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

00:00:00.000 Do whatever you want, but don't do it in front of children.

00:00:04.820 Is that so hard? Is it really so hard?

00:00:08.640 I'm not in favour of pulling anybody's sexual activities or kinks or whatever 1.00

00:00:14.040 under some kind of prohibition,

00:00:16.980 but I don't think it's unreasonable to say,

00:00:19.560 let's not expose children to it.

00:00:21.700 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:30.700 I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:32.200 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:33.280 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:39.040 Our brilliant guest today, who we've been after for a long time,

00:00:41.980 and we're delighted to have him on the show,

00:00:43.540 is an American journalist, Andrew Sullivan.

00:00:45.260 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:46.680 Thank you so much. It's an honour to be here.

00:00:48.920 It's a great pleasure to have you on the show.

00:00:50.720 So we know who you are and we love your writing and your work.

00:00:53.860 A lot of our audience do as well.

00:00:55.300 They've been asking us to have you on the show for a long time.

00:00:57.720 But for those who don't know you or your backstory, who are you?

00:01:01.000 How are you where you are?

00:01:02.240 What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?

00:01:06.620 It's a wild and woolly story, really.

00:01:08.620 I grew up in East Quinstead in Sussex.

00:01:13.480 I know it well.

00:01:14.640 You do?

00:01:15.540 Yes.

00:01:15.880 I live close to there. I play basketball there.

00:01:17.800 Yeah.

00:01:18.320 Oh, really? How wonderful.

00:01:19.380 And I used to go to school in Red Hill for a bit.

00:01:22.700 You did? Well, I went to Rygate Grammar.

00:01:25.100 I went to St. Beds.

00:01:26.740 Well, there you go. It's just a small...

00:01:29.640 Right, let's end the interview. We can just exchange locations.

00:01:32.140 So 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.

00:01:49.100 I 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.

00:02:14.420 I 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.

00:02:27.680 2000, 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.

00:02:39.720 And I was the first person to really put marriage equality on the map, I guess, and wrote the first book in defense of marriage equality for gays and lesbians, called Virtually Normal.

00:02:53.060 And later I wrote a book called The Conservative Soul.

00:02:57.260 My dissertation was on Oakshart, the British conservative philosopher who died a year after I finished my dissertation.

00:03:05.620 So that's been it.

00:03:06.420 Is there a causal link there? Is that what you're suggesting?

00:03:08.320 Yes. One last look at my dissertation. He thought it was all over.

00:03:12.640 It was actually the only second dissertation ever written about him.

00:03:16.840 And 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.

00:03:29.300 And he didn't disappoint.

00:03:30.220 And Andrew, as I hear you talking, I hear someone who is in love with journalism, who has spent a lifetime in this profession.

00:03:39.700 I'm afraid if you were to poll the general public, I would suggest that that love is not currently widely shared.

00:03:46.860 And we've seen over a long period of time now that some strange things have been happening in the world of mainstream media and journalism in particular.

00:03:56.080 What is going on, in your opinion, in that world?

00:03:59.960 Well, it's been in a serious crisis, I think, for quite a while.

00:04:05.640 Well, 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.

00:04:17.040 I think it was a combination of two things.

00:04:18.780 One, the media was in trouble economically.

00:04:22.520 I mean, they were terrified of going under.

00:04:24.300 They couldn't afford what they had been doing.

00:04:27.540 So they then reached out, and they were terrified by the web.

00:04:30.400 So then they reached out to young college graduates to come and help them out.

00:04:35.980 And they let a hell of a lot of them in.

00:04:38.340 And they were all freshly indoctrinated in various elements of critical theory and had the habits of elite college campuses.

00:04:46.880 And they swiftly began to turn newsrooms into the equivalent of these nightmarish college campuses.

00:04:54.300 Which 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.

00:05:10.380 And the dynamic emerged in these newsrooms in which these younger staffers would be incredibly absolutist about what they were demanding, wanted a totally different staff based on different gender, sex, race, etc., etc.

00:05:28.780 Wanted stories written again now, without any attempt at objectivity.

00:05:33.580 The goal was to change the world through the methods of critical theory.

00:05:38.400 And the desperate, aging, allegedly liberal editors caved.

00:05:45.680 In 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.

00:05:54.900 And once they figured this out, once they figured out the absolute insecurity of this older generation, they just went to town.

00:06:05.220 I mean, I personally, I was at New York Magazine.

00:06:08.180 I went back into the MSM after being an independent blogger for a long time.

00:06:11.960 And I began to write what I thought about some of the sort of excessive tactics of, for example, the Me Too movement.

00:06:24.000 Not that I was in any way opposed to changing the atmosphere about sexual harassment and treatment of women in the workplace, which I supported entirely. 1.00

00:06:32.860 But the notion that you could just simply slander people without evidence as rapists and sexual assault artists without any actual proof struck me as terrible.

00:06:43.860 So I wrote pieces saying I disagree with that.

00:06:46.260 And sure enough, pretty soon, a young swath of staffers decided that simply publishing my columns created an unsafe work environment for them and went to HR to get me, to get rid of me.

00:07:00.540 And I didn't even work in the office.

00:07:05.260 I work at home, hundreds of miles away from where they are.

00:07:07.760 But I was creating an unsafe work environment because my ideas were harming them.

00:07:11.880 Now, 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.

00:07:23.820 And when I wanted to write a column criticizing the violence, they asked me not to write.

00:07:30.040 And I said, OK.

00:07:31.640 And at that point, it was beginning to unravel.

00:07:33.760 And eventually they turned around a couple of weeks later and fired me.

00:07:37.980 And so then I started the Weekly Dish, which is a sort of weekly version of what I used to do.

00:07:42.000 And the good news is it's great.

00:07:45.460 It's doing really well.

00:07:46.360 I enjoy it.

00:07:46.900 I don't have to worry anymore about putting my foot in it.

00:07:51.020 If readers don't like what they're reading, they can always unsubscribe.

00:07:55.660 Every week to create a sort of atmosphere of liberal open debate, I have dissents, strong, powerful dissents against what I wrote the previous week, which I am required to answer, which are selected by my colleague Chris.

00:08:09.080 And we're doing great.

00:08:11.380 My salary, actually, this is why I'm not whining about cancel culture, because even though I was canceled, I did incredibly well from it.

00:08:18.200 I tripled my salary overnight.

00:08:22.580 But you see this dynamic in the newsrooms.

00:08:26.980 You see an urge for what they call moral clarity, which means abandoning any pretense of presenting both sides.

00:08:35.040 You have a younger generation using journalism as a form of social justice activism, not actual relaying of news or a diversity of opinion.

00:08:44.920 Now, I happen to think at this point, things may be beginning to shift back.

00:08:49.500 And I think we've seen some signs this week of that actually happening.

00:08:54.580 The 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.

00:09:07.940 After she had engaged in a week long to raid against her colleagues, accusing them of many, many different crimes, but especially that of being white, which was apparently the one thing, the one thing you can't, you're allowed to demonize people for.

00:09:24.120 So eventually she was fired as of Friday, last Friday, which would be early June.

00:09:30.440 And I sense a little bit of a vibe shift.

00:09:36.560 I sense the fact that readers are really not only kind of offended by some of this screechy, partisan, subjective journalism in replacement of others, but abhorred by it.

00:09:49.820 I mean, you look at the New York Times and you'll see a dozen different columns.

00:09:54.920 So basically they're all saying the same thing.

00:09:57.520 And ultimately this has kind of led people to move away.

00:10:01.020 And has led to the great flourishing of Substack.

00:10:04.500 And the existence of Substack and independent source information is beginning, I believe, to affect the judgment of some of these other organizations.

00:10:13.780 And they're beginning to restabilize.

00:10:17.720 The thing that I always find, and let's look at the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos,

00:10:23.320 a man who has been, in my view, legitimately criticized for the treatment and the conditions of the people in his factories and depots.

00:10:35.060 And we've actually had independent journalists come on and criticize him and criticize the practices of Amazon.

00:10:41.780 Yet these people who describe themselves as woke work for the Washington Post and they see no problem at all in working for Jeff Bezos,

00:10:51.040 whereas the traditional old school left that I used to identify with, they wouldn't work for him because they would say your treatment of workers is incorrect, wrong, inhuman, whatever word they wouldn't want to use to describe it.

00:11:04.660 And they wouldn't do it.

00:11:05.540 But these people have no problem taking Bezos' dollar and yet purporting to be more moral than you or I or anybody else.

00:11:14.520 Well, they're not that interested in the plight of working class people, actually, in terms of economics.

00:11:21.240 If Jeff Bezos didn't have enough African-Americans on his staff, or if he didn't have enough women, then they might get angry about it. 0.80

00:11:29.540 But that's the real twist of this.

00:11:31.420 And of course, Jeff Bezos, by going woke in this way, of course, I'm not entirely sure how fully aware he is of what's going on in his media properties.

00:11:41.400 But 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.

00:12:04.800 But 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.

00:12:18.660 So it's a kind of laundering, as it were, of a certain kind of economic inequality, of a protest against that in favor of this identity politics.

00:12:30.960 And that's a struggle that the left is going to have to figure out for itself.

00:12:34.780 There's a beginning of it.

00:12:35.780 You know, the Marxists over here, the best critique of the 1619 Project was done by the old school Marxists.

00:12:42.260 And increasingly, even though I'm a conservative, I kind of like those people because they're talking about something real.

00:12:47.540 They're talking about economics.

00:12:48.420 They're talking about inequality.

00:12:49.360 They're talking about how do you protect workers of any race.

00:12:54.140 And I think there's a sense that there's been a complete distraction from that.

00:12:58.340 And 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.

00:13:12.160 Because the best example of luxury white woke beliefs hurting African-Americans, for example, is the defund the police movement and the decision to demonize the cops in America.

00:13:25.360 The 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.

00:13:39.660 Crime that has soared in the last two years, while white wealthy liberals in their gated estates tell them it's good for them, that we need to overhaul our white supremacist system.

00:13:50.120 They are dying because of that.

00:13:52.680 The kids are being shot.

00:13:53.740 The murder rate has gone up staggeringly and it's concentrated in these particular areas of poverty, which tend to overlap with racial discrimination too.

00:14:05.540 And so you're beginning to see, I think, a real shift underneath politics in this country.

00:14:11.020 And I think the whole notion that, for example, the Democrats will ultimately win in America because they represent the non-white and the non-white are growing proportionally, is slowly being dismantled as an idea.

00:14:24.800 We 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. 0.65

00:14:40.000 They despise it.

00:14:42.240 They know what it means.

00:14:44.880 And, you know, a little side.

00:14:47.960 Richie Torres, he's a brilliant young congressperson from New York City.

00:14:54.420 Puerto Rican, I think.

00:14:56.500 I hope I got that right.

00:14:57.380 actually openly gay, who came out the last week and said, can we please stop using this term Latinx?

00:15:07.020 It just completely...

00:15:10.580 You're trying to tell Latin culture that there's no male and female? 1.00

00:15:14.300 Are you out of your fucking mind? 0.99

00:15:16.040 I mean, the language is divided into male and female. 1.00

00:15:19.380 It's binary language.

00:15:20.720 And so instead of saying Latino or Latina, they have to say Latinx.

00:15:25.860 And, you know, and you have Biden, Joe Biden, saying Latinx in a speech.

00:15:31.860 And I'm like, that dude has never said that word in private in the entire history of his life.

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00:16:07.440 Well, not least because he hasn't existed for most of his life.

00:16:10.640 But, Andrew, it's interesting to hear you describe yourself as a conservative.

00:16:14.540 Because when I read your column, I get quite a strong liberal bend from a lot of what you say, too.

00:16:21.960 And, of course, during the Trump era, you were widely accused of having Trump derangement syndrome and all of that.

00:16:30.020 So what do you mean when you describe yourself as a conservative?

00:16:33.580 Someone who believes in avoiding drastic ideological change, someone who believes in the organic development of society, someone who believes in the defense of institutions, of the rule of law, of tradition, generally speaking.

00:16:52.140 And that is why a conservative defense of Trump is simply impossible.

00:16:59.360 He was a direct radical threat to very basic democratic norms.

00:17:04.100 We 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.

00:17:26.140 When someone is attacking the very heart of a liberal democracy, openly boasting –

00:17:31.140 Andrew, what do you mean specifically?

00:17:32.520 Sorry to interrupt because Francis and I haven't followed the hearings that are going on right now particularly closely.

00:17:38.600 When you're talking about him undermining these institutions, what do you mean specifically?

00:17:42.580 I mean, insisting that the rule of law applies only to him, that if the rule of law goes against him, he will fire the attorney general.

00:17:51.100 I mean, clearly plotting to have electors from the states that had already selected Joe Biden to reverse their votes, actually helping organize violence to stop the passing of power from Trump to Biden.

00:18:09.720 This is staggering, sending violent, armed men into the sacred citadel of American democracy to bully and coerce people into reversing a legitimate election result.

00:18:27.720 There is no greater crime to be done against a liberal democracy.

00:18:33.060 And there may be – and there are, and I've said too, that there are some issues that Trump raised that are important, that liberals have failed to raise.

00:18:43.740 For example, obviously immigration, the effect of free trade on whole sections of the American society.

00:18:51.440 These are things that he was right to point out, and he deserves credit for pointing those things out, but that cannot legitimize the way he conducted himself in office, his attempt to undermine our democracy, which places him uniquely as the most destructive president in American history.

00:19:11.880 And I say that as a conservative, no conservative wants to destroy the institutions of liberal democracy or wants to impugn the entire system as a fraud.

00:19:24.360 Andrew, can I –

00:19:25.540 Yeah, go on.

00:19:26.160 I'm really – I'm glad we have this strong critique of Trump on the show.

00:19:30.020 I think it's really important, particularly from your position.

00:19:32.720 And Francis and I were both very concerned as outside observers about what happened on January the 2nd.

00:19:38.040 And we were unquestionably critical of those events.

00:19:40.840 What do you say to the counterpoints?

00:19:43.000 And I think there are two counterpoints to what you're saying.

00:19:45.620 The first is, yes, Donald Trump was a radically transformational candidate, but the reason people voted for him was that they felt that the status quo was not working.

00:19:53.800 And the Republican Party, such as it was, this hold, the chokehold that the two parties had without offering actual genuine change that people were concerned about, that is why Trump was elected.

00:20:05.800 And so in attempting to deliver some of that radical change, he was being democratic, the first point.

00:20:10.840 And the second point, you know, I agree with you that I think sending or encouraging people or even allowing people to be in a position to storm the Capitol in the way that they did was attempting to interfere with the democratic process.

00:20:23.620 And I think that's completely wrong.

00:20:25.440 What about the banning of the Hunter Biden story from being shared on the big tech platforms?

00:20:29.940 Was that not election interference that had, I mean, the studies showed that it had an impact on people's voting preferences, for example?

00:20:37.020 There is a clear and bright distinction between stories.

00:20:42.680 I mean, first of all, I agree with you.

00:20:44.400 That was a disgraceful act. 0.99

00:20:46.600 The idea that it was also a function of Russian intelligence was also bullshit. 1.00

00:20:52.340 I did not buy a lot of the Russian conspiracy bullshit that went on for a long time. 0.99

00:20:58.120 And you can check my record on that. 0.96

00:20:59.820 I was always skeptical about that.

00:21:02.940 But they're not equatable.

00:21:04.800 There is nothing that can be equated with an attempt to undermine knowingly, because now we know that every single person around him told him he'd lost this election.

00:21:14.560 He 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.

00:21:26.340 There is no restraining instinct in Donald Trump.

00:21:30.500 He would destroy anything rather than concede he was wrong.

00:21:35.560 He is manically going around the country still insisting not only he won the election, but he won it by a landslide.

00:21:42.120 He is trying to get a political party to invalidate the results of a democratic election.

00:21:48.800 This is so far outside anything acceptable that it must be forbidden.

00:21:55.560 He is a stain on American history and on the American constitution.

00:22:01.460 Listen to him. 0.98

00:22:02.480 He's out of his mind.

00:22:04.640 You can't let someone like that in a position of power.

00:22:07.580 We were lucky to get away with it for four years.

00:22:09.740 In fact, we weren't lucky because he nearly destroyed the whole system.

00:22:13.420 You 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. 0.97

00:22:28.760 You can say that some of the issues that Trumpism represents should be represented and I think the Republican Party is moving in that direction, but you can't get around this crazy person.

00:22:40.940 You know, human, individual humans do affect history and I do think he's the most uniquely dangerous person who's arrived in American politics in my lifetime by easily.

00:22:51.960 Hey, KK, do you believe in spring cleaning?

00:22:56.920 Yes, but only when my wife does it. 1.00

00:22:59.280 In Russia, men who clean are executed for not being real men, which is correct. 1.00

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00:24:15.480 And 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.

00:24:29.760 There are huge swathes of people in America who look at left and right and go, this isn't working.

00:24:36.700 You're not going to help me.

00:24:37.980 You don't represent me.

00:24:39.140 You represent the interests of big business and corporations and whoever I vote for, I'm going to end up in the same position.

00:24:47.280 So 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.

00:24:55.460 Yes, except you'll notice that Biden, for example, has largely adopted most of the trade policies that Trump pursued.

00:25:06.660 Biden has pulled out of Afghanistan, something that Trump promised but never did.

00:25:11.280 There are continuities here because policy issues have shifted.

00:25:15.080 And you'll see Republicans themselves actually prepared to engage in some minimal redistribution, some controls on trade.

00:25:26.280 And it has made a difference.

00:25:28.200 And Trump deserves credit.

00:25:29.920 I'm not going to deny this for bringing those issues to the fore.

00:25:34.060 But characterologically, he is incapable and proved himself incapable to be president of a democratic society.

00:25:41.580 He just is incapable of it.

00:25:45.080 Well, you don't, you know, don't you see how monstrous this person is?

00:25:49.820 I mean, aren't you?

00:25:51.100 I'm ashamed to be a country which had this person as president.

00:25:54.220 It's a massive embarrassment.

00:25:56.840 I would say as well, look, there's things that I disagree with Trump.

00:26:00.600 Absolutely.

00:26:01.180 And I thought ultimately he was a very toxic individual.

00:26:04.320 And the divisiveness that he brought to America was dangerous.

00:26:08.640 But I also look at the system that created him and I blame the system.

00:26:14.920 And I blame the left above all for saying that they represent people and represent working class people. 0.98

00:26:24.660 Whilst deep down, if I'm being honest, and I'm going to use industrial language, not giving a flying shit about them. 0.99

00:26:31.920 And it's their fault. 0.97

00:26:33.340 Well, they definitely bear a great deal of responsibility for this.

00:26:38.320 And also in the media, in obscuring and eliding the real questions that people had.

00:26:43.200 I agree with you totally.

00:26:44.980 But I don't believe the whole system is finished.

00:26:48.900 I do think that in America there are plenty of ways in which this can be changed through democratic elections.

00:26:55.520 We'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.

00:27:05.460 We'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.

00:27:15.600 I do not believe that a system that has been through rocky patches but has survived over 200 years is to be junked because we've hit a moment where our elites have been out of sync with what most people want.

00:27:30.380 That is to be expected in any country in periods of time.

00:27:33.780 Trump deserves credit for breaking that.

00:27:35.680 But now we have to move forward with our system, find a Republican who could represent them and not be insane and hostile to our very democratic system, and a Democrat who can possibly be what Biden said he was going to be, which is take the country back to the center.

00:27:54.540 And I think the center in America is there still.

00:27:58.000 It's quiet.

00:27:59.100 But the party that can occupy it first is going to win big.

00:28:04.260 That's very true.

00:28:05.180 And look, we weren't actually planning to spend a huge amount of time talking about Trump, but it comes back a little bit to the conversation we were having about journalism, because another perhaps point that I would agree with Francis, where Trump was a bit of a symptom, is he was really the only guy who could survive what journalists do to Republican leaders when they run for office, which is he's the only guy who could survive being called a racist, a sexist, a homophobe and all those things and still win.

00:28:35.180 Because everybody else just gets labeled as a Nazi, because everybody else just gets labeled as a Nazi and they never recover.

00:28:40.020 And that was, again, one of the points that I thought was accurate about Trump is I thought he was a very toxic personality and you could see it.

00:28:49.420 You know, we were actually sitting in just a quick anecdote.

00:28:52.220 We were sitting around in the studio on our YouTube.

00:28:54.740 We were watching something on YouTube and without us knowing the next video came on.

00:28:59.000 And it was like a compilation of Trump put-downs.

00:29:02.480 And I think a lot of people were watching it with like enjoying the, but it was all about him like going, go back to mummy or something.

00:29:10.180 And he just, it was very, very dark.

00:29:12.920 It was dark.

00:29:13.740 I don't question that at all.

00:29:15.380 I 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.

00:29:28.880 Well, it all depends whether people buy that description.

00:29:31.740 And over the long time, unfortunately, Trump in some ways was not innocent of some of the things he was charged with.

00:29:38.040 Whereas if you look at someone like Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, who won an election.

00:29:42.860 No, he wasn't.

00:29:43.880 You could call him these things, but he didn't give them ammunition.

00:29:48.160 In fact, there's evidence that what Trump did in so many ways was give credence to the left. 0.99

00:29:58.380 Look, they're a bunch of racists. 0.99

00:30:00.100 Look, he hates immigrants. 1.00

00:30:01.640 Look, he says all these things.

00:30:03.920 The fight against wokeness was, in my view, crippled by the fact that he was against it.

00:30:09.760 Because he seemed to legitimate every single left-wing idea of what a right-wing person was.

00:30:16.060 If you can have more moderate conservatives come forward and say, for example, yes, I'll give you one simple example.

00:30:24.540 Transgender people exist.

00:30:26.940 They deserve absolute civil rights.

00:30:28.980 They already have them, actually, under Bostock.

00:30:31.400 We need to respect transgender people.

00:30:33.640 But we shouldn't, at the same time, forget that there are biological differences.

00:30:40.140 And in some areas, a few, that makes a difference, like sports.

00:30:44.100 And 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. 0.99

00:30:57.280 Now, you are more credible, I believe, if you can make those nuanced distinctions, defend trans rights, but engage some of the difficult questions that they bring up, than if you just become this person who says that all these trans people are just mentally ill, making shit up. 0.99

00:31:20.440 There's nothing there. 1.00

00:31:21.620 It's bullshit. 0.99

00:31:22.280 And 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. 1.00

00:31:33.760 No, of course. 0.99

00:31:34.200 The concept of hate is ridiculous. 0.93

00:31:36.880 They're uncomfortable, but they can come to terms with it. 0.75

00:31:39.920 And generally speaking, they support the rights of trans people.

00:31:42.400 They have issues with their kids being taught at the age of three that they can choose to be a boy or a girl or both or neither or something else entirely, like an alien.

00:31:54.960 This is insane.

00:31:56.900 And it's being pushed back, and it should be pushed back. 1.00

00:32:00.460 And a lot of us within the gay community, I won't use that term, LGBTQIA++, because it's bullshit. 1.00

00:32:11.020 It is. 0.98

00:32:13.320 Sometimes people call me an LGBTQ person.

00:32:16.720 Yeah, why do you say that? 0.99

00:32:17.760 Why is it bullshit? 0.99

00:32:19.520 Because, first of all, no one can be an LGBTQ person, literally. 1.00

00:32:24.420 I mean, you can't be a lesbian and a gay and a trans and a queer or whatever.

00:32:29.660 Secondly, there is no community as such.

00:32:35.280 Even with gays and lesbians. 1.00

00:32:37.000 I'm talking to you from Provincetown, which is about as gay as you can get. 0.98

00:32:42.380 Yes, lesbians and gay men live here happily alongside each other. 0.99

00:32:46.520 But the way that oil and water can be mixed up together, you know, they have completely different ways of life, very different subcultures.

00:32:54.100 Huge different problems.

00:32:56.840 Because 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.

00:33:08.820 You know, straight men can't manage it.

00:33:11.120 When you have other men in the relationship, good luck.

00:33:15.140 Similarly, there are no big STD outbreaks among lesbians.

00:33:18.440 We're not worried about them getting monkeypox right now, because they have a completely different way of life. 0.99

00:33:24.440 And transgender people are a completely different set altogether. 1.00

00:33:28.900 The transgender experience could not be more different than the gay experience. 1.00

00:33:34.860 One simple illustration of this.

00:33:36.680 When you're a little gay boy, you're growing up, it seems to me one of the most important things you need to do is to own the fact that you are a boy, you are a man, and you can love other men.

00:33:46.460 That's crucial.

00:33:47.320 If you're a trans kid, the important thing is disowning that you're a man or a boy. 0.98

00:33:53.500 And if you give the same message to gay boys and trans boys, you're actually engaging in some horrible kind of conversion therapy for gay kids. 0.74

00:34:05.240 The last thing you want to say to a gay boy, for example, is, you know, maybe you're a girl. 0.77

00:34:12.180 When you hear it that way, doesn't it affect you?

00:34:15.600 Does it make you feel?

00:34:16.360 Well, I mean, I will never forget a Christmas.

00:34:19.320 I was at my grandparents and my, my long brother, I was eight.

00:34:24.540 He was kind of four.

00:34:25.480 He was bashing a truck around and I was reading a book.

00:34:27.700 And my grandmother looked at the two boys and looked at my mother. 0.78

00:34:30.620 And she said, well, pointing to my brother, well, at least now you have a real boy.

00:34:37.100 And that is roughly what some of these trans activists are effectively telling young gay boys. 0.64

00:34:45.980 It's what some people are calling trans away the gay. 0.91

00:34:49.420 Yeah. 0.74

00:34:49.940 Yes.

00:34:50.460 And 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.

00:34:58.880 And I'd been teaching at this point for around, well, about 12 years.

00:35:04.700 And kids now started to identify as, you know, trans or gender fluid, et cetera.

00:35:11.080 And I remember I taught one boy and I got informed that he's, he's seeing himself as trans.

00:35:17.060 And I started teaching him and I go, oh, no, you're not.

00:35:19.960 You're just gay and you're just having to come to terms with it. 1.00

00:35:23.520 That's, that's what it was. 0.98

00:35:24.940 Which is why Francis has never taught in a school again.

00:35:26.980 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:27.760 That was, no, no.

00:35:28.880 But that is very worrying.

00:35:32.360 It's incredibly worrying because children are vulnerable.

00:35:36.080 They just, oh, that's why there's safeguardings in place.

00:35:38.500 That's why we protect them.

00:35:39.700 But especially a child who is becoming aware of their own sexuality, which is incredibly difficult and painful for everybody.

00:35:48.420 Adolescence is awful for everyone.

00:35:50.320 And yet now we've got this extra thing on top.

00:35:53.220 Yeah, it's, it's bewildering for kids, I think.

00:35:57.540 And they've also been told they can call themselves basically anything.

00:36:01.220 You can invent a million different genders for yourself.

00:36:04.360 I think it's particularly tough on gay children, myself. 0.57

00:36:08.820 And I cannot understand why gay organizations are not concerned about this.

00:36:14.340 Can't even acknowledge that there is a trade-off here. 0.78

00:36:17.740 80% of kids with gender dysphoria, we find out, end up gay.

00:36:24.860 Puberty itself is itself a real affirmation of your actual biological sex.

00:36:31.660 I remember being a little worried.

00:36:33.580 I was a gay boy.

00:36:34.880 I did not. 0.83

00:36:35.740 I was a nerd.

00:36:37.060 I was a SWAT.

00:36:37.720 I definitely didn't like contact sports.

00:36:41.180 They forced me to play rugby.

00:36:42.280 I really did not like it.

00:36:45.440 And, where was I?

00:36:47.180 I'm sorry, now I've lost my chance.

00:36:48.720 Hold on.

00:36:49.120 I was going to say. 0.96

00:36:49.660 You were saying how gay kids are the most affected by all of it. 0.91

00:36:52.540 Yeah. 0.79

00:36:54.960 I was going to say something else.

00:36:56.580 Sorry.

00:36:57.480 It's all good.

00:36:58.000 Do you mind if I ask you a different question?

00:36:59.440 Yes.

00:37:00.220 And if it comes back to you.

00:37:01.080 No, I don't mind.

00:37:01.880 We'll recover it.

00:37:02.820 Yeah, perfect.

00:37:03.340 So, one of the things you're talking about is actually a concern of mine, because as you

00:37:11.300 start to see this so-called LGBTQI++, minus, up, down, left, right, whatever it is, community 0.97

00:37:19.680 start to get involved in things that would concern a lot of people.

00:37:25.020 We've seen images of drag shows, which no one had a problem with in the last 10 years.

00:37:32.060 Now, start to be performed to children.

00:37:50.520 Feeling like a woman. 0.91

00:37:52.680 We had a show here. 0.98

00:38:22.660 in the UK called the Family Sex Show, which involved full frontal nudity, targeted at

00:38:30.040 children from the age of five upwards, and other components of that nature within that.

00:38:38.420 And one of the things you're starting to see now, I think, from some of the research I've

00:38:42.160 shown, is acceptance for sexual minorities going down, including among young people.

00:38:49.220 Now, to me, for someone like you, not only because of your sexuality, but because you

00:38:54.480 were at the forefront of legitimizing marriage, equal marriage for sexual minorities, you've

00:39:02.180 got to be concerned about this, don't you?

00:39:04.680 I am.

00:39:05.660 I mean, I've been concerned.

00:39:06.820 And I'm also worried that the atmosphere that these activists create terrorize gay people 0.95

00:39:15.660 into accepting every single crazy thing. 0.88

00:39:21.200 Look, I take the view of Mr. Slave on South Park, which is that do whatever you want, but 0.55

00:39:28.920 don't do it in front of children.

00:39:30.160 Is it, is that so hard?

00:39:32.940 Is it really so hard?

00:39:34.940 I'm not in favor of pulling anybody's sexual activities or kinks or whatever under some 1.00

00:39:41.280 kind of prohibition, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say, let's not expose children

00:39:47.480 to it.

00:39:48.260 And to be honest with you, the vast majority of gay people feel the same way.

00:39:52.880 We do.

00:39:53.460 I feel like we're being grotesquely misrepresented by LGBTQIA++ organizations who are essentially

00:40:03.000 at this point incapable of doing anything but react tribally to any criticisms of any aspect

00:40:10.940 of the culture of minority sexualities, although I wouldn't call transgender a sexuality, but

00:40:18.860 it's not.

00:40:19.700 Yeah, I mean, I, I know lots of drag queens. 1.00

00:40:24.700 I'm surrounded by them here.

00:40:26.460 It's, it's like, they're like carpenter ants.

00:40:29.020 But, and they're friends of mine.

00:40:32.120 And, you know, the best ones are totally not risque in sexual terms at all. 0.99

00:40:36.200 They're like clowns. 0.97

00:40:37.200 They're like a pantomime dame. 0.99

00:40:39.300 I mean, we take children to pantomimes to, which are essentially drag shows, at least in

00:40:45.780 what some aspect, musical drag shows, and we don't think that's abusing them. 0.88

00:40:50.640 So there's a fine line here.

00:40:52.500 You know, you can have a fun, completely family-friendly drag queen who can be funny, who can engage just

00:40:59.840 like a pantomime dame or a clown.

00:41:01.620 And then you have the more, the more, less talented, frankly, more vulgar and more sexualized 0.96

00:41:08.460 versions.

00:41:11.080 And again, I took, I took my seven-year-old and five-year-old niece and nephew to see one

00:41:19.140 of these drag queens a few years ago. 0.99

00:41:21.400 She, she didn't, they loved it.

00:41:23.060 It's hilarious.

00:41:23.660 There was no sexuality, unless you saw the back of this guy's dress, which was full of 1.00

00:41:30.260 back hair.

00:41:31.400 I mean, it's deliberately done to kind of send up drag queens. 0.99

00:41:36.740 So it, again, it's complicated.

00:41:39.880 And I wish the more responsible ones push back against some of this.

00:41:48.080 But, you know, and RuPaul did a huge, I mean, I don't think it's, I don't think drag queens 1.00

00:41:53.220 are the great, terrible threat people saying they are, is what I would say.

00:41:55.860 I do think that public authorities, public schools telling children that they can pick

00:42:02.460 which sex they are is infinitely more concerning.

00:42:06.460 Oh, I agree with you, Andrew.

00:42:07.480 But I, the thing is, though, and I think you'll appreciate this, the general public are not as

00:42:14.660 into these issues and they're not as involved in the details and the nuances and whatever.

00:42:20.340 So I'm going to ask you quite an unpleasant and layman question about it, which is, look,

00:42:25.040 if I am a parent, which I now am, of a child, and I'm looking at this without delving deeply

00:42:31.100 into it, I'm not going, there's these drag queens and that drag queens and there's a spectrum 0.95

00:42:35.580 and some of them do this.

00:42:36.880 You're just looking at it and going, why are, as you said yourself, children being so shown

00:42:41.580 sexualized material, right, where is this coming from, in your opinion?

00:42:46.580 Why are people doing this at all? 0.96

00:42:50.360 Well, I think there was a genuine good faith idea that drag queens are like clowns, that 1.00

00:42:58.780 children relate to them in that way, and that having somebody read in the library, which

00:43:04.680 I think is where the stuff started, to children in funny outfits might actually be a completely

00:43:10.300 banal and rather benign thing, but some have exploited it.

00:43:16.060 And I think also this concept of LGBTQIA++, whatever, has created a culture which is now

00:43:24.580 something that people are saying they can choose.

00:43:27.640 So the majority, it turns out the biggest proportion of the people calling themselves LGBTQIA++ in

00:43:38.460 America are straight people, mainly straight women calling themselves bisexual.

00:43:43.660 Some 40% in one poll of people identifying as LGBTQ are straight.

00:43:48.520 So it's become this kind of all-purpose trendy catch-all.

00:43:52.700 And so, and there are some lefty liberal parents that sort of want their kids to be part of

00:43:57.180 the LGBTQIA, because at least that's not straight. 0.98

00:44:00.160 I mean, look, I'm not defending this.

00:44:02.040 I can't defend it.

00:44:02.920 I think it's whacked.

00:44:04.080 But, you know, parents have control over their children if they want to take them there.

00:44:07.600 If some kid is taken to a sexually explicit thing which they haven't explicitly had consent

00:44:12.980 for from their parents, I think it's an outrage.

00:44:15.800 But I do think most drag queens are not like that. 0.99

00:44:20.260 Andrew, we're not saying that, and we're not trying to pin it on you.

00:44:23.640 We're just trying to have a conversation, because the reason is that you see, and you

00:44:29.160 will know this, because you are online and you see the discourse and the way it moves.

00:44:32.860 There is this concern, particularly on the right, this whole groomer conversation, which

00:44:37.660 I find kind of like difficult, and I don't get what's going on exactly.

00:44:41.820 But there is a growing concern that as part of this increasing tolerance, we're now tolerating

00:44:47.440 things that just frankly shouldn't be tolerated.

00:44:49.460 And I think that's a completely legitimate concern.

00:44:54.060 But there is a distinction between that concern and saying that any teacher that teaches the

00:45:00.400 syllabus is attempting to sexually abuse your child. 0.96

00:45:04.180 That seems to me to be a reach that is ugly. 0.99

00:45:08.220 You know, calling someone a pedophile is a bit like calling them a racist.

00:45:12.220 It's something you just can't defend yourself against.

00:45:14.600 It is a totally totalitarian tactic.

00:45:19.120 I think if you don't think people should be called racist because they have different views

00:45:23.480 than you, which are legitimate views, then you shouldn't be calling people who have a

00:45:28.560 different view than you do on the question of sexual minorities to be a pedophile, the 0.97

00:45:34.740 first word out of your mouth. 0.97

00:45:36.260 And look, there is a long history of gay people being called pedophiles and being equated with 0.99

00:45:42.840 them. 0.89

00:45:43.380 And we have it in, you know, not so long ago, the 70s, there was an attempt to get all gay 0.91

00:45:50.240 teachers fired, which would, in California.

00:45:52.640 And the politician that actually did most to prevent that coming into force, it was called

00:45:58.780 the Briggs Initiative, was Governor Ronald Reagan, who said, no, you make a distinction.

00:46:05.220 You judge people by the way they teach, not who they are.

00:46:08.100 If there is some abuse, and there is abuse in schools, we know this.

00:46:12.580 I mean, but it's not always associated with gay people, and it shouldn't be associated with

00:46:16.860 a particular kind of curriculum. 0.93

00:46:18.460 I think it's cheap and ugly, and I think we can avoid it.

00:46:20.960 But you can still make the case.

00:46:23.740 Let us keep children out of politics. 1.00

00:46:28.140 Let them see the world for what they are. 1.00

00:46:30.940 Leave them the fuck alone. 1.00

00:46:34.020 Let them grow up and stop getting into their heads about this, that, and the other. 1.00

00:46:39.820 In the private sphere, you can do that.

00:46:41.840 You can bring up your kids as Jehovah's Witnesses.

00:46:43.760 You can do whatever you want.

00:46:44.700 But in the public sphere, public authorities teaching kids things that are extremely dubious

00:46:51.100 for political motives, no.

00:46:53.820 And I'm sorry, it's a little wishy-washy.

00:46:57.680 I don't mean to be wishy-washy.

00:46:59.020 I mean to be fair.

00:47:00.000 Andrew, look, it's a really, really, really important point, and thank you for putting

00:47:06.000 that across with nuance.

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00:48:07.260 about technology, privacy, and censorship.

00:48:10.980 I think the problem is, Andrew, I think we're politicizing everything.

00:48:15.080 And this is the inevitable result of what happens when you politicize sexuality and sex.

00:48:22.720 Yeah, I mean, at some point, when gay people had no, very few civil rights and were subject

00:48:30.140 to a great deal of persecution, yes, you have to be political to get to equality.

00:48:38.020 But the point of that politics was to let go of politics afterwards, was to get on with our lives.

00:48:44.820 Once you have formal civil equality, I think you should let the world evolve in its own way 0.99

00:48:50.740 without trying to coerce it, indoctrinate it, move it in any which way.

00:48:54.120 That's why I consider myself a conservative.

00:48:56.680 And if people, I mean, honestly, if people understand what I mean by that, I do have a book called

00:49:00.780 The Conservative Soul, which is available, and it is my attempt to kind of explain exactly

00:49:06.040 where I think that conservative temperament belongs.

00:49:09.480 And it is present in conservatives in Britain and America, but currently it's in eclipse to more

00:49:16.380 radical and revolutionary movements, I think.

00:49:24.000 And the problem is as well, when you politicize, you create, like we've touched on before,

00:49:29.420 this idea of community.

00:49:30.940 The gay community thinks this.

00:49:32.420 No, they don't.

00:49:33.800 Gay men have a variety of different political opinions, left, right, center, and so they should.

00:49:40.120 They're individuals.

00:49:41.240 You can't just put them under this umbrella.

00:49:44.220 This is part of my problem with the left.

00:49:46.880 It is.

00:49:47.380 The left told me, you can't exist. 0.98

00:49:51.140 How can you be a homosexual and believe in God? 1.00

00:49:54.400 How can you be a homosexual and adopt a conservative politics? 0.99

00:49:57.920 You know, the thing about gays especially is that we are born randomly across every country.

00:50:04.400 So we're going to have lots of gays in red states and blue states.

00:50:08.620 There's many gays being born in Oklahoma as there are in New York state per capita.

00:50:12.900 So, of course, you're going to have the most diverse political community.

00:50:17.720 A third of gays voted for Trump.

00:50:21.260 Many of us, many of the most important homosexuals in American history have been on the right.

00:50:27.600 Of course, this is the who, as someone rather crudely put it to me, what makes you hard has

00:50:33.300 nothing to do with what your politics are.

00:50:35.560 It's a completely involuntary thing.

00:50:38.680 Whereas your politics have to be constructed.

00:50:40.680 So, of course, if it irritates you to hear the LGBT community is offended by this,

00:50:48.240 imagine what it does to people like me. 0.98

00:50:49.720 We're absolutely fucking livid. 0.95

00:50:50.760 Of course we're not offended. 0.98

00:50:51.800 We're not offended by Dave Chappelle.

00:50:53.220 We love Dave Chappelle. 0.96

00:50:54.100 If you look at the people fighting back against some of this crap, Glenn Greenwald, Barry Weiss, 0.98

00:51:01.880 all these people, disproportionately gay people, are fighting back against this. 0.97

00:51:07.300 Because, and this is part of what the gay tradition is, we were never the censors.

00:51:12.040 We were never the scolds.

00:51:13.680 We were never telling people what to do with their lives.

00:51:16.060 Our message for so long was, do what you want to do.

00:51:19.280 Just leave us alone, let us do what we want to do, on some equal footing under the law.

00:51:25.040 That's all.

00:51:26.460 The idea that it's turned into this puritanical, censoring, scolding, humorless movement is so depressing

00:51:36.740 and it so violates our traditions, violates our ultimate culture, which is one of celebration

00:51:43.500 of variety, of the treasure of the eccentric, the support of the outsider, the love of art

00:51:52.280 that can subvert and change.

00:51:53.860 And I tell you, it's still here.

00:51:56.880 Not to offend you, but I went to a good drag show one here that comes every week. 0.95

00:52:01.200 There's a sort of talent.

00:52:02.500 Andrew, we're not offended by drag shows.

00:52:04.600 No, I know you.

00:52:05.320 I'm kidding you.

00:52:06.860 I'm kidding you.

00:52:07.720 We're two comedians.

00:52:08.860 We used to perform with drag people.

00:52:10.540 We've got friends who do drag shows. 0.98

00:52:12.040 I know, I'm just kidding you.

00:52:13.040 We were talking about this.

00:52:13.800 Yeah, all right.

00:52:14.580 I was just winding you up.

00:52:15.380 I'm not homophobic, all right?

00:52:16.780 No, of course you're not.

00:52:17.760 He's Russian.

00:52:18.480 It's not his fault.

00:52:19.400 It's his identity.

00:52:19.940 It's my culture. 0.57

00:52:21.660 My view as a homo is that I assume everyone's homo-friendly unless proven otherwise. 0.98

00:52:26.400 Yeah.

00:52:27.040 And my view as a member of a minority is that I do not get up every day wondering who hates

00:52:31.780 me.

00:52:32.740 I get up every day seeing who loves me and who I can be with and how I can best live my life.

00:52:39.860 And there are many, many more of us out there.

00:52:44.460 And boy, you know, the truth is that when you do what I've done, the most vicious hostility 0.98

00:52:53.160 comes from the gay left. 0.80

00:52:55.680 I mean, my first book on marriage equality was picketed by Lesbian Avengers. 1.00

00:53:01.020 I've had drinks thrown at me.

00:53:02.580 I've been called the Antichrist. 0.97

00:53:04.340 My second book was reviewed and said, if you hate gay men, you'll love this book. 1.00

00:53:08.120 The attempt to delegitimize non-leftist gays is so well-organized and well-oiled, it can 0.96

00:53:17.020 take a huge amount.

00:53:18.040 Look what happened to Bari Weiss, for example.

00:53:21.300 You were particularly vulnerable to attack.

00:53:24.960 So that's how they enforce the orthodoxy.

00:53:27.660 But people should not believe that gays and lesbians are not necessarily part of the same

00:53:32.800 community, but that they do not have an incredibly variety of views.

00:53:36.700 They disagree with each other.

00:53:37.880 And the conversation privately, for example, about getting kids to change their sex among 0.84

00:53:44.740 gay men, it is not happening. 0.99

00:53:49.000 People are actually concerned.

00:53:51.020 We've got lots of gay friends here that we talk to about this, men and women.

00:53:55.620 None of them are happy about this whole thing, about what's going on.

00:54:00.900 So I suppose that begs the question then, Andrew, how do we get to a position where we go to

00:54:08.580 what you're talking about, which is let us be who we are and do no damage to children and 0.97

00:54:16.480 leave everybody the fuck alone? 0.96

00:54:18.820 How do we get to that position? 0.98

00:54:20.520 One way, I think, is to remind people of history and of geography.

00:54:28.380 When certain elements are screaming that they need this, that and the other, and they want to push

00:54:33.400 boundaries further and further and further, my response is to say, have you ever read any history?

00:54:39.360 Do you have any idea of what it's still like to be gay, for example, in the vast majority of

00:54:44.560 countries on the earth, from the Palestinian authorities, to Russia, to Iran?

00:54:51.520 Do you have any idea where we've come?

00:54:54.720 In the 1950s, 10,000 gay men were fired from the federal government in a purge of all homosexuals.

00:55:02.320 The government had surveillance on all of us in the nation's capital.

00:55:07.140 The police had a list of anyone who had ever had any homosexual connections.

00:55:12.680 People were committing suicide upon being purged from the feds.

00:55:17.000 It was illegal.

00:55:18.280 People were being arrested.

00:55:20.940 If you were a gay person, ask yourself, is there any other time and place you would ever

00:55:27.120 have wanted to live except for now in the West?

00:55:29.840 And the answer is no.

00:55:31.660 So can we please get some perspective?

00:55:34.200 Can you please see that we are actually where we always wanted to be?

00:55:40.040 That we now have the equality we long sought.

00:55:44.040 Our predecessors would be amazed at what we've done.

00:55:47.420 The idea that we should further corral, coerce, and lecture the whole world and how they have 0.67

00:55:55.200 to do even more to acknowledge our existence.

00:55:58.740 It's a form of narcissism that is self-defeating. 0.89

00:56:02.160 It's a historical, and it's an insult to the vast majority of gay people in the world, 1.00

00:56:08.360 but who are also affected by this.

00:56:11.220 The more the extremists in the West push things like everyone is trans unless proven otherwise,

00:56:18.700 or you don't think that that is being broadcast in Russia.

00:56:23.060 You don't think that the extremes are being used to actually hurt gay people in other countries

00:56:28.680 who are under much infinitely greater pressure than we are.

00:56:32.520 I find it morally unserious, to be honest with you, and a luxury belief.

00:56:39.920 You know, I grew up in my 20s watching thousands, hundreds of thousands of my peers die,

00:56:47.320 agonizing, difficult deaths.

00:56:48.680 We endured that.

00:56:53.420 We saw things that I hope no one has to see.

00:56:57.280 And the idea that today someone misgenders you and you're traumatized,

00:57:03.520 it's an insult to those of us who actually went through real pain.

00:57:07.200 And I am incredibly depressed by a younger gay generation that does not even acknowledge 1.00

00:57:16.220 that contrast. 0.53

00:57:21.560 And I'm, to be honest, fed up with it.

00:57:25.500 Andrew, I've got a tremendous amount of sympathy for your position because

00:57:29.840 my family is South American.

00:57:32.980 I have, there's a saying in my family,

00:57:35.660 los palices, as they're known.

00:57:38.320 And there's a saying in my family whereby the palices, 0.99

00:57:41.440 they're either gay or they're ugly, right? 1.00

00:57:44.000 So we've got a lot of gay men in my family. 1.00

00:57:46.460 I had a cousin who passed away from AIDS when I was nine years old.

00:57:51.680 And this cousin of mine, we never said, he was, it's actually upsetting me now talking about it.

00:58:00.180 When he died, we, they said that he had throat cancer because they didn't want to say to the

00:58:08.140 family that he died of AIDS.

00:58:09.860 And I still, and even as a kid, I remember being angry because

00:58:14.360 I felt that when he died, he died of shame because he couldn't even be honest about his death.

00:58:20.100 So I've always had a tremendous amount of sympathy for the

00:58:22.980 gay movement, gay pride.

00:58:25.660 And it's one of the things that gets me really angry because

00:58:28.380 I just see how corporates have just jumped on this movement

00:58:33.000 and, and co-opted it.

00:58:34.960 And then at the same time, you know, that they don't care because in the Middle East 0.75

00:58:39.140 that they dropped, you know, the rainbow flag from, from their logos.

00:58:43.420 You know, that FIFA don't care because they hold a world cup in Qatar.

00:58:47.800 And you just think, you know, that's disgusting. 0.88

00:58:51.020 It's utterly disgusting.

00:58:53.640 Yeah. 0.72

00:58:55.640 I don't want to in any way counter what you just said.

00:58:59.420 Um, I do remember in my adult lifetime that we were frustrated that no corporation would

00:59:04.880 ever touch us.

00:59:06.340 Yeah.

00:59:06.920 Uh, so be careful what you ask for.

00:59:09.320 Um, and I think, uh, but I, you know, part of what has sustained gay people is our economic

00:59:18.740 power.

00:59:19.160 And insofar as our ability to buy and sell things can, can, can help integrate us into the

00:59:25.220 community, then I, I don't have a huge issue with it.

00:59:27.920 I agree with you that the idea that it's anything but utterly cynical on the part of 0.88

00:59:31.960 these corporations is, is ludicrous. 0.67

00:59:34.720 Um, but also that they're more enthusiastic than many of us, these bloody flags. 0.74

00:59:39.480 I mean, please, can you stop the flags? 0.51

00:59:42.200 I have no idea what all of them mean.

00:59:44.260 We had something called a rainbow flag, which was excruciating enough, but it, it, the whole 1.00

00:59:49.760 point of it was that it was a metaphor, including everyone.

00:59:54.080 We weren't defending green gays and white gays and purple gays.

00:59:58.240 It was a rainbow, right?

01:00:00.040 A metaphor.

01:00:01.060 And now they put this brown and black stripe in it to represent brown and black people.

01:00:06.040 They have pink and blue in it to represent trans people.

01:00:08.960 It looks like a licorice all sort.

01:00:10.380 And, and, and again, who, who determined that?

01:00:15.540 Who the hell decided we all had to have this new flag?

01:00:18.040 I didn't.

01:00:18.500 It wasn't a vote.

01:00:19.700 It's, it's done by these organizations and, and they are captured by these activists and

01:00:25.720 these activists have been captured by critical theory.

01:00:28.320 And it's hard to push back, especially when you tribalize, you know, when you're a small

01:00:36.420 community and someone says something hostile, or you perceive as hostile, even though it

01:00:39.680 might just be a counter argument, your ranks close and you understand how that dynamic can

01:00:45.680 occur.

01:00:46.300 But I agree with you.

01:00:47.260 More of us need to speak up.

01:00:48.500 Many of us are.

01:00:49.240 Um, and, uh, I think of Katie Herzog, for example, uh, who's a fantastic lesbian. 0.92

01:00:56.560 Uh, uh, so I'm not totally gloomy because I think, I think we're going to take our, our

01:01:03.600 identity back.

01:01:04.260 I don't want to take a movement back.

01:01:05.480 As far as I'm concerned, the movement is done.

01:01:07.720 We want our core rights.

01:01:09.800 Our job now is to ask ourselves, what lives do you want to live?

01:01:14.000 How do we as gay people contribute to our society?

01:01:17.320 How can we recognize the great people that were gay in the past? 0.86

01:01:21.160 These things, positive, constructive, contributive things, not this constant yelling of people

01:01:27.600 who've already said yes.

01:01:30.240 It's as if these people cannot take yes for an answer.

01:01:33.460 Uh, and, and we are in a much better place.

01:01:38.760 And look, I've lived, I'm not that old, but I've lived through this extraordinary change.

01:01:42.700 Does it make me depressed?

01:01:44.640 I think we're going backwards right now, but I know how much further forwards we went.

01:01:49.380 And we won.

01:01:50.660 Again, this is what they don't understand.

01:01:52.140 We didn't win marriage equality by saying, if you don't support us, you're a bigot.

01:01:56.360 We actually made the arguments.

01:01:58.400 I went out there.

01:01:58.940 I went, I don't know how many, I went to churches.

01:02:00.860 I went to fundamentalist organizations.

01:02:02.800 I went to Catholic universities.

01:02:04.320 I went anywhere anybody asked me to make an argument respectfully.

01:02:07.940 And, you know, we did that for a couple of decades and we persuaded the middle and we won.

01:02:14.320 And, and we should remember how we did that.

01:02:17.940 We did do, we did not do that by hating on people.

01:02:21.720 We, we did that by assuming good faith.

01:02:24.220 And, 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.

01:02:37.920 You let it go.

01:02:39.700 It's the fundamentally insecure, the young and the activists who actually believe that they have some duty to do something that they cannot do because it's already done.

01:02:49.000 I call this MLK envy.

01:02:50.640 You know, people always want, I want to be the Martin Luther King Jr. of my generation.

01:02:54.600 Well, sorry, but it's done.

01:02:56.020 The civil rights act is finished.

01:02:57.600 You're too late.

01:02:59.700 And you can invent other ways in which you think you're changing the world.

01:03:02.920 But at this point, you're not.

01:03:03.900 You're just coercing other people.

01:03:05.700 So let it go and get on with your life.

01:03:07.920 What a beautiful message, Andrew.

01:03:09.560 I'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.

01:03:15.840 And I just think that is such a powerful way of looking at the world, not only in terms of the political issues that we talk about, but actually at the individual level.

01:03:23.600 And it doesn't apply just to gay people.

01:03:25.360 It applies to all of us.

01:03:26.460 Like, you know, the book I've just written called An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West.

01:03:30.380 This is a point I'm trying to make to people.

01:03:32.260 You've got, this is the best place ever to be alive.

01:03:35.740 And all we spend our time doing is complaining about how terrible everything is.

01:03:39.620 It is, it's mind boggling.

01:03:41.940 But so I'm glad we've had you on.

01:03:43.700 It's such a pleasure talking to you.

01:03:45.560 As you know, the last question we always ask is, what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be?

01:03:52.640 It's a very good question.

01:03:56.320 And I've been trying to think of it since you started asking.

01:03:58.760 I was going to say-

01:03:59.360 Don't give away the secrets that we brief people.

01:04:01.540 Oh, I'm sorry.

01:04:02.660 No, it's joking.

01:04:03.700 Everybody knows it.

01:04:05.200 Everybody knows.

01:04:06.520 Uh, I mean, I was immediately thinking, I don't want to be too gay because this has been, we've been too gay anyway.

01:04:17.860 Too late.

01:04:18.280 Too late, mate.

01:04:18.780 It's going to have a rainbow flag on the cover of the thumbnail.

01:04:21.860 Yes.

01:04:22.240 There is, this is something that people will not talk about. 0.98

01:04:25.500 That there is a methamphetamine epidemic among gay men that is killing large numbers of gay men. 0.99

01:04:32.820 Uh, it is the most hideous drug. 0.99

01:04:35.940 It is taking people's lives away.

01:04:38.360 It is rampant.

01:04:42.460 Uh, no one talks about it. 0.86

01:04:44.980 Certainly the gay press barely talks about it.

01:04:47.120 Uh, it's implicated in a whole bunch of things, uh, that you can see.

01:04:54.220 I mean, for example, it's the real story of Matthew Shepard.

01:04:57.900 Not 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.

01:05:07.820 Um, that makes much more sense of the situation than, than these other things.

01:05:12.100 And, 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.

01:05:21.480 Um, and I really would like to see this treated with the seriousness it deserves.

01:05:27.820 Andrew, why is it happening?

01:05:28.960 I've not heard about this at all.

01:05:30.300 I don't know if you have, you have, uh, well, maybe you're more informed than I am, but why is it happening?

01:05:36.400 Why is it specifically in the gay community?

01:05:39.120 It'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.

01:05:48.020 Um, it's, it's, it's, it's used in conjunction with sex. 0.81

01:05:52.440 It'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.

01:06:04.580 Um, and people talk about that experience as super wonderful and they can't go back to having sex without it.

01:06:13.360 It, I've just seen it destroy people.

01:06:16.520 Um, friends and, and, and, and it goes on.

01:06:20.620 Everyone acknowledges it privately.

01:06:22.360 It reminds me of the early days of AIDS in which people refused to actually acknowledge because they were scared that the facts of the matter would alienate people from gay people.

01:06:32.760 Uh, well, we are alienating ourselves.

01:06:35.920 We are committing suicide in a way as a community and you can barely see a word written about it.

01:06:42.960 Um, and, and I think again, it's partly.

01:06:46.520 It's partly the media's attempt.

01:06:48.560 Well 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. 0.97

01:07:00.640 Um, 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. 0.97

01:07:18.420 Um, infinitely more black Americans are killed by civilians than by cops, and yet we barely mention the former and we obsess on the latter.

01:07:29.040 And I'm not saying that killing by cops is something we should, but the perspective is all skewed.

01:07:37.320 Similarly, 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.

01:07:49.780 What 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.

01:08:05.720 Um, it happens to be a very potent drug too, which seems to hook people very quickly and be incredibly hard to recover from.

01:08:13.960 Um, it has taken a real toll and it's still going on.

01:08:19.780 Andrew, thank you for, for bringing that up.

01:08:22.020 That's not an issue that we've heard anyone else, Ray.

01:08:24.140 So we really appreciate it.

01:08:25.420 We're going to ask you a couple of questions from our local supporters that only they will get to see.

01:08:30.440 But for now, thank you so much for joining us.

01:08:33.180 I read the weekly dish every week.

01:08:35.120 It's a Monday.

01:08:35.780 It comes in Monday.

01:08:36.840 I think afternoon, my time.

01:08:38.240 I really enjoy it.

01:08:39.720 Recommend people check it out.

01:08:40.760 Where else should people find you online?

01:08:43.180 Oh, well, the weekly dish is the most, uh, I'm on Twitter, Sully dish.

01:08:46.560 Um, 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.

01:09:03.700 So it's, but also Obama, you know, the entire political, the world.

01:09:09.460 I'm not, I don't want people to think that I'm just a gay journalist.

01:09:12.980 I do write about this topic, but primarily, primarily I'm really in the thick of American political and cultural and religious, uh, discussions.

01:09:22.920 So, um, uh, but Out on a Limb gives you a sense of, of, of who I am and where I've been.

01:09:29.060 Um, it's on Amazon.

01:09:31.680 Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:09:34.540 It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:09:36.660 Uh, don't log off because we'll ask you questions for our locals.

01:09:39.340 And thank you for everyone watching.

01:09:41.420 We hope you've enjoyed this episode.

01:09:43.000 It's been absolutely brilliant.

01:09:44.320 If you want to watch our episodes, they're available on Wednesdays and Sundays, always coming out at 7pm UK time.

01:09:50.640 Our Raw shows are on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

01:09:53.480 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

01:09:58.800 Take care and see you soon, guys. 0.97

01:10:02.860 I am now told by critical theorists that if I am not attracted to someone with a vagina, I'm a bigot. 0.85

01:10:09.680 See you soon, guys. 0.98

01:10:25.060 We love you.

01:10:29.060 We love you.

01:10:32.120 We love you.

TRIGGERnometry - June 30, 2022

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

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