Andrew Neil On Global Politics And The US

The hard-nosed, legendary interviewer takes my questions.

Andrew Neil has long been one of the finest journalists in the UK. He has been chairman of The Spectator, chairman of Sky TV, editor of The Sunday Times, and a BBC anchor, where his grueling interviews of politicians became legendary. He’s currently a columnist for both the UK and US versions of The Daily Mail and an anchor for Times Radio. In the US he went viral after a car-crash interview with Ben Shapiro.

For two clips of our convo — on Europe’s steady decline, and Trump’s cluelessness on tariffs — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up near Glasgow as a working-class Tory; his mother working in the mills; his father fighting the Nazis; his merit-based grammar school (before Labour dissolved them); thriving on the debate team; studying US history at university; Adam Smith; reporting on The Troubles; covering the White House at The Economist in the early ’80s; Reagan Dems and Trump Hispanics; covering labor and industry in the Thatcher era; her crackdown on unions; the print unions that spurred violence; Alastair Stewart; tough interviewing and how the US media falls short; Tim Russert; audio of Neil grilling Shapiro and Boris; the policy-lite race between Trump and Harris; populism in the US and UK; Greenland and the Panama Canal; the rise of autocracy in the 21st Century; recent elections in Europe; Starmer; US isolationism past and present; the Iraq War; the 2008 crash; Taiwan and semiconductors; China’s weakening economy; the overconfidence of the US after the Cold War; Brexit; Covid; mass migration; AI; and the challenge of Muslim assimilation in Europe.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: John Gray on the state of liberal democracy, Jon Rauch on “Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy,” Sebastian Junger on near-death experiences, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Yoni Appelbaum on how America stopped building things, Nick Denton on the evolution of new media, and Ross Douthat on how everyone should be religious. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s episode with Adam Kirsch on “settler colonialism”:

I enjoyed your discussion with Kirsch, and I’m glad you made the point that all countries have been built on colonialism if you go back far enough. The history of humanity is one of movements of peoples, conquest, displacement, massacres, and absorption. (Noah Smith had a good take on this recently: “No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land.”)

When discussing the expulsion of 800,000 Arabs during the founding of Israel, neither you nor Kirsch mentioned that a similar number of Jews were subsequently expelled from Arab countries. (Other than by Bill Maher in one his shows after October 7, I hardly see this discussed by anyone.)

In other words, it was an exchange of populations — something that happened at roughly the same time, and on a much larger scale, during the partition of India, when millions of Hindus and Sikhs fled from what became Pakistan and millions of Muslims fled in the reverse direction. Yet within a few years, there were no refugee camps, since India and Pakistan — both poor countries — absorbed and settled these refugees. Around the same time, there were also large population exchanges in northern Europe, and a couple of decades earlier, between Turkey and Greece. All of these refugees were absorbed and settled.

What is noteworthy about the Palestinian Arabs is that they were not absorbed by the Arab countries, though they could easily have been. It has suited the Arab countries to keep them as refugees, as a distraction from their own failures.

Another asks rhetorically, “Are the current immigrants to the US also settler colonialists?” Another:

The next time you come across some leftist who believes the very existence of America is bankrupt from birth, ask them, “If, two thousand years from now, an indigenous tribe had the opportunity to reestablish sovereignty on its ancestral homeland in Utah or Minnesota or New York, would it be justified in doing so?” If they say, “Yes absolutely,” ask them how that fundamentally differs from Zionism — and behold their ignorance of history. If they say, “No, it will have been too long,” ask them where the statute of limitations is (the answer can only be arbitrary). But as I know you don’t need me to tell you, 99% of the time the answer will be the former. Sheer hypocrisy.

To be sure, none of this invalidates the extreme complexity of recent history and the present situation, which includes a great deal of which Zionists should not be proud. But as Kirsch notes and as you know, the leftist critique of Israel isn’t really about October 7 or Camp David 2000 or even 1967; it’s about 1948, and indeed 1878.

At its root, though, Zionism — not merely as an expedient to escape an increasingly genocidal Europe, but as, in the words of Hatikvah, the realization of a 2,000-year-old hope — is perhaps the most deeply decolonial political movement in history. This is what the left doesn’t understand (often due to bad faith, of course). And it’s what Sinwar didn’t understand. When the Palestinians broadly come to understand it, then — and perhaps only then, I’m afraid — will true and lasting peace finally be at hand.

Another listener also invokes parallels to Native Americans:

Thank you for the episode with Adam Kirsch, and I’m going to buy his book. I work adjacent to the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies, and I would be shunned for questioning the concept of settler colonialism. For at least the past 20 years, it’s become one of the orthodoxies you wrote about in your column last week.

At the 30,000-foot level, your initial take is exactly right: if every part of European invasion/settlement in North America, Australia, Rhodesia, etc. is the same, then: A) there’s no point in writing or reading history, because it’s all one “structure”; and B) there were empires approximating “settler colonial” entities in the Americas before 1492 and in Africa, etc.

The Israel/Palestine parallels and differences are unsettling (pun intended). Indigenous people in North America and Australia were overwhelmed by unfathomable levels of death from disease, which could wipe out 80% of a people a thousand miles from any physical European presence, as cholera or smallpox spread. Then when settlers did arrive (some of them refugees, prisoners, or slaves, let’s remember), there was no UN to criticize genocidal violence. Ultimately, settlers outnumbered Natives by overwhelming numbers. Israel doesn’t have any of those (horrific) “luxuries”, so it isn’t going to be as easy for them.

And I appreciated you pushing back on Kirsch’s premise that every ethnic group deserves an ethno-state. Should the UN create Israels for Kurds or Roma, or colonize Atlanta to return Georgia to the Cherokee Nation’s 300,000-strong diaspora to make up for the Trail of Tears?

P.S. You should do an episode about American Indians! Talk to novelist Sherman Alexie about his post-cancellation life and this great Substack essay from a couple of years ago criticizing broad-brush interpretations and lefty pieties about Indians.

Just a note to say that my role here was to push back, and so I raised points I don’t necessarily agree with in order to get Adam to unpack his argument some more.

Here’s a clip of us addressing the canard of “genocide” when it comes to Gaza and elsewhere:

A dissent over the episode:

Listening to your discussion with Kirsch, I think you’re being a real wimp on the settler-colonialism thing. Your liberalism and Christianity compel you to recognize the profound immoralities intrinsic to the settler-colonial project, but you think the immorality was often (e.g. in the case of America) justified anyway because they (e.g. the English colonists/Americans) were by far the superior civilization. Just admit that is your view and stop cavilling!

By the way, Kirsch’s argument that the European Jews who founded Israel are indigenous to Palestine is fantastically weak, and I wish you’d have challenged him on that (though your challenges were quite effective overall). Okay, the European Jews have a considerable amount of ancient Levantine DNA, and also have a religious connection to the land. I accept this because it’s true. But it doesn’t change the fact that in looks, culture, ideology, and language they “came as Europeans” (to quote David Ben-Gurion). Those things matter far more in practical terms than secularized Jewish myths about Eretz Israel and 23andMe results. I would think you’d appreciate that, as a conservative.

Any people in the Palestinians’ position would’ve seen the Zionists as colonizers, given that they “came as Europeans” and sought to transform Palestine into a Jewish state. Indeed, the Zionists — from Herzl (who called Zionism “something colonial” in a 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes) to Jabotinsky (who repeatedly referred to Zionism as colonialism and compared the Palestinian Arabs to the Aztec and Sioux) to Ben-Gurion — saw themselves as Europeans and colonizers!

Points taken. I made some of them myself. But I would not say the violence, genocide, and slavery that made America possible are defensible because the colonialists had a “superior civilization.” Even if the colonialists were superior in some ways, that did not give them the right to invade and occupy. I guess I think that global migration was inevitable once technology reached a certain point, and so some kind of colonialism was always going to emerge. The first experiments, as my listener notes above, generated so many plagues that seizing the land without interminable struggle became feasible. None of this applies to the 20th Century creation of Israel though.

Another dissent:

I’ve been a subscriber since the early *Daily* Dish days, and this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to write to you. Your conversation with Kirsch left my jaw on the floor. First off, you suggest that settler colonialism (or the broader, longer trend of exploring and conquering huge swaths of the planet) is uniquely European. You seem to have forgotten that Arab peoples — who are indigenous to the Arabian peninsula — conquered (read: settler-colonized) most of the Middle East, North Africa, and part of Southern Europe. How do you think Arabic became one of the most commonly spoken languages on the planet?

Unlike Christians and Arabs, Jewish people have never gone to war for any piece of land other than the one sliver of land the size of New Jersey that was once ours. (We also don’t seek to convert others to our faith.) You pay lip service to the damage done by European colonialism, mostly writing it off as “something humans have essentially been doing forever.” But when it comes to Israel, it’s “egregious.” Do you not see this double standard?

You seem to think that the only reason why so many around the world hate Israel is that its creation is so recent. Did it not ever occur to you that many people just can’t stand the idea of a Jewish state? Considering the absurd double standard you use to characterize European colonization vs the creation of Israel, and your total ignorance of Arab colonization, it seems to me that you too — on a level you won’t acknowledge but should explore — have it in for the Jews.

Sigh. Yes, my reader is dead on about the ubiquity of colonialism — a point I made early in the conversation. But it does matter that Israel was created very late in the day — just as colonialism was being dismantled, not erected — and that the very modern context meant that Israel couldn’t get away with many of the things earlier colonialists had. Unfair maybe. But true nonetheless. Colonialism in the 1840s was more defensible in world opinion than colonialism in the 1940s.

As for my “having it in for the Jews,” my listener may have missed other things I said in the episode, including:

The Jewish people have constructed a state and a country that is simply extraordinary — that is booming with talent, freedom, culture, science, technology. It’s kicking ass! …

I am more sympathetic to Israel now than I was two years ago … because I can see the absolute impossibility of their situation. And since I don’t think that Israel should be destroyed — at this point, I think it would be an absolute moral crime to somehow, in any way, enable the end to the state of Israel.

A less sunny view of Israel comes from this listener:

I grew up in the “old Israel,” and there’s much more to say about the evolution of the nation. It’s becoming an ethno-nationalist state, and it’s no longer that incredibly advanced cultural, scientific, and democratic phenomenon. It’s now considered an illiberal democracy, where censorship and religion creep into daily life. It also has the second highest poverty rate in the OECD. In the last year alone, around 83,000 have left with no plans to return. Of my friends, anyone with a second passport is contemplating leaving, and those who can afford to are doing so.

One more on the episode writes, “Thank you for asking Adam Kirsch challenging questions, which gave us an opportunity to hear his calm and measured responses”:

A failure in modern discourse on Israel is to portray the Palestinians as a besieged minority denied self-determination. Palestinians, however, are Arab Muslims and therefore part of the regional cultural hegemony. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI, ethnic and religious minorities have been poorly treated in the Middle East. Just ask the Yazidis, the Kurds, the Armenians, the Lebanese Maronites, the Egyptian Coptic Christians, and yes, the Jews. On the eve of WWII, Baghdad was a quarter Jewish, and they endured a horrific pogrom in 1941.

As nation-states were being created out of the former Ottoman Empire, the refusal by the majority culture to accept the self-determination of a small minority on a tiny piece of land was not inevitable. It is an ongoing tragedy. As Kirsch said, still today most Palestinians claim they would rather have no state than accept a Jewish state. Is there a better example of cutting off your nose to spite your face? Imagine the prosperity that Palestinians, and the wider region, would be enjoying if they’d chosen peaceful co-existence with Israel.

For example, look to Singapore and Malaysia. Not long before Zionists began migrating to Israel, a surge of Chinese immigrants arrived on the Malay peninsula, then a Muslim-majority society and a British colony. Shortly after gaining independence in 1957, Malaysia introduced a race-based quota system to limit the number of ethnic Chinese in universities, government, and the public sector. This led to the separation of Singapore from Malaysia. Singapore declared itself a sovereign nation in 1965. Today, Singapore (a tiny country) has an ethnic Chinese majority and a Malay Muslim minority. The demographics of Malaysia (a sizable country) are the reverse, though the ratios are different. Just to the south is Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. As Singapore has prospered, Malaysia and the region have benefitted by being peaceful neighbors.

Thus, by fixating on European immigration, proponents of settler colonialism miss valuable lessons from other parts of the world about demographic change, nation-state creation, and the dynamics between minority and majority cultures.

On another topic entirely, here’s a guest recommendation for a future pod:

There hasn’t really been any serious discussion of whether the US will elect a female president (if there is a decent candidate selected, rather than terrible ones like Clinton and Harris). You have touched on this without exploring it in depth, and it’s an interesting topic.

You and I both come from countries that have had three female Prime Ministers, and arguably in each country one was great, one was mediocre, and one turned out to be terrible. Their gender hasn’t seemed to have been an issue for the voters. Of the living female former PMs, Helen Clark has a formidable intellect and dominated her party and New Zealand politics, winning three elections in a row, so perhaps you could get her on to discuss this issue.

Here’s a topic rec:

After reading the bestseller Say Nothing, I got to thinking: Have you ever thought of doing a Dishcast on the history of the IRA? I ask because I think you’re unusual in being an Irish Catholic and also an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, so you can see the conflict from both sides.

I haven’t read the book, but I recently watched the miniseries. It’s an extraordinary piece of work — penetrating, real, honest, heart-breaking, funny. It’s the best thing on TV since Shogun, and the best miniseries since The Bureau. And yes, I’m a Unionist and a Catholic, whose grandmother witnessed the terror of the brutal British Black and Tan militias. One of my aunts was a Northern Irish Catholic — her accent a marvel to me as a young boy. But my grandmother married a British soldier (who never served in Ireland, mind you), was ferociously attached to her new country, and had no illusions about the IRA.

I don’t feel strongly about a political solution either way. But I do feel strongly about terrorism and the thuggery of the IRA; and the bigoted violence of the Protestant cops as well. Say Nothing slices through the IRA mafia boss, Gerry Adams, like a stiletto, and spares no detail with respect to Protestant hate.

Here’s a trailer for the miniseries:

Continued from the main page, here’s another dissent over last week’s column:

I want to thank you for exposing the lenient treatment of of the British-Pakistani men who raped and tortured so many English women, as well as your further examination of your mistaken support of the Iraq War. But linking Iraq and those heinous rapes to the transgender disputes shows that you are still unable to analyze the transgender issue free of your own orthodoxy.

The Iraq War and British-Pakistani rapes all involved massive coercion and unbridled brutality. As an unwilling participant in the Vietnam War, I felt that coercion, learned about the brutality, and pretty quickly understood that almost everything I had been told about the war was bullshit. As a result, I had my doubts about the Iraq War and the search for WMD from the beginning. Turned out the WMD claims were as bogus as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. (My experiences in Vietnam also lead me to support Biden’s decision to get out Afghanistan quickly, and you published my critique on the Dish.)

Blessed are imperfect peacemakers! In Vietnam, Nixon sacrificed over 20,000 our men, and likely ten times as many Vietnamese lives, just so he could claim he was achieving a “peace with honor” only to watch the helicopters try to evacuate our embassy. Biden’s evacuation was so much more successful. And just like Cheney and Bush, Nixon suffered no meaningful sanctions. In fact, he commuted Lt. Calley’s sentence, and he was impeached for totally different reasons.

The issue of coercion is crucial. As far as I know, no child is being forced to undergo treatment. Parental agreement is almost always required. The parent and child may be misled, but they are making a voluntary decision. In fact, it is only red states where the government is using indirect coercion by stopping parents and children from accessing treatment.

In addition, the data suggests a significant majority of those who have undergone treatment have no regrets. The outrage appears more keenly felt by pundits than those involved, which is also true of many the left’s pet peeves. That said, I long for a time when top-flight research can be done free from the left and right’s political pressures.

But I think your analysis of the transgender issue may be substantively wrong. The transgender issue is relatively new, so there is a lot we don’t know (so I may be as wrong about my theories as you were about the Iraq War). To me, what’s not known is the role of the brain. The right stays focused on sexual organs, penises and vaginas, balls and breasts, but they ignore the brain. The left may be be worse since it appears to rely heavily on sociology — one of the most malleable of the social sciences. I don’t know which organs are most important, and neither do you.

I do know that you have compassion for those children whose sexual organs say they’re a girl or boy but whose brains tell them otherwise. That’s not true for many other critics. But you appear to assume, without much supporting evidence, that those are rare cases. The truth is that we really don’t have much good evidence either way.

Yes, the “issue of coercion is crucial.” And you breeze past it too easily. A child is not an adult, and the question of meaningful consent is vital. I simply do not believe that a choice is freely made when ideological doctors blatantly lie to parents and tell them that if they do not trans their child, he or she will commit suicide. Yet that was the norm in countless cases. My view is that any doctor who provided such counsel should be disbarred for lying and misinformation.

Consent is also almost moot when we have no long-term serious studies on whether transitioning in childhood even makes a child’s life easier. Subjecting children to irreversible lifelong bodily damage without any solid proof that it even helps is immoral. Removing the capacity for any future orgasm for a child, when such a child cannot even understand what an orgasm is, is a grotesque violation of basic human rights.

And we do have good evidence on how many people are genuinely of one sex and believe they are the other from childhood onward. It’s very small, certainly far, far smaller than queer theory’s view that any deviation from gender norms is somehow “trans”.

Another returns to the UK scandal:

Let me start by saying that the gang-rapes in Oldham, and many other places in the UK, were truly horrifying. There are a lot of people with questions to answer as to how it went on for as long as it did. But let’s not pretend that the current storm stirred up by the terminally online Elon Musk and jumped on by many on the right, including the Conservatives, is anything but political — and it’s disgusting.

Musk’s targeting of Jess Phillips, who has done more than most MPs to protect women and girls, is disgraceful. And Phillips, as well as the Labour government, isn’t against a new inquiry if survivors want it. Here is Ros Atkins going after Musk for spreading misinformation about it.

Andrew Norfolk, the Times journalist who first exposed the crimes, said, “I want to put the record straight on this. It was [Keir] Starmer [while head of the CPS] who changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible.”

I would add that sentences for those who commit this sort of crime should be long. But how long someone can be sentenced for a crime is determined by Parliament, not lawyers or judges. Meanwhile, the Conservatives did try to torpedo actual legislation this government introduced to protect children who are home-schooled (there is a very recent and also horrifying case around that) with their call for an inquiry, even though they ignored the last one.

There should be more done to investigate what happened, make sure lessons are learned, and ensure that people are appropriately punished. But it needs to be handled sensitively, not on social media. And in the meantime, there are recommendations that should actually be implemented. Let’s not credit very toxic people who are using this to further their own hideous agenda, because this should be about victims — and neither Kemi Badenoch nor Elon Musk have actually talked to any of them. So here is a link to the BBC actually doing that: “Oldham abuse survivors criticise government over inquiry decision.”

I’m with you on Musk’s preposterous, ill-informed interventions. He needs to fuck right off.

Another reader addresses the Iraq War and transing kids:

Your column on Orthodoxy deals with a hugely important systemic modern cultural defect. I think you misidentify the problem, though, by focusing on those who might be sympathetic to a cause and then conflating them with those who actually are part of the Orthodoxy. Those who are part of an Orthodoxy should share collective guilt for its sins, especially when they ignored or enabled them. But on most issues, most of us are outside observers, taking positions where we have little firsthand knowledge and must rely on the information that others publish. Outsiders sometimes deserve blame when they ignore what is in front of them, and their moral failings deserve attention, but their failures differ from those who are invested in an Orthodoxy.

Take your discussion of how your own support for the Iraq War caused you to question the early stories of torture. You had no inside knowledge, and your behavior thereafter is not an example of the problem; it’s an example of the solution. It is understandable for someone who supports a cause to set a burden of proof before accepting facts that might be critical. This is what you did, but you continued to listen, and then you accepted the truth even though it caused you to reconsider your support for the war. Dick Cheney was part of the Orthodoxy; you were an outsider.

Similarly on an issue that is important for you, there is nothing wrong with those sympathetic of the transgendered but who are not vested in the transgender movement, to have accepted what at one-time seemed conventional wisdom on conversion therapy. But we certainly should criticize those who are active in the transgender Orthodoxy who knowingly lied about state of relevant medical data.

On the other side of the political spectrum, there are Republicans who know that Biden won the 2020 election, as did Trump. They further ignored substantial evidence that Trump took enormous efforts, some of them defamatory and illegal, and actively supported his reelection. Such people deserve big criticism because they are part of an Orthodoxy and want to obtain and retain power.

Amen. Next up, an “angry old gay guy” writes:

Go ahead and believe last week’s dissenter about Florida, because there’s more important pushback needed here. The reader got called “woke” for disliking the word “faggot”? Well, clutch my gay pearls! This is America. People get to call you names and more generally believe you deserve hellfire for whatever reason they want. You’re allowed to be similarly insulting towards them, and think as little of them as you’d like. Allowing this is a good thing. It’s what makes freedom in a pluralistic society possible.

We’ve carved out a few important spaces in society (employment, government, school) where that kind of expression is prohibited by law. I doubt we’re going to lose those protections any time soon, though sure, keep an eye on Florida. But outside of those spaces, yes, the death of woke means we can expect an uptick in all sorts of nasty opinions across the board (except perhaps from the far left, only because they’ve been allowed their maximal hatred throughout).

So this isn’t something to deny is happening; it’s something to embrace. When the gay younglings come to us complaining about it, we need to say, “Suck it up, fellow faggot; this is what equality looks like!” (I wouldn’t normally use that language; I’m being rude as part of my point.)

Of course, I can only say this at all by laundering it through the anonymity that the Dish provides, because you’re right, woke isn’t actually dead yet. But to kill woke, we’re going to have to help an entire generation or two realign their expectations. They’re going to have to finally learn a modicum of resilience, and that’s the solidarity we need to give them.

Amen again. When I read stories like this from the Woke Post, I’m just staggered by the dumbness, ignorance, and paranoia so many gays seem to live with. They’re moving up their marriage plans before the Trumpocalypse! And yet, Trump removed the opposition to gay marriage from the GOP platform, and we just watched an openly gay man, Scott Bessent, masterfully respond to questions in a Senate hearing with his husband and children right behind him. As Treasury secretary he will be the highest ranking openly gay man in US history — and the “queers” are afraid of being taken to the camps. But none of that is something most of these queers know. They’re are as ignorant as they are dumb.

The bubble here is intense. Every now and again, I look at Threads, where many of my gay friends and peers post their opinions. They are living in an alternative universe, spinning ever more elaborate and insane grievances, whining and attacking others incessantly. The bigotry towards anyone and anything outside their approved circle is staggering.

Here’s another reader on the gays and language:

I’m a long-time Dish reader, and I was horrified by your disclosure that GLAAD (and apparently the NYT, etc.) have cautioned people not to use the term “homosexual.” I am beyond befuddled. I understand that language changes, but this pronouncement feels obtuse, absurd, and counter productive.

I’m a historian of early America, gender, and sexuality, and I often spend lots of time in class discussing what we should call people who had same-sex sex before the term “homosexual” was coined in 1868. Indeed, I recently published a book on a man who was accused of having sex with men in the era of the American Revolution. The term used at the time was “buggerer,” though I was informed that this was too offensive to put in the book title, so I changed it to “homosexuality”. I really struggled with language in my book, as I wanted both to be true to the terminology and ideas of the past (when “buggerer” and “buggery” were the preferred terms in the discourse), but I also wanted to acknowledge that there’s a transhistorical aspect to men who had sex with men that “buggerer” did not convey.

So, I ended up using both terms. It did not occur to me that I was actually being insensitive to the present; I worried that I was being unfaithful to the past! Maybe this is one of those instances where the definition of a conservative is someone who holds on to the liberal positions of 20 years ago.

The hostility to “homosexuality” is intrinsic to transqueer ideology. Transqueers despise white gay men because we “oppress” them; they despise the sex binary, which defines homosexuality; and they despise any idea of nature, which rules out any understanding of gay men and lesbians are inherently same-sex attracted.

What they believe in is the abolition of the sex binary and the replacement of any stable idea of sex with an utterly nebulous idea of “gender”. So of course they want to ban the term homosexuality; of course they don’t want to refer to “gay men”; of course they hate the word “sex”. So they and the docile MSM — the WaPo is the worst of them — use the acronym “LGBTQ” so they can disappear same-sex attraction into “queerness” and render trans and gay identity as two variations on “queerness”.

It’s all postmodern claptrap. Also meaningless. To call someone an “LGBTQ person” is an oxymoron. Always ask: are they gay, trans, or bi? They can’t be all three.

A 71-year-old reader quotes me:

“It would be awesome to have some abs at some point before I die.” No, it would not. You’re 61 years old. It would be ridiculous for you to “have some abs.” Semaglutide is not a fountain of youth. Trying to look like an underwear model at your age would be embarrassing. I thought you were doing this for your health.

Health and vanity, tbh. I was also making a bit of a joke. A small detail: I switched last week from Ozempic to Zepbound. Far less nausea.

One more email for the week:

I discovered your blog around 2003 and read it almost everyday. I thought it was one of the best things on the internet. Odd as it my sound, you kind of became a part of my life. I almost begged you not to retire the blog, followed you to New York magazine, and subscribed to The Weekly Dish as soon as I found out.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but it’s odd for me to feel such a deep connection to someone I’ve never met and who I mainly know through their writing. Somehow I avoided all social media, and a few years ago I gave up on all news. Aside from occasionally watching Bill Maher, you were my only connection to current events. But I dipped back into politics and media before and after the latest election. Sheesh. The current state of “news” in this country sucks way worse than I could have imagined.

You seem to be one of the few intelligent, loud voices that has retained the capacity for independent thought. I know you catch hell all the time. I don’t see how you’ve stayed sane. Your bravery to emphatically voice unpopular opinions and stick to your guns is a true rarity. (I almost emailed you a few times to say “enough about woke,” but I’m starting to think you might be right and this thing runs deep. I sure hope I’m wrong.)

It’s so unusual for someone to change their mind, admit their mistakes, post dissents from their readers or peacefully agree to disagree. And your ability to synthesize what is happening in the world into clear, crisp, brilliant writing in such a short period of time is kind of fucking amazing. But I think my favorite thing about you is your humanity. You’re all too human in an industry full of narcissistic cyborgs. Your courage in putting that humanity and vulnerability on a big stage for people to see and experience. That’s one of the reasons I’m such a big fan.

However, I am writing to say “farewell” and tell you I am unsubscribing from your newsletter. Not because of anything you wrote, but to retreat, yet again, from all this madness. I’m going to soak my brain in fiction, movies, music, and nature for a while. Even if I don’t resubscribe, I sent something you wrote to my dad and he signed up, so the universe is evening things out.

Please stay on the trail of the neoliberals, neocons, and the incompetent elites. Thank you so much for all you’ve written over the years. Your writing has been like an oasis of reason in a mosh pit of insanity.

I’m so proud you found me. And sorry to lose you. But why not just listen to the non-political podcasts? We have a lot. As for your praise, I’m dead chuffed, as the Brits would say. You made my day.

Thanks as always for the dissents and other emails, and please continue to send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

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