00:01:26.740Well, there you go. It's just a small...
00:01:29.640Right, let's end the interview. We can just exchange locations.
00:01:32.140So I grew up there. I went to Rygate Grammar. I was sat next to Keir Starmer for five years. And we notoriously fought each other every day on the 428 bus. He was a lefty communist. I was a young Thatcherite. And we went at it.
00:01:49.100I mean, that's another part of my story. Then I got a scholarship to go to Oxford, studied history, got a scholarship to go to Harvard, did political philosophy there. And then I got an internship at the New Republic magazine, which at that time was kind of like The Spectator in London, or fusion of The Spectator and New Statesman, which was an incredible opportunity for me to understand America. I fell in love with the place.
00:02:14.420I went back and forth, did my PhD. Then, surprise, surprise, at 26, they made me the editor of The New Republic, which I did for five more years, which was an exhilarating, if crazy, experience.
00:02:27.6802000, I started my blog, Daily Dish. I now have a substack, The Weekly Dish. I worked for The Atlantic and New Republic and New York magazine, New York Times magazine.
00:02:39.720And I was the first person to really put marriage equality on the map, I guess, and wrote the first book in defense of marriage equality for gays and lesbians, called Virtually Normal.
00:02:53.060And later I wrote a book called The Conservative Soul.
00:02:57.260My dissertation was on Oakshart, the British conservative philosopher who died a year after I finished my dissertation.
00:03:06.420Is there a causal link there? Is that what you're suggesting?
00:03:08.320Yes. One last look at my dissertation. He thought it was all over.
00:03:12.640It was actually the only second dissertation ever written about him.
00:03:16.840And he actually invited me at the end of it to talk to him in his cottage in Dorset, which was really a wonderful, wonderful day to meet your idol, to meet the person you've been reading for a year and a half.
00:03:30.220And Andrew, as I hear you talking, I hear someone who is in love with journalism, who has spent a lifetime in this profession.
00:03:39.700I'm afraid if you were to poll the general public, I would suggest that that love is not currently widely shared.
00:03:46.860And we've seen over a long period of time now that some strange things have been happening in the world of mainstream media and journalism in particular.
00:03:56.080What is going on, in your opinion, in that world?
00:03:59.960Well, it's been in a serious crisis, I think, for quite a while.
00:04:05.640Well, my own experience with what happened is that it kind of shifted in the mid-20-teens, something around 2014, 2015, something seemed to happen.
00:04:17.040I think it was a combination of two things.
00:04:18.780One, the media was in trouble economically.
00:04:22.520I mean, they were terrified of going under.
00:04:24.300They couldn't afford what they had been doing.
00:04:27.540So they then reached out, and they were terrified by the web.
00:04:30.400So then they reached out to young college graduates to come and help them out.
00:04:35.980And they let a hell of a lot of them in.
00:04:38.340And they were all freshly indoctrinated in various elements of critical theory and had the habits of elite college campuses.
00:04:46.880And they swiftly began to turn newsrooms into the equivalent of these nightmarish college campuses.
00:04:54.300Which have a kind of reign of terror, fear of wrongthink, fear of contrary ideas, a belief that speech itself, writing itself, words somehow are harmful, that they are the equivalent of sticks and stones.
00:05:10.380And the dynamic emerged in these newsrooms in which these younger staffers would be incredibly absolutist about what they were demanding, wanted a totally different staff based on different gender, sex, race, etc., etc.
00:05:28.780Wanted stories written again now, without any attempt at objectivity.
00:05:33.580The goal was to change the world through the methods of critical theory.
00:05:38.400And the desperate, aging, allegedly liberal editors caved.
00:05:45.680In fact, there's something about calling an older liberal person in America a racist that will make them do anything you want them to do.
00:05:54.900And once they figured this out, once they figured out the absolute insecurity of this older generation, they just went to town.
00:06:05.220I mean, I personally, I was at New York Magazine.
00:06:08.180I went back into the MSM after being an independent blogger for a long time.
00:06:11.960And I began to write what I thought about some of the sort of excessive tactics of, for example, the Me Too movement.
00:06:24.000Not that I was in any way opposed to changing the atmosphere about sexual harassment and treatment of women in the workplace, which I supported entirely.
00:06:32.860But the notion that you could just simply slander people without evidence as rapists and sexual assault artists without any actual proof struck me as terrible.
00:06:43.860So I wrote pieces saying I disagree with that.
00:06:46.260And sure enough, pretty soon, a young swath of staffers decided that simply publishing my columns created an unsafe work environment for them and went to HR to get me, to get rid of me.
00:07:05.260I work at home, hundreds of miles away from where they are.
00:07:07.760But I was creating an unsafe work environment because my ideas were harming them.
00:07:11.880Now, this went on for a while until eventually the summer of 2020, when I could not and would not praise the rioting after the BLM movement or the violence.
00:07:23.820And when I wanted to write a column criticizing the violence, they asked me not to write.
00:07:46.900I don't have to worry anymore about putting my foot in it.
00:07:51.020If readers don't like what they're reading, they can always unsubscribe.
00:07:55.660Every week to create a sort of atmosphere of liberal open debate, I have dissents, strong, powerful dissents against what I wrote the previous week, which I am required to answer, which are selected by my colleague Chris.
00:08:22.580But you see this dynamic in the newsrooms.
00:08:26.980You see an urge for what they call moral clarity, which means abandoning any pretense of presenting both sides.
00:08:35.040You have a younger generation using journalism as a form of social justice activism, not actual relaying of news or a diversity of opinion.
00:08:44.920Now, I happen to think at this point, things may be beginning to shift back.
00:08:49.500And I think we've seen some signs this week of that actually happening.
00:08:54.580The Washington Post, which is one of the wokest of the woke, they finally had it and fired one of the most troublemaking and passionate and fanatical social justice activists on staff.
00:09:07.940After she had engaged in a week long to raid against her colleagues, accusing them of many, many different crimes, but especially that of being white, which was apparently the one thing, the one thing you can't, you're allowed to demonize people for.
00:09:24.120So eventually she was fired as of Friday, last Friday, which would be early June.
00:09:30.440And I sense a little bit of a vibe shift.
00:09:36.560I sense the fact that readers are really not only kind of offended by some of this screechy, partisan, subjective journalism in replacement of others, but abhorred by it.
00:09:49.820I mean, you look at the New York Times and you'll see a dozen different columns.
00:09:54.920So basically they're all saying the same thing.
00:09:57.520And ultimately this has kind of led people to move away.
00:10:01.020And has led to the great flourishing of Substack.
00:10:04.500And the existence of Substack and independent source information is beginning, I believe, to affect the judgment of some of these other organizations.
00:10:17.720The thing that I always find, and let's look at the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos,
00:10:23.320a man who has been, in my view, legitimately criticized for the treatment and the conditions of the people in his factories and depots.
00:10:35.060And we've actually had independent journalists come on and criticize him and criticize the practices of Amazon.
00:10:41.780Yet these people who describe themselves as woke work for the Washington Post and they see no problem at all in working for Jeff Bezos,
00:10:51.040whereas the traditional old school left that I used to identify with, they wouldn't work for him because they would say your treatment of workers is incorrect, wrong, inhuman, whatever word they wouldn't want to use to describe it.
00:11:31.420And of course, Jeff Bezos, by going woke in this way, of course, I'm not entirely sure how fully aware he is of what's going on in his media properties.
00:11:41.400But this is the dynamic, isn't it, of woke capitalism, is that you distract people with this identity politics in order to justify and defend your own exploitative, sometimes incredibly almost Victorian work policies.
00:12:04.800But now you're a good person because you're politically correct and you are woke and you have more African-Americans on your staff and you run stories that are full of references to white supremacy and the rest of it.
00:12:18.660So it's a kind of laundering, as it were, of a certain kind of economic inequality, of a protest against that in favor of this identity politics.
00:12:30.960And that's a struggle that the left is going to have to figure out for itself.
00:12:49.360They're talking about how do you protect workers of any race.
00:12:54.140And I think there's a sense that there's been a complete distraction from that.
00:12:58.340And that's beginning to be why, when you look at the polling in America and you look at the election results of the last few years, you are seeing a really quite interesting shift towards the Republicans from minority groups.
00:13:12.160Because the best example of luxury white woke beliefs hurting African-Americans, for example, is the defund the police movement and the decision to demonize the cops in America.
00:13:25.360The people who have suffered from that, who have suffered from the drawback of policing, are black, Latino, often immigrant communities that are facing crime every day on their own streets.
00:13:39.660Crime that has soared in the last two years, while white wealthy liberals in their gated estates tell them it's good for them, that we need to overhaul our white supremacist system.
00:13:53.740The murder rate has gone up staggeringly and it's concentrated in these particular areas of poverty, which tend to overlap with racial discrimination too.
00:14:05.540And so you're beginning to see, I think, a real shift underneath politics in this country.
00:14:11.020And I think the whole notion that, for example, the Democrats will ultimately win in America because they represent the non-white and the non-white are growing proportionally, is slowly being dismantled as an idea.
00:14:24.800We can see that Latinos are no different than previous waves of immigrants who just want to assimilate, want to take part in the American dream, didn't come here from places like Venezuela or Cuba to set up socialism.
00:15:20.720And so instead of saying Latino or Latina, they have to say Latinx.
00:15:25.860And, you know, and you have Biden, Joe Biden, saying Latinx in a speech.
00:15:31.860And I'm like, that dude has never said that word in private in the entire history of his life.
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00:16:07.440Well, not least because he hasn't existed for most of his life.
00:16:10.640But, Andrew, it's interesting to hear you describe yourself as a conservative.
00:16:14.540Because when I read your column, I get quite a strong liberal bend from a lot of what you say, too.
00:16:21.960And, of course, during the Trump era, you were widely accused of having Trump derangement syndrome and all of that.
00:16:30.020So what do you mean when you describe yourself as a conservative?
00:16:33.580Someone who believes in avoiding drastic ideological change, someone who believes in the organic development of society, someone who believes in the defense of institutions, of the rule of law, of tradition, generally speaking.
00:16:52.140And that is why a conservative defense of Trump is simply impossible.
00:16:59.360He was a direct radical threat to very basic democratic norms.
00:17:04.100We now know this person tried to foment a – essentially preventing a peaceful transfer of power uniquely anti-institutional, radical, subversive attack on the practices that make a country work and that define a country.
00:17:26.140When someone is attacking the very heart of a liberal democracy, openly boasting –
00:17:31.140Andrew, what do you mean specifically?
00:17:32.520Sorry to interrupt because Francis and I haven't followed the hearings that are going on right now particularly closely.
00:17:38.600When you're talking about him undermining these institutions, what do you mean specifically?
00:17:42.580I mean, insisting that the rule of law applies only to him, that if the rule of law goes against him, he will fire the attorney general.
00:17:51.100I mean, clearly plotting to have electors from the states that had already selected Joe Biden to reverse their votes, actually helping organize violence to stop the passing of power from Trump to Biden.
00:18:09.720This is staggering, sending violent, armed men into the sacred citadel of American democracy to bully and coerce people into reversing a legitimate election result.
00:18:27.720There is no greater crime to be done against a liberal democracy.
00:18:33.060And there may be – and there are, and I've said too, that there are some issues that Trump raised that are important, that liberals have failed to raise.
00:18:43.740For example, obviously immigration, the effect of free trade on whole sections of the American society.
00:18:51.440These are things that he was right to point out, and he deserves credit for pointing those things out, but that cannot legitimize the way he conducted himself in office, his attempt to undermine our democracy, which places him uniquely as the most destructive president in American history.
00:19:11.880And I say that as a conservative, no conservative wants to destroy the institutions of liberal democracy or wants to impugn the entire system as a fraud.
00:19:43.000And I think there are two counterpoints to what you're saying.
00:19:45.620The first is, yes, Donald Trump was a radically transformational candidate, but the reason people voted for him was that they felt that the status quo was not working.
00:19:53.800And the Republican Party, such as it was, this hold, the chokehold that the two parties had without offering actual genuine change that people were concerned about, that is why Trump was elected.
00:20:05.800And so in attempting to deliver some of that radical change, he was being democratic, the first point.
00:20:10.840And the second point, you know, I agree with you that I think sending or encouraging people or even allowing people to be in a position to storm the Capitol in the way that they did was attempting to interfere with the democratic process.
00:21:04.800There is nothing that can be equated with an attempt to undermine knowingly, because now we know that every single person around him told him he'd lost this election.
00:21:14.560He still went on to attempt to, and could have, if he'd in any way succeeded, destabilized this country massively and would have welcomed that destabilization.
00:21:26.340There is no restraining instinct in Donald Trump.
00:21:30.500He would destroy anything rather than concede he was wrong.
00:21:35.560He is manically going around the country still insisting not only he won the election, but he won it by a landslide.
00:21:42.120He is trying to get a political party to invalidate the results of a democratic election.
00:21:48.800This is so far outside anything acceptable that it must be forbidden.
00:21:55.560He is a stain on American history and on the American constitution.
00:22:04.640You can't let someone like that in a position of power.
00:22:07.580We were lucky to get away with it for four years.
00:22:09.740In fact, we weren't lucky because he nearly destroyed the whole system.
00:22:13.420You can be and should be, in my view, a great critic of the way that liberal elites, neoliberal elites, right and left, forgot a lot of human beings in our society and enacted policies and refused to correct them that hurt people.
00:22:28.760You can say that some of the issues that Trumpism represents should be represented and I think the Republican Party is moving in that direction, but you can't get around this crazy person.
00:22:40.940You know, human, individual humans do affect history and I do think he's the most uniquely dangerous person who's arrived in American politics in my lifetime by easily.
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00:24:15.480And what would you say to the, this is my view on Trump, that Trump is a system of the fact that the system no longer works for the average American voter.
00:24:29.760There are huge swathes of people in America who look at left and right and go, this isn't working.
00:24:39.140You represent the interests of big business and corporations and whoever I vote for, I'm going to end up in the same position.
00:24:47.280So it doesn't matter if I vote for the crazy radical, because even if the system goes to pot, I'm going to still be in the exact same place.
00:24:55.460Yes, except you'll notice that Biden, for example, has largely adopted most of the trade policies that Trump pursued.
00:25:06.660Biden has pulled out of Afghanistan, something that Trump promised but never did.
00:25:11.280There are continuities here because policy issues have shifted.
00:25:15.080And you'll see Republicans themselves actually prepared to engage in some minimal redistribution, some controls on trade.
00:26:44.980But I don't believe the whole system is finished.
00:26:48.900I do think that in America there are plenty of ways in which this can be changed through democratic elections.
00:26:55.520We're seeing, for example, all over America school board elections in which some of the craziest indoctrination that's being proposed is being reined back in by ordinary people using democracy.
00:27:05.460We're going to have an election, a midterm election very soon, which will probably show, I think, a Republican landslide in both houses, forcing Biden to some correction.
00:27:15.600I do not believe that a system that has been through rocky patches but has survived over 200 years is to be junked because we've hit a moment where our elites have been out of sync with what most people want.
00:27:30.380That is to be expected in any country in periods of time.
00:27:33.780Trump deserves credit for breaking that.
00:27:35.680But now we have to move forward with our system, find a Republican who could represent them and not be insane and hostile to our very democratic system, and a Democrat who can possibly be what Biden said he was going to be, which is take the country back to the center.
00:27:54.540And I think the center in America is there still.
00:28:05.180And look, we weren't actually planning to spend a huge amount of time talking about Trump, but it comes back a little bit to the conversation we were having about journalism, because another perhaps point that I would agree with Francis, where Trump was a bit of a symptom, is he was really the only guy who could survive what journalists do to Republican leaders when they run for office, which is he's the only guy who could survive being called a racist, a sexist, a homophobe and all those things and still win.
00:28:35.180Because everybody else just gets labeled as a Nazi, because everybody else just gets labeled as a Nazi and they never recover.
00:28:40.020And that was, again, one of the points that I thought was accurate about Trump is I thought he was a very toxic personality and you could see it.
00:28:49.420You know, we were actually sitting in just a quick anecdote.
00:28:52.220We were sitting around in the studio on our YouTube.
00:28:54.740We were watching something on YouTube and without us knowing the next video came on.
00:28:59.000And it was like a compilation of Trump put-downs.
00:29:02.480And I think a lot of people were watching it with like enjoying the, but it was all about him like going, go back to mummy or something.
00:29:15.380I just wonder whether a more moderate person was able to break through the chokehold that the liberal mainstream media have on like deciding whether you're an evil bigot or not.
00:29:28.880Well, it all depends whether people buy that description.
00:29:31.740And over the long time, unfortunately, Trump in some ways was not innocent of some of the things he was charged with.
00:29:38.040Whereas if you look at someone like Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, who won an election.
00:30:28.980They already have them, actually, under Bostock.
00:30:31.400We need to respect transgender people.
00:30:33.640But we shouldn't, at the same time, forget that there are biological differences.
00:30:40.140And in some areas, a few, that makes a difference, like sports.
00:30:44.100And we should let, we should be extremely careful in having children make lifelong decisions about whether they're a boy or a girl before they've even hit puberty.
00:30:57.280Now, you are more credible, I believe, if you can make those nuanced distinctions, defend trans rights, but engage some of the difficult questions that they bring up, than if you just become this person who says that all these trans people are just mentally ill, making shit up.
00:31:22.280And I think that the nuanced message is actually has more traction in the country at large, because I actually don't think most people hate trans people.
00:31:36.880They're uncomfortable, but they can come to terms with it.
00:31:39.920And generally speaking, they support the rights of trans people.
00:31:42.400They have issues with their kids being taught at the age of three that they can choose to be a boy or a girl or both or neither or something else entirely, like an alien.
00:32:37.000I'm talking to you from Provincetown, which is about as gay as you can get.
00:32:42.380Yes, lesbians and gay men live here happily alongside each other.
00:32:46.520But the way that oil and water can be mixed up together, you know, they have completely different ways of life, very different subcultures.
00:32:56.840Because one of them, almost all men, you know, with the effect of being a man quadrupled, which means you try getting a longstanding monogamous relationship.
00:33:08.820You know, straight men can't manage it.
00:33:11.120When you have other men in the relationship, good luck.
00:33:15.140Similarly, there are no big STD outbreaks among lesbians.
00:33:18.440We're not worried about them getting monkeypox right now, because they have a completely different way of life.
00:33:24.440And transgender people are a completely different set altogether.
00:33:28.900The transgender experience could not be more different than the gay experience.
00:33:36.680When you're a little gay boy, you're growing up, it seems to me one of the most important things you need to do is to own the fact that you are a boy, you are a man, and you can love other men.
00:33:47.320If you're a trans kid, the important thing is disowning that you're a man or a boy.
00:33:53.500And if you give the same message to gay boys and trans boys, you're actually engaging in some horrible kind of conversion therapy for gay kids.
00:34:05.240The last thing you want to say to a gay boy, for example, is, you know, maybe you're a girl.
00:34:12.180When you hear it that way, doesn't it affect you?
00:34:50.460And it's so true because when I was a teacher and towards the end of my, of my stint as a teacher, my, the last time I taught in a school was 2020.
00:34:58.880And I'd been teaching at this point for around, well, about 12 years.
00:35:04.700And kids now started to identify as, you know, trans or gender fluid, et cetera.
00:35:11.080And I remember I taught one boy and I got informed that he's, he's seeing himself as trans.
00:35:17.060And I started teaching him and I go, oh, no, you're not.
00:35:19.960You're just gay and you're just having to come to terms with it.
01:02:04.320I went anywhere anybody asked me to make an argument respectfully.
01:02:07.940And, you know, we did that for a couple of decades and we persuaded the middle and we won.
01:02:14.320And, and we should remember how we did that.
01:02:17.940We did do, we did not do that by hating on people.
01:02:21.720We, we did that by assuming good faith.
01:02:24.220And, and, and, and, and front that also, you see, the other thing about this is that if you're really secure as a gay person, you're not constantly waging war on the world of everybody who might not be totally okay with you.
01:02:39.700It's the fundamentally insecure, the young and the activists who actually believe that they have some duty to do something that they cannot do because it's already done.
01:03:09.560I'm so glad we had you on the show to talk about this aspect of things because it's not, it's not a position you hear very often.
01:03:15.840And I just think that is such a powerful way of looking at the world, not only in terms of the political issues that we talk about, but actually at the individual level.
01:03:23.600And it doesn't apply just to gay people.
01:03:45.560As you know, the last question we always ask is, what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be?
01:04:44.980Certainly the gay press barely talks about it.
01:04:47.120Uh, it's implicated in a whole bunch of things, uh, that you can see.
01:04:54.220I mean, for example, it's the real story of Matthew Shepard.
01:04:57.900Not that he was assaulted by two complete redneck strangers who hated gays, but he was assaulted by his own boyfriend who was on meth for five days.
01:05:07.820Um, that makes much more sense of the situation than, than these other things.
01:05:12.100And, and, and, but the ability and the need to suppress this reality, because it's dirty laundry, because it's telling the truth about problems that we have, it's not helping gay men either.
01:05:21.480Um, and I really would like to see this treated with the seriousness it deserves.
01:05:30.300I don't know if you have, you have, uh, well, maybe you're more informed than I am, but why is it happening?
01:05:36.400Why is it specifically in the gay community?
01:05:39.120It's a good question because there are other communities, for example, in America, it's very much a sort of, um, working class, white, rural epidemic as well.
01:05:48.020Um, it's, it's, it's, it's used in conjunction with sex.
01:05:52.440It's apparently a fantastic sort of, uh, uh, experience temporarily when you're on this thing, you feel great and powerful and all the rest of it, you have, you have sex for days on end.
01:06:04.580Um, and people talk about that experience as super wonderful and they can't go back to having sex without it.
01:06:22.360It reminds me of the early days of AIDS in which people refused to actually acknowledge because they were scared that the facts of the matter would alienate people from gay people.
01:06:32.760Uh, well, we are alienating ourselves.
01:06:35.920We are committing suicide in a way as a community and you can barely see a word written about it.
01:06:42.960Um, and, and I think again, it's partly.
01:06:48.560Well meant, but cowardly, cowardly, not to air dirty laundry about minorities when in fact that dirty laundry needs to be aired in order to help minorities, in order to have minorities help themselves.
01:07:00.640Um, so for example, denying that in America that the terrible toll of violence on black people is something that is a function of white supremacy when it is clearly a function of, of criminals killing them, uh, is an important thing to remember.
01:07:18.420Um, infinitely more black Americans are killed by civilians than by cops, and yet we barely mention the former and we obsess on the latter.
01:07:29.040And I'm not saying that killing by cops is something we should, but the perspective is all skewed.
01:07:37.320Similarly, in terms of where gay people are, instead of talking about the hatred other people have for us, which they generally don't, except for a few nutters, uh, let's talk about how we can take care of ourselves.
01:07:49.780What issues of self-esteem are still buried within us, the things that, that, that makes it preferable to go on these drug benders than just get on with your life, building a relationship or setting up a home or, or getting a productive career going.
01:08:05.720Um, it happens to be a very potent drug too, which seems to hook people very quickly and be incredibly hard to recover from.
01:08:13.960Um, it has taken a real toll and it's still going on.
01:08:19.780Andrew, thank you for, for bringing that up.
01:08:22.020That's not an issue that we've heard anyone else, Ray.
01:08:40.760Where else should people find you online?
01:08:43.180Oh, well, the weekly dish is the most, uh, I'm on Twitter, Sully dish.
01:08:46.560Um, I have a book, a collection of my essays of the last 30 years, which came out in the U.S. last year called Out on a Limb, um, which traces my writing for the last 30 years from the first arguments for marriage equality through my arguments against trans extremism.
01:09:03.700So it's, but also Obama, you know, the entire political, the world.
01:09:09.460I'm not, I don't want people to think that I'm just a gay journalist.
01:09:12.980I do write about this topic, but primarily, primarily I'm really in the thick of American political and cultural and religious, uh, discussions.
01:09:22.920So, um, uh, but Out on a Limb gives you a sense of, of, of who I am and where I've been.