pulling of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six blood clot incidents out of millions.

00:16:33.520 It's like there have been so many mistakes all along the way.

00:16:36.340 And I could spend an hour talking about the media distrust.

00:16:39.580 So people don't trust the evening news anchor when he says the vaccines are safe.

00:16:43.960 They just don't trust the evening news anchor to say anything anymore.

00:16:46.760 So there's been such a breakdown.

00:16:48.680 At this point, also, you don't you neither want to infantilize Republican right wingers who refuse to acknowledge reality, but not I get irritated by the infantilization of African-Americans as if people can't decide for themselves what they should be doing.

00:17:03.740 I don't I honestly, Megan, I looked this up yesterday and it's 38 percent nationally.

00:17:08.960 You may be thinking about I think of African-American vaccination.

00:17:12.000 And but that's still shockingly low, especially given the fact that we know that disproportionately African-Americans are more likely to come in contact with it if by anything, if for no other reason, tend to be working more jobs which require more interaction with the public, more out there, more essential work.

00:17:32.420 And so they are the most vulnerable and the failure to get that across from an administration that does nothing but talk about equity a million times a day.

00:17:41.200 But you just get people safe is is is is is stunning.

00:17:46.300 And that's why politically it's difficult for Biden.

00:17:49.180 Biden can't start lambasting people because he's going to be lambasting his own base at the same time.

00:17:55.500 But it's he should say we've done what we can for God's sake, get vaccinated and we're going to move on.

00:18:02.820 And I think it would be my question for you on that.

00:18:04.980 Here's my question for you on that. So in New York City, the vaccination rate among black people is less than 30 percent.

00:18:13.380 If I hadn't seen the national stat of 38.

00:18:16.020 But here's here's I'll make the counter argument.

00:18:18.000 OK, since there since you and I seem to be on the same page as I was reading the Wall Street Journal today and some other papers today about the rising hospitalization rates and people, people with heart attacks, people, people with other issues who cannot get a bed right now because the unvaccinated people who got covid and now need serious help are taking up all the beds.

00:18:39.400 I mean, I can see the other side's argument that it's a public health issue and that the mandates have to go into place.

00:18:46.160 If not, you know, if we were telling unvaccinated covid patients, get out, you can't have the bed, right?

00:18:53.200 Maybe that would be one thing, but we're not.

00:18:55.540 We're kind of telling it. We're taking on a first come, first serve basis and somebody who may have gotten the vaccination, but then as a heart attack or a stroke, maybe struggling to get a bed because somebody who was like, I don't believe in any of this is taking up the bed.

00:19:07.220 Yeah, I mean, obviously, you're right.

00:19:10.800 The the question of whether ICUs are available in various of these places that in in the capacity necessary to deal with the demand is something I don't know for sure.

00:19:22.660 Obviously, it's changing all the time.

00:19:25.280 My assumption is that they're not going to be overwhelmed.

00:19:27.440 I mean, the reason for the original lockdown, if you recall, was that we can't our medical system would collapse under the weight of suddenly all these infections.

00:19:35.900 If if if we if it is going to collapse again, then I can see the reason for for actually initiating some mitigation things as maybe mandatory.

00:19:45.540 But I'm not convinced yet, at least, that we're anywhere near the hospitalization rate that we were back in a year ago or a year and a half ago.

00:19:56.960 You know, in other words, I think there's still some there's still some room in the system.

00:20:00.860 Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, I was reading in the journal about Florida and Orlando, but I will say it's frustrating to me because I read the Times and I feel like they have a motive to to play it up.

00:20:12.080 They just they've been so into the covid fear, fear porn, as they call it, that I don't trust them anymore.

00:20:18.740 So I read something something like the Journal, even the New York Post.

00:20:22.180 I feel like, OK, these are not people who have been leaning into covid fear.

00:20:25.240 So if they tell me that there's an overrun of beds or hospitalizations, I'll believe them.

00:20:29.540 But how messed up is it that that's how you have to read the news now?

00:20:33.100 Right. It's like, you know, I don't trust data.

00:20:36.780 I read in any given publication, depending on the political outcomes or risks for the Republicans or the Democrats.

00:20:43.900 Yeah. I mean, I think that at some point, I think we both agree on this.

00:20:49.620 There's there's become a point at The New York Times, certainly, and to some extent of the networks and The Washington Post, of course, and most of the mainstream media that you that there simply is such an overwhelming majority of people there who have one political point of view.

00:21:05.920 That even if they're trying to be unbiased, the very framing of the stories becomes impossible if you're not working with anybody who thinks differently.

00:21:16.980 It is important to have people say, hold on a minute.

00:21:20.460 Why do you say that or why are you pitching it in that way?

00:21:24.140 And I think that has been an institutional capture of one political party and one political party's objectives.

00:21:30.680 It's it's almost impossible to find a Republican at The New York Times, even though it's supposed to be diverse.

00:21:37.760 You know, it's funny. That's it.

00:21:40.820 Well, yes. And and even people who are sort of Republican adjacent or even friendly to, you know, conservatism is very few are allowed.

00:21:51.500 And when you look at the but as far as I'm concerned, the op-ed page is not worth reading.

00:21:55.320 It's just a bunch of different demographic slots with the same opinion, which is why it's boring, actually, after a while.

00:22:02.080 But what worries me is the way that these news stories just come off like op-eds increasingly from the lead to the language, the way it's framed.

00:22:12.120 And, yeah, it is depressing because I still read the time.

00:22:14.820 I still read the journal.

00:22:16.700 I increasingly can't read the Post.

00:22:18.660 I'm sorry. It is such it is so slanted.

00:22:21.300 It's it's hard to get through.

00:22:23.460 New York Post or Washington Post?

00:22:25.820 Washington Post. I'm sorry. I'm being a little Washington centric here.

00:22:30.540 But, yeah, they've gone much further than I imagined.

00:22:34.520 Yeah. And, yeah.

00:22:35.380 So you have this crisis of trust, too, as crisis of trust in the media and the government, which all makes this so much harder.

00:22:42.980 Here's a thought I had, Megan, is if this were affecting children, if COVID did what 1918 did and targeted children and many children started dying last year, I think we would have had a much more different response.

00:22:59.100 I think it would have been much more of an emergency.

00:23:03.140 And I think we would we would it's a straight.

00:23:06.760 It's often this happens.

00:23:07.900 You know, some of these viruses come.

00:23:10.000 1918 did, too.

00:23:11.960 1918 was the reverse because the older people, people who had actually gone through a preexisting flu of 1898 had developed immunity.

00:23:20.020 So what happened in 1918 is that it was almost all kids and young people who were dying, which made it that much more traumatizing to people.

00:23:29.820 I'm not diminishing the the horror of old older people dying in the way that we sequester old people and then let them die.

00:23:37.400 But obviously there is a different nature to the death of a 12 year old than an 82 year old.

00:23:43.060 There just is.

00:23:43.740 And and I think our instincts would have kicked in in a more profound way and maybe the sense that it's just it's just going to kill off the old and the infirm has in some ways shifted our psychology around this particular plague.

00:23:58.800 Up next, did you know that it was an event in Provincetown that led to the CDC returning everyone to these mask mandates?

00:24:06.180 Well, Andrew lives there and he's got some thoughts on how on earth something they call Bear Week led to a national mask mandate, which I think Andrew and many others find somewhat absurd.

00:24:19.380 He'll explain also whether Abraham Lincoln was gay one minute away.

00:24:27.860 I definitely want to get back to the media because there are a couple of examples over the weekend of, you know, why people don't trust The New York Times.

00:24:34.560 I'm just I love The New York Times yesterday.

00:24:36.860 Loved it.

00:24:38.520 I just got that lovely review.

00:24:40.180 Oh, right, right, right, right.

00:24:41.380 I want to get and I want to get to your to your book out on a limb in it.

00:24:43.940 One second.

00:24:44.460 Today, I'm going to praise The New York Times for its amazing insight and editorial skill.

00:24:49.500 Makes perfect sense.

00:24:50.900 Their book review.

00:24:51.680 Those are still solid.

00:24:52.840 The book review section actually is really independent, pretty independent of the rest of the paper.

00:24:56.940 But first, I want to ask you about because I saw you you wrote something about, you know, how this initial outbreak that led to the renewal of the mask mandate by the CDC was based on something that happened in Provincetown during something called Bear Week.

00:25:12.780 And no one's really talking about what that is or why.

00:25:16.420 This is a ridiculous week on which to base national policy when it comes to mass or anything else.

00:25:22.060 Can you explain that?

00:25:24.420 Yes.

00:25:25.300 It was it was two weeks, I think.

00:25:27.080 It was what's the week after Fourth of July and the following week, which is called Bear Week.

00:25:32.720 So bear with me.

00:25:34.000 Pardon me.

00:25:35.900 Basically, this is a tiny little town.

00:25:38.460 There are 900 year round addresses here.

00:25:41.240 It's right at the end of the world.

00:25:43.440 60,000, 60,000 people come two weeks in a row.

00:25:48.320 So 120,000 people altogether in those two weeks.

00:25:52.060 Of young, young and middle aged gay men, overwhelmingly, who have not really had any sex or any dancing or any venting for a year and a half.

00:26:04.120 This is going to be their blowout weekend or two weekends.

00:26:07.480 And so that's what happened.

00:26:08.740 It also happened to be really cold for some reason.

00:26:11.740 Normally, everything happens outside.

00:26:13.280 So everybody was jammed inside.

00:26:15.040 And some of these little dance places in this old town are like the black hole of Calcutta.

00:26:19.840 I mean, I don't go in them in the normal time.

00:26:21.660 And people were jammed.

00:26:23.640 And people were literally, you could not move.

00:26:26.460 The lines around the blocks for the dance parties were just insane.

00:26:33.140 I mean, it was so overwhelming.

00:26:34.300 I stayed well away.

00:26:36.820 I'm too old anyway for that stuff now.

00:26:38.320 But I'm just saying, this was insane.

00:26:41.060 Okay?

00:26:41.600 And not only that, but you're being honest, not just breathing each other, but every possible bodily fluid was flying in every possible direction.

00:26:48.420 So this is not a good control group.

00:26:53.760 It really isn't.

00:26:54.340 This isn't like first and second graders sitting in school.

00:26:58.180 No, it is not.

00:26:59.260 It is the opposite.

00:27:00.680 It's the worst possible thing you could do.

00:27:02.980 And, you know, I understand how people, I always, you knew this, you read history.

00:27:09.500 When these plagues start to ease up, people go nuts.

00:27:13.580 They did it in, after the 1918-19 war.

00:27:16.540 If you read stories of the 1919 Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, even for Carnival in Rio, people said it was, it was, it was, it was, it was middle, it was like middle ages in its complete bacchanalian excess.

00:27:29.000 And you see this also in the middle ages after Black Death, people suddenly having these wild orgies in, in Rome, everywhere.

00:27:36.600 There's a sense when you're under that kind of existential threat, people act out.

00:27:41.080 But anyway, that's what it was.

00:27:43.000 And, you know, it is what it is.

00:27:44.640 People come here to let off steam.

00:27:46.780 The positivity rate in the actual town, once they'd left, they took it all with them.

00:27:51.020 So we now have a 3% positivity, below 3% here.

00:27:54.800 It's, it's been remarkably safe here.

00:27:56.660 We have 85% vaccination rate.

00:28:00.220 Now, so 120,000, we have 700 cases and seven hospitalized.

00:28:08.400 So you do the math.

00:28:09.900 I mean, it's, it's incredibly small.

00:28:12.920 Yeah.

00:28:13.460 And I know several people who got it, who got it.

00:28:15.980 And I was at a party with them yesterday.

00:28:17.940 But I mean, this is, this is literally why a lot of kids now and people are going to be wearing masks for the foreseeable future, because it was after the Provincetown Bear Week, which we got to talk about why it's called Bear Week.

00:28:29.980 Yes.

00:28:30.360 Okay.

00:28:31.040 Well, right.

00:28:31.620 Because now, because of that, the mask mandate returned.

00:28:34.720 Thanks a lot, by the way, Andrew.

00:28:36.020 I know you live in Provincetown.

00:28:37.140 So thanks.

00:28:37.560 Thanks for that.

00:28:38.300 I know.

00:28:38.680 I know.

00:28:39.040 I didn't go to this part.

00:28:39.960 I promise you, I would, I wouldn't, I would tell you if I did.

00:28:42.580 But I didn't, because it's just, it's too much.

00:28:46.160 But yeah.

00:28:46.460 Why is it Bear Week?

00:28:48.200 Well, you know, there are, there was a point, there's a piece in my book, actually, this new book called I Am Bear, Hear Me Roar.

00:28:55.880 It's a sub, sub, subculture.

00:28:57.460 Let's put it that way.

00:28:58.160 It's basically, at some point in the early 2000s, there were enough openly gay men who were also middle-aged, who were exhausted, because they kept being told they had to go to the gym and stay in shape and to be attractive.

00:29:12.860 And they just couldn't be bothered.

00:29:14.300 And so they got kind of fat and, and they have, and so it's basically a bunch of overweight, middle-aged men with beards and back hair who show up to, to just hang out with each other and eat pizza and drink beer and hang out by the pool and, and go to parties and, and just chill.

00:29:36.160 And it's a, you know, it's, I'll tell you, it is a lovely week.

00:29:39.020 People, those bears, the big, fat, chubby, hairy ones are so mellow and sweet.

00:29:44.200 It's, it's, they really are.

00:29:46.420 It's totally wholesome.

00:29:47.660 The previous week, which is all, what you would think of as these chiseled, like no body fat, beautiful young guys dancing all night long.

00:29:56.520 That's called circuit week.

00:29:57.860 And those guys are sort of, they're the perfect young, hairless gay boys who show up.

00:30:02.740 And, and, and so we have these, it's not just gay culture anymore.

00:30:06.620 Gay culture is now so big in a way that it's these little, little subcultures and you live in Provincetown and all the time you get these different weeks where different kinds of gays show up and lesbians show up.

00:30:18.100 It's so great.

00:30:18.740 Cause I can just picture some in the bear week being like, remember when we used to come during circuit week?

00:30:23.080 Those are, remember those bodies.

00:30:25.800 So you just look over there and they go, oh, well, we're 12, 20 years older now.

00:30:29.780 And I can't be bothered.

00:30:30.740 I can't be, but probably happier too.

00:30:32.900 Happier.

00:30:33.620 They are happier.

00:30:34.400 The mood.

00:30:35.340 Everybody the first week is like all tense because you know, am I as good looking as this guy?

00:30:40.320 Am I hot?

00:30:40.880 Can I get labeled?

00:30:42.200 Bear week is like, oh, fuck it.

00:30:43.420 You know, excuse my language.

00:30:44.400 No, it's true.

00:30:45.200 It's sorry.

00:30:46.940 Let's just hang out and have fun.

00:30:48.640 And they don't go to the beach.

00:30:49.580 It's too far to walk.

00:30:50.780 Plus you get angry when you can't eat.

00:30:52.700 You it's, it just makes you a generally grumpy person.

00:30:55.560 It's a huge boon for restaurants that week too.

00:30:57.960 They eat all the time.

00:30:59.800 And pizza shops make all their profits in like a couple of weeks.

00:31:03.460 All right.

00:31:03.760 Now this reminds me.

00:31:04.780 So you mentioned your book out on a limb and one of the, one of the great pieces in there,

00:31:09.280 because this is a celebration of your many, many writings over the years.

00:31:12.360 Although I really, I don't, maybe I'm crazy.

00:31:14.420 You tell me, I really feel like the piece you did last month on what's the matter with you may have been the greatest thing you've ever written.

00:31:22.460 It really, it's definitely top 10, but I wanted to ask you while we're on this, on this subject of gay men and bear week and circuit week, which, which one of those would Abraham Lincoln have attended?

00:31:34.640 Uh, I have a feeling Abraham Lincoln would be stalking brutally through the dunes both those weeks.

00:31:42.900 He's, he's a, he's a bit of a loner.

00:31:44.640 He's not really a party boy.

00:31:46.220 Um, Abraham Lincoln.

00:31:47.520 So can you sign up for the audience?

00:31:49.120 Why, why I asked you that?

00:31:50.700 Well, I have a piece in there about whether Abraham Lincoln was gay, which is a kind of unknowable question, but, but I kind of point out some facts.

00:32:00.320 I don't know whether you read it, Megan, but I point out some biographical facts, which are, you know, they're kind of hard to just completely dismiss.

00:32:08.680 I mean, I'm, I, I can't claim this, but I do think there's an interesting book I read, which by a Lincoln scholar that, that really went into it in some detail.

00:32:16.960 I mean, it is, it is remarkable that, that, you know, that he, he slept with his law partner in the same bed for six years.

00:32:24.300 And there it is.

00:32:25.760 And there, there it is.

00:32:27.000 There it is because I read the piece and I was like, okay, so there's stuff in here about like, oh, he, um, never really developed deep emotional relations with any woman, including his wife.

00:32:37.340 I'm like, well, a lot of guys do that.

00:32:38.840 You say he was the classic best little boy in the world type in childhood.

00:32:42.520 One of the largest categories of gay male childhood there is.

00:32:45.320 Okay.

00:32:45.700 Well that could be explained, you know, by other means.

00:32:47.980 And then you get to the part about him sleeping with another man and in the white house when his wife was away.

00:32:52.280 And I said, well, that, that, that is the problem that is that you're right.

00:32:57.140 That is the thing.

00:32:57.720 I mean, like, and people would say, oh, it was very common for men to sleep with other men in those days.

00:33:01.940 There weren't so many beds, et cetera, et cetera.

00:33:04.440 I'm like, but not an honor guard in the white house where Mary Toddy's gone.

00:33:07.720 I mean, come on.

00:33:08.440 I mean, what, what did you think was happening?

00:33:10.600 I mean, I don't know.

00:33:11.740 And I'm not claiming to know, but I think part of my role, part of what I try and do is,

00:33:16.240 is ask these questions that other people are a little leery of asking and going there.

00:33:20.820 Well, it's not like there weren't gay men back then.

00:33:23.400 They just didn't act on it, or at least didn't do it loud and proud out in the open.

00:33:28.800 Well, of course they were.

00:33:29.660 They've always been.

00:33:30.540 And some of them, you know, some of them great Americans like Walt Whitman, for example,

00:33:34.680 whose poetry is probably the greatest thing this country's ever produced in terms of poetry.

00:33:39.800 Yeah, of course.

00:33:40.960 And of course, how they understood themselves.

00:33:42.700 I think there is a, it was a great snobbery of the present,

00:33:46.760 like, especially among some of us who are in minorities.

00:33:50.060 And it's true that we've made huge gains and strides in terms of acceptance,

00:33:54.840 but we tend to assume that the homosexuals and lesbians and cross-dressers and transgender people

00:34:01.620 before just didn't really exist or didn't function in everyday life,

00:34:08.340 that people didn't know about them.

00:34:10.340 Yes, they did.

00:34:11.540 Yes, they were.

00:34:12.440 And there were ways in which more traditional societies walked around it,

00:34:17.980 had euphemisms for it, tolerated it, allowed it.

00:34:21.340 So, for example, I was talking to Michael Pollan,

00:34:23.140 who has that amazing new book about coffee culture and how it happened in the 1650s,

00:34:27.580 only happened in the West in the 1650s.

00:34:29.620 And what happens?

00:34:30.600 Coffee houses spring up with all this new ferment of ideas.

00:34:34.240 Everyone stopped drinking and started drinking coffee.

00:34:36.280 Everybody's sharp.

00:34:36.960 Well, guess what happens?

00:34:37.680 In those all-male coffee houses, suddenly one of them becomes a gay coffee house.

00:34:42.440 Another one becomes a gay coffee house.

00:34:44.180 They're called molly houses.

00:34:45.680 So if you look closely, you can see gay life, but it's represented in other ways, in other forms.

00:34:51.800 And it's not actually very visible, but it's there if you look.

00:34:56.080 And that's what historians need to look at.

00:34:58.740 And just as a gay person, I just think, well, that's interesting.

00:35:01.480 I have no vested interest in Abraham Lincoln.

00:35:03.620 He's so much more important and more than this than this.

00:35:06.400 But it's interesting, right?

00:35:07.760 It is interesting.

00:35:09.380 I never heard anybody talk about it.

00:35:11.380 But I will say your mention of snobbery, like what snobs we are now to sort of look back at history and say,

00:35:16.340 oh, no, we're the first to do anything.

00:35:17.980 And it's all about the me generation, was reflected to go full circle in the news this weekend on COVID, right?

00:35:23.980 Because there was a woman, she's a New York Times reporter, she was on CNN, I want to say she was on CNN,

00:35:30.960 and she was trying to defend President Obama's, former President Obama's big birthday bash on Martha's Vineyard.

00:35:38.840 She wasn't putting the defense in her own words.

00:35:41.760 She was trying to explain why many of the Martha's Vineyard residents didn't have any problem with Obama having several hundred people there.

00:35:49.280 This is a scaled back version.

00:35:50.340 Remember, he got guff for having a party planned with 600 people.

00:35:53.320 So he scaled it back.

00:35:54.660 Now it's just several hundred.

00:35:56.500 Okay, great.

00:35:57.600 By the way, they say Larry David was one of the people who was disinvited second time around.

00:36:01.160 So I cannot wait until that episode comes out.

00:36:03.080 Curb Your Enthusiasm.

00:36:03.780 He addresses the revocation.

00:36:06.900 But so he still has the party.

00:36:09.680 And of course, all the shows this weekend that are talking about, like Meet the Press was lamenting with Dr. Fauci,

00:36:16.140 the South Dakota bike rally.

00:36:18.120 And Fauci was like, there's definitely, you know, concern about an outbreak because of that.

00:36:21.580 But they didn't mention anything about Obama's birthday bash.

00:36:25.400 Okay, so here's the person, this woman from the New York Times on CNN.

00:36:30.340 Her name is Annie Carney, New York Times White House correspondent, explaining why folks who live in the vineyard aren't worried about the Obama party.

00:36:38.180 Listen.

00:36:38.280 Other people said, you know, this is really being overblown.

00:36:43.580 They're following all the safety precautions.

00:36:46.120 People are going to sporting events that are bigger than this.

00:36:48.800 This is going to be safe.

00:36:50.200 This is a sophisticated vaccinated crowd.

00:36:52.440 And this is just about optics.

00:36:54.460 It's not about safety.

00:36:56.060 Oh, boy.

00:36:57.260 It's a sophisticated crowd, Andrew.

00:36:59.740 So they won't get COVID.

00:37:01.420 Well, yeah.

00:37:02.240 Well, of course, you know, there are breakout cases.

00:37:04.680 I mean, I'm not sure it was that risky, since most of it was outside, even in a tent.

00:37:09.180 It's not that bad.

00:37:10.180 But, yeah.

00:37:11.140 Look, the moment the public health authorities lost a huge proportion of the public was when, in the summer of 2020, the BLM marches started these massive things.

00:37:24.420 And the response to it was so out of touch with what they had been saying about every other thing.

00:37:33.520 And it was clearly also a political question.

00:37:37.180 We were suddenly told that racism was a public health threat greater than COVID, and that, therefore, this stuff was okay.

00:37:43.640 Or we were told that wearing masks.

00:37:45.460 And, look, there are nuances here.

00:37:47.480 It does matter if a huge crowd gathers and they're all wearing masks.

00:37:50.480 That will be a lot better than if they don't.

00:37:52.220 It does matter if you're outside in a tent or inside in a crammed basement dance floor with 300 bears.

00:38:01.700 These things are different.

00:38:03.820 But the public health message has to be clear and consistent.

00:38:08.640 And the minute it seems to be political or at least one rule for us and not a rule for everybody else, it's bullshit.

00:38:15.660 Like the mayor of D.C., Miro Bowser, like at an indoor party the same day she made indoor masks mandatory.

00:38:26.360 And at some point, people just – it doesn't pass the sniff test.

00:38:30.420 And if you're trying to get people to be less suspicious that maybe you're – they're trying to get you to do things that they wouldn't do themselves, then this is going to play right into that, right?

00:38:40.900 I mean, it's – now, yesterday I had a little party for my friend, but it was outside on a deck.

00:38:48.140 It was only 40 people, and we weren't – whatever.

00:38:52.180 But I didn't – I mean, it's – again, I don't want to stop living, and I don't think Obama had to cancel the whole thing.

00:38:59.280 But I'm not the president of the United States.

00:39:01.400 I'm former president of the United States.

00:39:02.640 Well, that's the thing.

00:39:02.660 I certainly wouldn't suggest the guy cancel the thing.

00:39:05.460 I've had parties this summer myself.

00:39:07.240 They've been outside, but I would have had one inside too if we had it outside because it was nice weather.

00:39:11.680 But I'm not the one lecturing everybody in the country on how they have to walk around with mandatory masks and have to – it can't work unless they have a mandatory vaccine and all that.

00:39:19.080 That's the Democrats.

00:39:20.080 That's Obama's party.

00:39:21.600 A lot of people who were there.

00:39:23.080 So that's – the hypocrisy is what gets people.

00:39:25.660 Yeah.

00:39:26.300 Well, the role of nagging people – no one likes the nagging party.

00:39:30.640 No one likes the one telling you.

00:39:32.400 Everyone likes the party that says, you know, take precautions, but have fun and live your life.

00:39:38.420 That's America.

00:39:39.200 And the Democrats, I think, are – yeah.

00:39:40.700 And I don't know why some Democrats – some of them just don't get that spirit of America.

00:39:45.660 They don't.

00:39:46.560 They just don't see that that's – you can go with the grain of it or you can spend your life nagging and lecturing it.

00:39:53.880 And I do think it's a bad thing for the Democrats.

00:39:57.200 They don't want to come across as a scolding, angry party that's constantly trying to control everybody else's lives, which is how they increasingly come off.

00:40:05.980 Too late.

00:40:07.320 Well, you – I think you've made this point before.

00:40:09.200 It sort of reminds you of the, you know, the Republicans back in the day when it was like, that movie cannot be shown at the local movie theater because it's inappropriate.

00:40:19.100 The Republicans used to have that mantle.

00:40:20.800 And now the Democrats have it.

00:40:22.300 Yeah, in the book I have this piece that came out in 98 called The Scolds, which is when in the latter part of the 20th century under Clinton when conservatives became obsessed with personal morality because Bill Clinton was in the White House and obsessed with gay marriage.

00:40:43.480 They were all these – they were constantly in a position of doing America down.

00:40:49.160 I remember Robert Bork had this thing about calling America Gomorrah, or Bill Bennett was constantly talking about how to crave this country.

00:40:58.140 There's a point at which also either side, the right or the left, to some extent it's happening also on the right where they're appealing to the vision of Hungary, for example, as a model for America, as if they really don't like America now, as if something's wrong with America now.

00:41:14.640 They don't love it now.

00:41:15.840 And that's dangerous for a political party, to be basically criticizing the people you're hoping to represent in the Congress.

00:41:26.000 And I think there's a scoldishness in political parties that really turns people off.

00:41:33.040 If you look at the successful politicians, whether it be Reagan or Obama, for example, they weren't scoldy.

00:41:39.500 At least I didn't think of them as scoldy.

00:41:40.740 No, they weren't.

00:41:41.700 Are you going to go – and they were very optimistic and buoyant and go do your thing and – yeah.

00:41:49.420 But Jimmy Carter, you know, just spent four years telling us what a bunch of losers we were.

00:41:55.120 Eventually it's like –

00:41:56.200 No.

00:41:56.660 Or Hillary Clinton with deplorables.

00:41:58.960 Oh, God.

00:41:59.560 I mean, Obama's – probably one of his worst moments was when he was caught on mic saying the bitter clingers remark about the Republicans.

00:42:07.360 Something he – you know, he didn't say that exactly publicly.

00:42:10.640 But that – those comments are so alienating when you dismiss huge groups of people as awful.

00:42:17.320 And that is one of the main reasons I think Hillary Clinton had no chance.

00:42:20.980 I mean, she just turned off so many independents even just by calling anybody who supported Trump basket of deplorables.

00:42:28.320 The one thing I would say in defense of that comment by Obama, which is if you look at it in context, he was talking to a Democratic crowd saying,

00:42:35.980 understand why people are alienated, understand why they look at you and think you hate their guns, you hate their religion, you are – their jobs have been lost.

00:42:48.900 That was the context of that statement.

00:42:50.680 And it came out horribly, obviously.

00:42:52.240 But I think he was trying, actually, at that moment to tell Democratic elites to stop not being interested or caring about people who do have religious faith and do own guns and are worthy of talking to and understanding and engaging.

00:43:11.100 And the thing – the difference between Obama and Hillary, the key difference, is that Obama never ran to be the first black president.

00:43:18.340 Hillary only ran to be the first woman president.

00:43:20.600 He actually pitched himself on the issues and the renewal and all the other stuff.

00:43:24.880 And Obama, you know, had a – it was brought up by white Midwesterners, his grandparents.

00:43:30.540 And he always had an ability to reach actual the white working class.

00:43:34.680 That's how he won the Midwest, twice.

00:43:36.180 And people, I think, can – again, we sort of see things in black and white terms, we think – but that was the difference between Obama and Clinton.

00:43:45.520 His tenacious belief, actually, in ordinary white working class Americans and their good faith.

00:43:53.180 And I don't think he ever really lost that.

00:43:55.500 And I've dealt with –

00:43:56.820 The difference, it should be said, between Obama and Hillary Clinton.

00:43:59.980 Hillary Clinton, yes.

00:44:01.020 Bill had it.

00:44:02.400 Bill totally understood that stuff, and he did his best to try and get that Clinton campaign in 2016 to wake up.

00:44:11.500 Yeah, but there's only so much you can do, right?

00:44:13.700 It's like you can –

00:44:14.820 And Hillary represented where the party was going.

00:44:18.820 But, you know, we shouldn't give up on the Democrats either.

00:44:21.120 People like Jim Clyburn, moderate African-American voters, you know, Eric Adams of New York City, there are people dealing with the real world who are actually elected as Democrats who aren't entirely awful in the sense that they aren't entirely woke.

00:44:38.500 A note of hope.

00:44:39.140 They do actually care when African-American kids are shot dead in the street as a function of de-policing, which seems not to concern terribly much some of the more active white people in Black Lives Matter movement.

00:44:53.980 So they see that the price of the delegitimization and demoralization of the police in this country over the last year has been in African-American lives.

00:45:05.080 Up next, a 29-year-old female police officer was shot and killed in Chicago this past weekend.

00:45:10.980 Sixty people were shot there, and that's just in one city alone.

00:45:14.660 Meanwhile, the mayor doesn't want to hear anything about the possible connection between events like that and her anti-cop rhetoric.

00:45:22.600 We'll get into that in one minute.

00:45:24.440 But first, I want to bring you a feature we have here on the show called Sound Up, where we bring you some sort of sound in the news and discuss it.

00:45:31.880 And today, we're going to bring you a clip that was – it's from the Daily Mail.

00:45:36.440 They got their hands on a conversation between the then co-hosts of CBS's The Talk, Sharon Osbourne, and her co-host Elaine Welteroth.

00:45:48.640 Now, these two were part of sort of that viral clip where the cast seemed to be ganging up on Sharon Osbourne for standing up for Piers Morgan, who was being called a racist because he questioned Meghan Markle's story in the Oprah interview, right?

00:46:02.500 Remember this whole thing?

00:46:03.740 Everybody was saying he was a racist.

00:46:04.800 Why? Because he didn't believe Meghan Markle, because he questioned her.

00:46:07.160 That somehow made him a racist, as if the color of your skin entitles you an automatic assumption of truth-telling.

00:46:13.120 So she stood up for him, saying, you know, kind of lay off, and then she came under fire and ultimately lost her job on that show as a result.

00:46:20.640 It was absurd.

00:46:22.440 The whole thing was ridiculous.

00:46:24.540 Well, unbeknownst to me, my crack executive producer, Steve Krakauer, caught this on the Daily Mail.

00:46:31.620 Well, I missed it and called attention to it, and I loved the soundbite, and I loved the story, so he's going to help me do this edition of Sound Up.

00:46:37.980 Steve, hi.

00:46:38.680 So basically, it was these two talking after the on-air dust-up at the on-air pile-on on Sharon Osbourne, like right after that.

00:46:48.120 Exactly, yeah.

00:46:49.040 This takes place as soon as the show goes off the air, and this audio, which I saw the Daily Mail story a couple weeks ago when it came out.

00:46:57.440 Elaine Welteroth sort of distanced herself immediately from it, but I hadn't really listened to the full 12 minutes of it.

00:47:03.380 And I went back over the weekend, and it's really sort of remarkable about not just her talking, apologizing to Sharon, everyone knows you're not a racist.

00:47:12.300 Of course we know you're not a racist, which they didn't say on the air, of course.

00:47:15.520 But also talking about why the conversation went the way it went, which I think, you know, really kind of pulls back the curtain about why, you know, not just this incident,

00:47:25.520 but so many incidents get portrayed a certain way because of, frankly, the fear people have of social media and backlash.

00:47:33.540 Including women of color, like Elaine and her other co-host, Cheryl Underwood, who were going after Sharon on this segment.

00:47:42.120 So here is Elaine and Sharon talking right after the pile-on about Elaine's real feelings.

00:47:48.040 Cheryl and I are held to a different standard by black people and people of color out there who expect us to say something about every racist, anything similar.

00:48:04.260 And it puts us in such a f***ed up position that even if we don't have the information, if we don't even really care, if we don't really want to engage, it feels like a spotlight is on us.

00:48:15.700 It's like America is black America, white America, racist America.

00:48:22.920 It's like they're all watching us and there's this pressure to demonstrate how to talk about this stuff.

00:48:30.260 But we haven't ever been guided on how to f***ing do this.

00:48:35.140 I'm not a D&I expert.

00:48:36.980 I didn't know I was going to come on here and be the...

00:48:39.760 No!

00:48:40.200 I don't know how to do that, actually.

00:48:42.080 Neither do I!

00:48:43.140 I'm just a f***ing old woman that has a lot of stories!

00:48:49.160 I love Sharon.

00:48:49.900 So, first of all, fascinating insight, right?

00:48:52.920 I mean, I appreciate her...

00:48:54.580 I mean, she wasn't saying it publicly, but I appreciate the new information.

00:48:58.040 Yeah.

00:48:58.320 That even some public figures, you know, of color may be feeling what everyone's feeling, which is they don't really want to say anything.

00:49:06.640 She didn't really want to pile on Sharon Osbourne, but she felt like she had to because she felt like some woke warriors of the black community, people who are woke within the black community, were going to come after her for not taking a more aggressive stance.

00:49:21.760 Yeah.

00:49:21.860 Okay?

00:49:21.960 So I appreciate that.

00:49:22.820 But then she totally disowned it when the tape came out.

00:49:25.540 Right, right.

00:49:25.960 I mean, this is someone who, in the segment, she goes, you know, it's the whole thing.

00:49:29.560 We need people to stand up for anti-racism.

00:49:31.880 She kept saying anti-racism is what's being called for not just not being racist, which, you know, and then to go and say, look, I'm not an expert on this.

00:49:39.880 I don't even really care about it.

00:49:42.060 You know, it's incredible.

00:49:43.360 It is, you know, but it's a good reminder for people, too, that when you see sort of these performances, mostly online, but often sometimes on television, too, they're exactly that.

00:49:54.100 It's acting.

00:49:55.260 It is.

00:49:56.160 It's virtue signaling, but it's also acting.

00:49:58.560 And even look back at that tape we heard, you remember this, Steve, where the ESPN anchor, Rachel Nichols, got in trouble for not wanting her black colleague to take over her role at the NBA finals.

00:50:13.140 And she had this private conversation with one of LeBron James' top people.

00:50:17.500 And that guy was like, I'm so exhausted between Me Too and Black Lives Matter.

00:50:22.040 I'm so over this.

00:50:23.400 Yeah, yeah.

00:50:24.360 And he had to apologize, although that part of the story really kind of quickly went away because, you know, the deference for LeBron James in the media is pretty strong that it even extends to his inner circle there.

00:50:35.180 And it was mostly aimed at Rachel Nichols, who, by the way, I follow Rachel Nichols on Twitter.

00:50:39.160 Every tweet she puts out is people calling her a racist in the in the replies.

00:50:44.220 That's just.

00:50:44.800 Wait, what do you.

00:50:45.260 Oh, she puts something out and then everybody replies that she's a racist.

00:50:48.180 Yeah.

00:50:48.480 Yeah.

00:50:48.640 That's that's, you know, just just going forward weeks later.

00:50:51.140 Now she just tweets something.

00:50:52.740 Oh, here's my conversation about this NBA player.

00:50:54.880 OK, everyone just calls her a racist because that's that's what it's like.

00:50:58.620 It's sad, but I do think to some extent you have to get used to that.

00:51:02.520 You know, you can't you can't listen.

00:51:04.600 I mean, Andrew Sullivan, he's been called a racist many times.

00:51:06.880 I've been called a racist many times, especially if you're a white person trying to have a conversation on race and you don't totally sign on to Black Lives Matter and all this anti-racism, you know, BS propaganda.

00:51:16.900 You're going to get called a racist.

00:51:18.120 It isn't pleasant.

00:51:19.620 I do think you kind of have to get to the point where you're like, OK, you know, you can call me whatever you want to call me.

00:51:23.620 I'm just going to say how I feel.

00:51:24.660 Right.

00:51:24.780 And then you find out over time you're not alone.

00:51:27.320 Most normal people don't think that at all.

00:51:29.000 You can't listen to the Twitter commentators.

00:51:31.040 That's the last place you go for real info.

00:51:33.180 Well, that and that's what's so alarming about this.

00:51:36.280 And it is on some level, I guess I feel a little bit bad for someone like Elaine Walteroth, who is saying, I feel this pressure that there's pressure to demonstrate how to talk about this stuff, like saying that if I just don't say anything.

00:51:50.160 I mean, again, talked about this with Andrew, if I don't say anything, I will get called out on Twitter by people and it will make me uncomfortable and it will potentially put my job at risk.

00:51:59.280 You know, she really does feel this, that that the small minority of very loud voices on Twitter have this tremendous power right now.

00:52:07.800 Yeah. And she did to your to your point in a longer clip talk about how she doesn't even really care.

00:52:11.920 Like she's it's not like I really want to talk about it.

00:52:14.280 I just don't have the tools.

00:52:15.780 She pretty much made made clear she didn't care what Sharon Osbourne said.

00:52:19.020 She wasn't like she's busy.

00:52:20.460 She's leading her life like most normal people.

00:52:23.260 It's crazy executives at TV stations like CBS and people on Twitter who control too much of the national dialogue, who try to shame you into saying just exactly the right thing.

00:52:34.060 And, you know, having been on both sides of those people, I can say, I mean, I'm not somebody who's trying to shame anybody, but I've been the target of theirs many times.

00:52:41.340 And now I'm free.

00:52:43.200 I can say life is much better when you're free of them, when you just finally say, I'm not playing your game anymore.

00:52:47.880 Call me what you want.

00:52:49.400 Totally. Yeah.

00:52:50.420 Sharon, he's a sub stack or a podcast.

00:52:52.140 That's right.

00:52:53.820 Wait, Sharon Osbourne.

00:52:55.320 Absolutely.

00:52:55.880 And frankly, sounds like Elaine and Cheryl Underwood may need one, too.

00:52:59.460 There's life outside of CBS, which, by the way, has absolutely no ratings anyway.

00:53:03.460 No one's watching that show.

00:53:04.800 So get out.

00:53:06.180 Get out while you still can.

00:53:08.240 Steve, it's been fun having you on this edition of Sound Up.

00:53:10.680 I appreciate it.

00:53:11.300 Anytime.

00:53:11.820 Thank you.

00:53:12.640 And in one minute, back to Andrew.

00:53:14.640 Just this weekend in Chicago, 60, six zero people were shot in Chicago just this weekend.

00:53:27.700 That's not even to speak about the murder rate for the major cities in America going up over one third, over 35 percent year on year, which is the largest increase we have seen since 1968.

00:53:39.540 And at that point, the murder rate had gone off year, gone up year over year by 13 percent.

00:53:44.240 So we are way up when it comes to murders in the United States.

00:53:48.220 Obviously, it's related to what's gone on with the police.

00:53:50.500 And by the way, in Chicago, there was a young officer, 29 years old, Ella French, shot in pulling over a car.

00:53:57.820 She's dead.

00:53:59.120 Her partner also shot fighting for his life right now.

00:54:01.820 And when Mayor Lightfoot there was asked, hey, do you think the rise in attacks on cops in the city might be related to the anti-cop rhetoric?

00:54:09.460 She put up her hand and said, just stop it.

00:54:11.740 Stop it.

00:54:12.740 It's like, no, you stop it, Mayor Lightfoot.

00:54:14.880 But you and the others who try to demonize police writ large because of some bad cases that have gotten outsized media coverage, you stop it because you're part of the problem.

00:54:25.940 And this weekend, Andrew, Cori Bush, one of these big defund the police folks, she's a Democrat from Missouri, was asked about the fact that notwithstanding the fact she's pushed defund the police at every turn, it turns out she has spent $70,000 of taxpayer money on her own private security.

00:54:49.880 And here she was defending that move.

00:54:52.440 Listen here.

00:54:52.860 I'm going to make sure I have security because I know I have had attempts on my life and I have too much work to do.

00:54:58.760 There are too many people that need help right now for me to allow that.

00:55:02.960 So if I end up spending $200,000, if I spend $10 more on it, you know what?

00:55:09.120 I get to be here to do the work.

00:55:11.240 So suck it up and defunding the police has to happen.

00:55:14.280 OK, so tell it to the 453 murdered people in Chicago just this year.

00:55:20.480 They might have benefited from some police presence too, Cori.

00:55:25.400 The one thing that I found very disturbing about the BLM protests is that, last summer, is that normally these protests can be very angry and very vociferous.

00:55:38.500 For example, if you want to protest police abuse, then it's a perfectly legitimate, admirable in some ways, thing to do and chant your slogans.

00:55:47.080 But they chanted them at the faces of the cops hired to keep them safe.

00:55:55.200 And there's something about that that just I do not believe I'm a civil libertarian.

00:56:00.880 I do not believe police should be should abuse people.

00:56:04.560 And I think it's very important for us to be vigilant about it.

00:56:07.360 I think we should protest it and we should do everything we can to prevent it.

00:56:11.440 But you do not generalize and then take a random cop who's policing your march and shriek at them that they are bastards, pigs, all the other things, screaming at them in the face.

00:56:27.200 I saw one picture of this young white woman, you know, I think a student is yelling at this older black cop, accusing him of being an agent of white supremacy.

00:56:38.160 And it just made me sick, to be honest.

00:56:42.060 The way in which cops in general have been the the definition of bigotry, Megan, is generalizing from a few to everybody.

00:56:53.140 And in that sense, the way that the BLM marches were targeting random police, just people, they had no idea who they were.

00:57:03.500 They might be the best cop in the beat and accusing them of the sins of a handful.

00:57:09.860 That is called bigotry.

00:57:12.140 It is it is the definition of it.

00:57:14.260 And and you can be bigoted towards cops.

00:57:17.020 And when, you know, the New York City Pride March actually prevented gay cops, people who have are out in the job, people who for the last 25 years have had courage and integrity and done their job well as cops while also being gay.

00:57:35.920 They were prevented from marching in the gay pride march in uniform.

00:57:40.380 And again, who are you who are you attacking here?

00:57:46.160 Are you really is this about Derek Chauvin?

00:57:48.340 Fine.

00:57:49.540 But these these people who were unbelievable heroes, who have real integrity and who took on a very hard task.

00:57:57.760 And when these first cops came out in their units, it wasn't easy.

00:58:01.540 They really, you know, old enough to remember when that happened and to see those same cops be treated this way by gay people just infuriated me and infuriated a lot of us in the gays, among the gays.

00:58:17.120 Most of us did not want that to happen.

00:58:18.980 You do polling of the gay public and 80 percent wanted the gay cops to be marching, overruled by a clique of of of of woke fanatics.

00:58:29.600 And it's incredibly depressing because the other thing is that we're seeing around the country, city after city, police morale really collapse.

00:58:40.660 Public denunciations of the cops without any qualifications has consequences.

00:58:47.760 It really does.

00:58:49.500 And the consequences are not being felt by prosperous students at Yale.

00:58:55.680 They're being felt by three year olds in downtown D.C.

00:59:01.060 Shot dead in a barbecue, in a in a in a drive by.

00:59:05.200 Nothing.

00:59:06.740 That brings us to what happened to you.

00:59:09.600 And you may not know this, but I was raving about this piece you wrote when you wrote it and recommended it to all of our listeners.

00:59:15.460 And I've gotten a lot of feedback from people saying thank you for that.

00:59:17.960 Thank you for recommending it because they, too, love what you said.

00:59:21.140 And it I will say, I mean, not to just really lick your boots, Andrew, but like it takes a special gifted mind to write what you wrote.

00:59:28.480 It takes a special ability to process larger cultural events and distill it so clearly like you did in that piece.

00:59:36.300 It's it's the gift that we have of you really reflected in your book out on a limb that you've been writing about our culture for decades and have all that perspective.

00:59:44.280 But unlike a lot of us, you can remember it.

00:59:47.220 It's still in your head and you'd help you frame new events.

00:59:50.820 It's it's why you're such a gift.

00:59:52.900 And you you wrote in that piece.

00:59:55.380 This is just to pick one of the many jewels that's in there.

00:59:58.180 And I'm quoting now, we are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s.

01:00:04.520 This isn't coming from the ground up.

01:00:06.380 It's being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda.

01:00:13.080 And its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown that to the point you just raised.

01:00:19.760 That's exactly it.

01:00:20.980 In the name of anti-racism, in the name of fighting anti-blackness, the woman, the white woman in her Lululemon,

01:00:27.880 will go out there and scream in the face of the black older cop and tell him he's white supremacist adjacent.

01:00:34.320 Right. Or they'll let black and brown kids get killed by the dozens in the inner cities as they take away police who protect these communities

01:00:42.840 because it makes them feel better at night when they go to bed in Brooklyn.

01:00:46.000 Or they will abolish the SAT, which is the most powerful means to find bright, smart, young, poor black kids to get them to college because it's elitist.

01:01:01.000 Because the smartest black kids who otherwise would not be found, who are lost in the system otherwise, don't deserve the same chance as everyone else.

01:01:08.920 Again, part of this is not constantly, we're constantly on the defensive, the sense that under the barrage of being told you're racist until you prove otherwise.

01:01:20.420 We're so busy spluttering in a way and our mouths are kind of opening and we don't, there's no defense of that.

01:01:26.420 It's how did you, when did you last stop beating your wife?

01:01:28.760 You know, it's that the dynamics change, but you can reverse the dynamics and say, and this is what was happening to me, really.

01:01:35.220 I've just been enduring this for, and one night I just was like, I'm just going to say, you know, screw you.

01:01:41.240 You keep telling me I've gone crazy.

01:01:43.260 I haven't gone crazy.

01:01:44.400 I'm still the same person.

01:01:45.900 What happened to you?

01:01:46.640 You've gone crazy.

01:01:47.560 Yes, what happened to you?

01:01:48.840 Because that's what it's based on.

01:01:49.580 Everybody keeps coming up to you and saying, oh, you know what happened?

01:01:52.720 Now you're a white supremacist.

01:01:53.920 Now you're, you know, take off the hood, Andrew, right?

01:01:56.260 And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:01:57.560 I'm the same as I've always been.

01:01:59.120 I know.

01:01:59.440 And that, you know, at some extent because of that, because suddenly every left Twitter person was calling me a white supremacist.

01:02:04.720 And I thought, you know, I can't defend myself against this.

01:02:08.320 It is pure smear job.

01:02:09.780 What I can do is produce a book of my life's work.

01:02:15.300 And you make your mind up.

01:02:16.700 If you read this book and think there's a white supremacist behind it, you're out of your mind.

01:02:21.220 But go ahead.

01:02:22.280 I wanted to say, I wanted this to be something I put out there to say, look, this is my work.

01:02:27.020 This is all it's about.

01:02:29.180 Now it's not, it's not left liberal.

01:02:31.620 It's not.

01:02:32.000 I know that.

01:02:32.800 It never has been.

01:02:33.920 It's an independent conservative voice, but it's, it's also not Republican.

01:02:38.180 And it's also very anti-authoritarian.

01:02:42.720 And it comes really from the enthusiasm of an immigrant to America.

01:02:46.480 I think sometimes those of us who come here, you know, when we hear people say, those of us who immigrated here from other countries, this country is the most racist place on earth.

01:02:55.960 I just feel like saying them, are you out of your mind?

01:02:59.400 Have you been to China?

01:03:01.380 Have you been to Russia?

01:03:02.760 Have you been to Japan?

01:03:04.220 Have you been to rural England?

01:03:06.020 Have you been to rural Germany?

01:03:07.260 Hey, this place is a miracle.

01:03:10.140 The ability of Americans with this level of unprecedented diversity of faith, of background, of religion, of race, of ethnicity, of dialect, of language.

01:03:23.180 It's never been attempted in human history before.

01:03:26.360 And we're still doing okay.

01:03:29.100 You know, you would have predicted, given humankind's basic nature, that we would be in a permanent civil war.

01:03:34.300 But we haven't, because liberalism and our constitution gave us enough air to live together without fighting a zero-sum war.

01:03:43.500 And we believe in a non-zero-sum world in which we can all win, given enough space.

01:03:50.160 And that's all I can say.

01:03:52.520 I've never met.

01:03:54.340 I mean, the English are pretty easygoing people in general.

01:03:57.020 There are bigots and nasty people in every country.

01:03:59.160 So let's just assume that.

01:04:00.880 Okay, they're there.

01:04:01.680 But the way in which Americans routinely, when you look at them, not in the papers, but in real life, interact with each other, deal with each other, as different racial individuals, it's really very impressive to anybody who has any sense of perspective.

01:04:19.020 And it's only if you're 19 years old and been in Yale for three years that you can believe this kind of crap.

01:04:25.160 It's just, it doesn't, it doesn't face the first instant of reality.

01:04:29.480 It disappears immediately.

01:04:31.680 And ask yourself, why isn't there a multicultural, multiracial capital in China?

01:04:36.960 Where are all the minorities in Japan?

01:04:40.460 Where is the interesting minority part of Moscow?

01:04:45.540 No, they're all, they're all exactly where we were a long, long time ago.

01:04:50.180 America's had to evolve, partly because of its diversity.

01:04:53.780 And that's why I'm still, I'm still enthusiastically a citizen of this, these United States, having given up my subjection to her majesty, even though her majesty hasn't ever, ever regarded me as having disappeared.

01:05:08.280 But here's, here's how you put it.

01:05:11.400 This is from Out on a Limb in November of 1996, writing in the Sunday Times.

01:05:17.660 You, you, you write about America and what you think make it, the things that you thought made it such an enduringly liberating place.

01:05:27.900 And this is a quote, America's still a country where the past is anathema.

01:05:32.420 Even when Americans are nostalgic, they're nostalgic for a myth of the future.

01:05:37.460 What matters for Americans in small ways and large is never where you've come from, but where you are going, what you are doing now, or what you are about to become.

01:05:47.160 And that's exactly right.

01:05:49.380 That's exactly right.

01:05:50.400 And I, and I read it with a little bit of a welling in the eyes.

01:05:55.080 Well, feeling the loss, feeling a shift.

01:05:59.120 Yes, but you know, that is still America.

01:06:01.840 And when one political tribe insists that you must go back to the darkest days of your history, not because we need to understand that we do, and we need to face up to it.

01:06:12.880 But to say that that's the meaning of America, the past, the worst of our past, is what defines America.

01:06:21.320 That was what the 1619 Project was about.

01:06:23.840 That is what critical race theory is about.

01:06:26.060 It is about this entire experiment is actually not an experiment in freedom, but an experiment in slavery.

01:06:32.980 That is what they are saying.

01:06:34.440 And it's important to understand that that's what they're saying, because that is why they don't believe in any of the constitutional guarantees of individual freedom that we, that most Americans have believed in.

01:06:45.380 But they're out of touch with the mood of Americans in general.

01:06:48.220 Americans are not fixated on the past.

01:06:51.580 Even if they know something, they want to know, what can we do now?

01:06:55.900 Okay, what can we do now?

01:06:57.620 And the truth is, they're not being told what they can do now except hate themselves, or give up their job, or allow someone else.

01:07:05.460 And that can't work as a political strategy.

01:07:08.480 That's why I'm confident, Megan.

01:07:09.940 All it takes is someone else to say, no, we're looking, we're a people of the future.

01:07:16.200 We will never, we should examine our past.

01:07:18.780 We should make amends.

01:07:19.940 We should, again, they don't, don't, don't let them put you in that position of defending slavery, for Christ's sake.

01:07:26.220 No.

01:07:27.360 But in fact, we are proud of the amount of progress we've made to overcome that.

01:07:32.060 It's not perfect.

01:07:33.180 Obviously not.

01:07:33.920 It was built on a crime.

01:07:35.420 We know that.

01:07:37.220 But what do we do now?

01:07:38.840 And what can we become in the future?

01:07:40.960 And how can we move forward?

01:07:43.000 That's America.

01:07:44.640 It's not, Europe is the opposite.

01:07:47.300 But America is that.

01:07:48.740 And if you lose that, you've lost something incredibly important about the place.

01:07:53.660 It's so different, though, because you're right.

01:07:56.820 I agree with you on Americans in general.

01:07:59.380 But, you know, the woke have seized control of all of our institutions, as you accurately point out repeatedly in this piece and in others.

01:08:06.860 And you write about how you refer to this from, and you use Wesley Yang's term, who you also interviewed on your podcast.

01:08:13.080 And I recommend that to everybody, the successor ideology.

01:08:17.360 And the successor ideology is the next, it's the replacement for liberalism, small L liberalism in this country, meaning due process and freedom of speech and freedom of association.

01:08:27.720 And, you know, all the things that we grew up with as sort of the parameters by which we all agreed to live in this country.

01:08:33.360 And they're getting rid of that slowly, but surely the elites who have taken over these cultural institutions to the objection of most Americans.

01:08:41.740 But most Americans don't fully understand how to make their objections clear, whether they could do that and keep their job, keep their place at a university and so on.

01:08:50.760 And this is what you write.

01:08:51.940 In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence.

01:08:59.020 And you are either fighting this and, quote, on the right side of history, or you are against it and abetting evil.

01:09:04.400 Well, there's no neutrality, no space for skepticism, no room for debate, no space even for staying silent.

01:09:12.160 Contrasted to, as you point out, liberalism, which leaves you alone, whereas the successor ideology will never let go of you.

01:09:18.940 They want to fuck police.

01:09:20.320 You're not allowed to think or feel as you want.

01:09:22.120 You have to think and feel exactly as they want and so on.

01:09:24.840 And I do think it's it's growing there.

01:09:27.880 I don't know.

01:09:28.480 I think finally people are fighting back.

01:09:30.040 But is it too late?

01:09:31.380 Because I feel like the power, the control over these cultural institutions in every area that touches our lives, it feels ubiquitous and sometimes it feels overpowering.

01:09:41.760 I think one way of looking at it is in some ways, sometimes I joke and said that Harvard has finally gone back to its roots.

01:09:48.200 And it's now once again a divinity school teaching students the right religion, teaching them not to say bad words, teaching them in the ways that America has always.

01:09:58.620 America was also founded by a bunch of religious lunatics who were too, too crazy, even for 16th century Reformation England.

01:10:08.840 They were they were they were the people that even the crazy people in Europe couldn't handle.

01:10:14.060 And they landed a little bit from where I'm sitting.

01:10:16.680 And there is a tradition in America of religious fanaticism and and Puritanism in policing the lives of others.

01:10:25.560 This is the only country on Earth that passed a constitutional amendment to prevent people drinking.

01:10:32.740 Right.

01:10:32.980 So look at the past of America in some ways, because what I would argue, because we don't have an established religion like most other countries did when they were founded, when America was founded.

01:10:45.480 It gives everybody it doesn't allow the government to control people's morality in the way that it did in other established churches and states.

01:10:55.440 And so people created their own, which is what made it so vibrant, because religion in America was so self-generated.

01:11:02.620 It wasn't but it wasn't top down.

01:11:04.160 It was very bottom up.

01:11:05.100 The problem with that is that those upwellings of religious purity can become incredibly, you know, you get the Scarlet Letter, you get you get Salem, you get you get the the Lavender Scare.

01:11:22.840 You get the Hollywood Blacklist, that there are these civil movements that aren't generated really by the government.

01:11:30.500 They are out there in the society that is attempting to purify America constantly.

01:11:35.660 And I think you should we should see part of this woke thing as part of America's religious tradition of of of of calling to account people who are sinful and and attempting to control and direct their lives.

01:11:50.840 We look at you. If you look at the way in which 19th century religious fundamentalists who police language to make sure he didn't say anything that could be that could lead to lust or sex or greed or all the rest of it, you can say swear words.

01:12:03.940 And and now look at where the woke police your language.

01:12:06.120 So you don't. It's the same instinct of telling other people how to live their lives in order to save their souls.

01:12:13.960 Yeah. And to be in order to save their souls.

01:12:16.200 And look, I don't need you to save my soul, my soul, whatever it is, is between me and God.

01:12:21.980 And that's another part of America. But we should never underestimate that zeal, that puritanical zeal that's in American history that comes and goes and is currently at a horrible waxing period.

01:12:36.040 Don't leave me now. We got more coming up in 60 seconds.

01:12:38.680 If you look at history and view it through a lens that analogizes this to a religion, how does this end?

01:12:51.020 How do we get back to small L liberalism, free, free speech, free association, due process and all the rest of it?

01:12:58.340 Do we?

01:12:58.900 Well, I think there are maybe I can imagine a couple of ways.

01:13:03.280 One is that it grotesquely overplays its hand in which people are much more aware of its darker side.

01:13:10.260 And I think I'll be honest with you, Megan. I think that has begun to happen a little bit.

01:13:14.900 I think I hear younger people saying, you know, finally rebelling against this.

01:13:20.100 And finally, a generation that's coming up, maybe younger Gen Z, that looks at the way in which their older generation, just above them, just basically took everything their teachers told them and swallowed it whole.

01:13:33.480 I mean, this is not the way students were when I was there.

01:13:35.900 We were constantly against our professors.

01:13:38.580 But no, these people are like children being mothered by these ideological people.

01:13:44.760 So I do think there's an element in which at some point the American urge to say, screw it, we'll come along and undermine this.

01:13:52.640 The other way is it'll be mocked, that humor will take its edge away.

01:13:56.920 And that's why it's so important to defend comedy.

01:14:01.300 It's so important to defend the right of the jester in these moments.

01:14:05.000 And it's also why they're obsessed with humor.

01:14:07.780 Humor is the corrosion, is corrosive of orthodoxy.

01:14:12.760 Because it immediately just gives you another perspective.

01:14:16.900 So humor is another thing.

01:14:18.940 But in my more gloomy moments, I sort of think that the one thing that's missing, which we used to have, and the 21st century has really seen a collapse, was a shared, even if it wasn't completely sincere, but a shared Christian inheritance that understood that everybody was an individual under the eyes of God.

01:14:41.880 And answerable to God alone.

01:14:44.020 And that we are all equal in the eyes of God.

01:14:46.280 Now, that is very basic belief that this part of all Christian beliefs, which is very much founding of America, is a great solvent to tribalism.

01:14:57.800 And just as Jesus was, in fact, the first anti-tribalist, the first person who was of his tribe and said, no, the other tribe is just as good, sometimes better.

01:15:09.320 That was a revolution in human consciousness.

01:15:14.000 From that came Europe.

01:15:15.240 From that came the possibility of the individual soul.

01:15:18.020 From that comes individual rights, this notion that the individual is the most important person, most important factor.

01:15:24.460 Not families, not nations, not tribes, individuals.

01:15:28.140 And take that away.

01:15:30.480 Take that infrastructure of thought and spirituality and understanding of the world away as Christianity has collapsed in America.

01:15:39.880 And you may have taken away the foundations of the liberal order.

01:15:44.240 And without realizing it.

01:15:46.160 And, of course, when you've done that, people seek meaning elsewhere.

01:15:52.240 They create new religions.

01:15:54.660 I mean, if you looked at that summit, it was so fascinating.

01:15:57.920 Because you could see a spontaneous new religion taking shape.

01:16:02.540 People need it.

01:16:03.860 So they create it if they don't have it.

01:16:05.800 We used to have it as part of our inheritance.

01:16:07.920 And we thought, ah, fuddy-duddy Christianity.

01:16:10.400 It's all.

01:16:11.160 We don't need it anymore.

01:16:12.060 And we take it away.

01:16:13.080 And suddenly, we begin to realize what we only realized what we had until it was going.

01:16:20.520 And that's my concern, which is why I honestly believe.

01:16:23.500 And I know this sounds cheesy or pious.

01:16:25.780 But I do actually think that the only real long-term project to rescue liberalism is a revival of Christianity.

01:16:34.720 Wow.

01:16:35.760 That's my next book.

01:16:37.080 That makes sense.

01:16:37.780 No, no, no.

01:16:38.260 I love that.

01:16:39.100 Because even I, as I am Christian, I'm Catholic.

01:16:42.060 But I've said openly, I'm not so great about getting to the church these days.

01:16:45.600 But I've been making an effort.

01:16:47.240 I have been making an effort recently to get there and bring my kids.

01:16:50.900 And I will say, obviously, I'm not woke.

01:16:53.980 But whenever I leave, I'm always resolved to try harder, right?

01:16:58.900 To be more generous in my opinions, in my lens that I look at other people with.

01:17:03.720 You know, to sort of get back to kindness, forgiveness.

01:17:07.020 And that's what I mean by morality, not judgment of others, but non-judgment, support, love, understanding that we're here for a limited time, understanding of what Jesus wanted for me, wanted for the world.

01:17:19.260 You drift too far from that.

01:17:21.540 And no matter, even if you're not woke, your behavior can sort of stray from where you want it to be.

01:17:26.980 It was just a good reminder to me that it does matter.

01:17:29.080 Even if you're not totally connecting with the hymns, with what the priest is saying on any given day, just being with your fellow citizens, standing, kneeling, sitting, peace, the communion, all of it does something positive to you.

01:17:39.860 Yes, it absolutely does.

01:17:42.280 It also, you know, our lives are full of choices.

01:17:45.900 And that's almost defined by, that's almost a definition of freedom.

01:17:50.840 We choose everything.

01:17:52.580 And we go to, and that's wonderful in so many ways.

01:17:55.740 We're empowering and we have an extraordinary number of things to choose.

01:17:59.880 But at some point, we also want not to choose.

01:18:02.380 We need as humans to just obey and to submit in some way.

01:18:06.380 And the safest, best, and psychologically and spiritually most productive way of doing that is going to a church in silence and kneeling and accepting that you're not everything.

01:18:19.180 There's something greater than you and something that you're now required to do because you're just a human being at that service.

01:18:25.700 Stand up now.

01:18:26.880 Kneel down.

01:18:28.240 Bow your head.

01:18:28.900 It's a place where there are silences, where no one is behind the camera saying, pick that up, pick that pace up.

01:18:36.520 We can't have that because it's giving you a different understanding of what time is too, which is time is not about being productive in the next hour.

01:18:46.220 Time is about spending time with God.

01:18:48.520 And also, by inference, it is spending time with those you love and the people around you and not living abstractly in your head or constantly around your own wants and needs.

01:19:02.440 And just, we're human, so we forget it.

01:19:05.200 And we want to run our lives.

01:19:06.680 And we like power.

01:19:07.520 We like choice.

01:19:08.380 But the discipline to go every week and to say, nope, there's something else.

01:19:12.960 I need to remember that.

01:19:13.900 And, you know, that's also what having Sunday, the Sabbath, did, which is also gone.

01:19:21.380 We had a whole day where shops weren't open, where choice ended, when you actually had a day of quiet and rest.

01:19:29.940 And you can trace, I think, I know this sounds very fogey-ish.

01:19:34.660 And, of course, I'm one of these people that's happy I can go out and get, you know, something on a Sunday afternoon.

01:19:40.400 But we're missing something, missing something important, a moment of calm, a quiet.

01:19:47.520 Our world is so full of noise.

01:19:52.680 So there's a piece in the book called I Used to Be a Human Being, which is about my, basically, my breakdown after blogging for 15 years, after living online for 15 years, and how this is not a way of really living.

01:20:06.320 That you think, oh, I'm just doing all my online stuff on top of my life.

01:20:11.660 It's all a game.

01:20:13.240 And then at some point you realize, no, I'm not.

01:20:15.780 This is my life now.

01:20:17.600 I don't have those hours.

01:20:19.300 I wasn't with that person.

01:20:21.100 I wasn't with my kid.

01:20:22.940 Even when I was with my kid, I was on my phone.

01:20:27.200 And that wears you down.

01:20:32.020 It's not good for people.

01:20:34.100 It's just not good for the way we live.

01:20:35.800 And so mitigating the technological challenges to spirituality and to sanity is also incredibly important.

01:20:42.900 That technological shift.

01:20:45.160 I mean, I also think it's true that the way in which social media has altered the context of our discourse is incredibly bad.

01:20:55.100 And I feel enormous concern about that, to create a communication structure that is designed to distract us and to make us emotional and reactive.

01:21:08.620 It's the worst context for any kind of public discourse at all, which is why, you know, on Substack.

01:21:17.140 We're actually trying to have a place where people can disagree, but at length, with the context and nuance necessary, and which we used to have in the old blogosphere when we started.

01:21:29.060 I was going to say, I was going to say, you've always been doing that, but I admire that, too.

01:21:33.180 I can relate to that, just having left Cable News after, you know, 14 years or so.

01:21:37.660 Cable and Facebook are kind of in the same business, you know, foment rage, deep emotional swings that no one really gives a damn whether it's healthy for the participant.

01:21:50.520 What they give a damn about is, will the advertisers pay for this particular audience?

01:21:55.840 And it feels, I don't know, somehow cleaner to not be doing that, right?

01:22:01.040 To be in a business that allows for nuance and more fruitful discussion and intellectual massaging and not just like, you know, you on Fox News.

01:22:10.800 I don't know.

01:22:11.380 I think I don't know whether the whether Roger Ailes would have allowed that and could have had the discussion that we had today.

01:22:17.180 Right.

01:22:17.800 I love.

01:22:18.360 Almost certainly not. It would be. They don't want to complicate things for people.

01:22:22.320 That's right. That's right. And it got to the point where somebody's layer of humanity.

01:22:27.440 Yeah. Or that you have some doubts about something. No doubts are allowed.

01:22:31.460 One things I make a point of doing every week on on the weekly dish is I always run dissents of to the column that I ran the last week.

01:22:41.820 And I am forced to answer the substantive, well-crafted arguments against me.

01:22:47.800 In other words, I'm not just having an easy hit, an easy riposte or something.

01:22:52.800 My my colleague at the dish, a man called Chris Boda, he edits it so I don't rig it.

01:22:57.600 And I am put on the spot every week. And you know what people if cable news did that cable news did.

01:23:03.180 OK, now now we're going to do with all the toughest things that people have said about what I said last night and go through them and defend yourself.

01:23:09.160 So, you know, I think people will find that interesting.

01:23:11.760 No, instead, what we do is not we because I honestly I pride myself on not having done this, but they'll put up a liberal shill, right?

01:23:18.500 An empty suit who you can just beat up on easily.

01:23:21.380 I loved always putting on really smart liberals against really smart conservatives and letting them go at it.

01:23:26.620 The frustration was they only had three minutes to do it.

01:23:29.060 OK, nothing gets solved in three minutes.

01:23:31.680 Right. But the just the gesture to understanding that we don't know everything.

01:23:38.100 And that more views are always better.

01:23:40.680 Yeah. Right.

01:23:41.520 And a contrary view is not. I mean, if it's in good faith, it's a stupid, silly one.

01:23:46.500 Fine. But if it's a good faith, real critique, don't treat don't immediately impugn the motives of the person making it, which is the usual move.

01:23:54.740 Don't impugn the identity of the person making it.

01:23:57.040 Oh, well, you're a woman. You would say that or you're a man.

01:23:59.000 You would say that or you're Jewish. You would say that or whatever.

01:24:01.960 Actually, take the argument seriously.

01:24:03.700 I mean, and if it has some cogency to it, it's going to improve your point of view to nuance your point of view to integrate that idea or that point into your own position.

01:24:16.160 What's there to lose? What's there to lose, of course, is our pride.

01:24:19.820 And and so we create this thing called Twitter where our pride is the most important thing.

01:24:24.360 How many followers do we have? How can we appeal to these people?

01:24:27.180 And it's it's it's corrosive, as you say.

01:24:29.940 But I again, rather than getting too depressed, I see examples of writers resisting this, of leaving the mainstream media, of starting these new ventures like you're doing, like like Bari is doing or people like Matt Taiby or Glenn Greenwald or these people who are setting up new forums.

01:24:47.820 And you know what? We are not collapsing in traffic this year.

01:24:51.280 We are going up.

01:24:52.540 And and and and I feel the energy coming into the blog from the sense that we are in a period.

01:25:01.020 It does matter. It does matter how we debate and argue right now, because these are important issues.

01:25:06.580 And I do feel a slight revival in energy in again against this.

01:25:12.500 Oh, it's a great. I do.

01:25:14.080 I wish to leave it. Honestly, Andrew, thank you for your for your insight, for your analysis, for your wisdom, your ability to put it in terms that we can understand.

01:25:22.020 Andrew Sullivan, a big, beautiful, brilliant bear.

01:25:27.100 No, I don't have enough back here.

01:25:29.240 I I'm not still on the circuit training.

01:25:32.020 OK, good to hear.

01:25:33.980 No, I'm an I'm a I'm a daddy now.

01:25:36.040 I'm a dad. I've turned into a daddy.

01:25:37.360 That's what happens to you when you've turned 50, whether you like it or not.

01:25:41.880 It's not when they first start calling you daddy.

01:25:44.660 I'm like, oh, please.

01:25:45.800 No.

01:25:47.040 But there I am.

01:25:47.940 It's a it's a fate, not a calling.

01:25:50.220 It was a pleasure.

01:25:51.580 Good luck with it out on a limb and everybody should go buy it.

01:25:59.280 Don't miss tomorrow's show because we are going to take you in depth on the eviction moratorium.

01:26:04.280 The Biden administration has admitted they don't have the authority to do this.

01:26:07.680 They admitted that right before they did it.

01:26:09.660 And they're basically just flouting the law.

01:26:11.280 I mean, it's really kind of insane.

01:26:13.360 They're doing it anyway.

01:26:14.440 And these same people who told us that Trump was behaving in extra legal ways don't seem

01:26:19.220 to care.

01:26:19.740 Right. Because they like the cause, not evicting people who can't pay their rent.

01:26:23.240 Well, why?

01:26:23.660 Why can't they pay their rent?

01:26:24.600 What about the landlords?

01:26:25.400 These are not all wealthy Mr.

01:26:27.260 Potter types from It's a Wonderful Life.

01:26:29.920 These are hardworking people who are trying to pay their own bills who didn't understand

01:26:32.800 they'd be subsidizing somebody else's life forever as a result of the pandemic.

01:26:37.160 So we're going to take a hard look at it tomorrow with two people directly involved in this decision

01:26:42.680 and in the aftermath and the effects of this decision.

01:26:45.960 And I think you're going to enjoy this discussion.

01:26:48.260 See you then.

01:26:48.720 Don't forget to subscribe, download, rate, and give us a review while you're there.

01:26:52.980 Go to Apple Podcast Reviews.

01:26:54.740 Let me know your thoughts.

01:26:55.860 Still reading them all.

01:26:56.740 Still enjoying them all.

01:26:57.560 And still getting great guest suggestions from you guys.

01:27:00.340 Talk to you tomorrow.

01:27:02.160 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

01:27:04.200 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:27:09.140 The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

The Megyn Kelly Show - August 09, 2021

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

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