Mike White On Transcending Identity

The brilliant filmmaker makes a rare podcast appearance. It was a blast.

Mike White is a writer, director, and actor. Among his many films, he wrote and starred in Chuck & Buck and wrote the screenplay for School of Rock. In television, he co-created and starred in Enlightened, and he’s the genius auteur of The White Lotus, currently in its third season. In reality TV, he competed on Survivor: David vs. Goliath and two seasons of The Amazing Race, alongside his gay evangelical father, Mel White, whom I knew well before I came to admire his son’s work.

For three clips of our convo — on the humanism of The White Lotus, Mike finding Buddhism, and his courageous gay dad — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in the boring suburbs of Pasadena; attending a private school of rich kids; his mom a teacher and homemaker; Mel the minister and ghostwriter for famous televangelists; the productive pain of adolescence; Mike studying postmodernists like Judith Butler at Wesleyan; Mel coming out of the closet right after his kids left college; Soul Force; Mike’s power of observation; his love of Camille Paglia; Sexual Personae; the subtle psychological warfare in White Lotus; how its characters aren’t didactic; how identity politics is bad for art; the golden age of reality TV; Mel joining Falwell’s church with his partner; the pressure to be the model gay; the gay characters of South Park; Mike’s nervous breakdown; the humor and lightness in Buddhism; meditation; Oakeshott and the ordeal of consciousness; Orwell and the clarity of nonfiction; Jennifer Coolidge and the evil gays; Parker Posey; Sam Rockwell’s autogynephilic role; bro-cest; the mysteries of desire; Freud; how iPhones kill imagination; Mike’s veganism; how class gets eclipsed in wokeness; and the redeemable qualities in all the White Lotus characters.

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: Nick Denton on China’s inevitable world domination, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science, and Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod on DOGE and public servants:

Thank you for inviting Michael Lewis on the show last week; it was so much fun. The thing I loved most was your both absolutely genuine belly laughs at each other’s jokes, memories, and insights. Humor saves, and I appreciate it.

Another listener writes:

I loved your discussion with Michael Lewis, and two things stood out to me. First, the discussion of where to find the 2025 Ross Perot. The easy answer is Donald Trump. The GOP of 2012 is dead and gone and has been hijacked by Trump. If a 2028 version of Mitt Romney were to run for president, he would need to mount a third-party run and wouldn’t stand a chance in the modern GOP.

Second, you voiced concern over federal employees having blocked Trump in his first term. I don’t believe any of them blocked Trump (or had the power to). Instead, it was laws and — as you pointed out in the episode — empirical truth. As we’re seeing in the second Trump administration, he’s ignoring both the law and empirical truth, and I don’t know what the public wants civil servants to do with a chief executive not constrained by either of these factors.

Here’s a dissent:

Of course there are great government employees who are doing amazing things and selflessly helping the country. But the country is also running the highest-ever federal deficit outside of wartime (or Covid), at nearly 7% of GDP last year while at full employment, which is completely insane. Ignoring this, in favor of emphasizing that a dozen of the 3,000,000 federal employees are really great and undervalued, is certainly one editorial choice!

Both you and Michael complained about how DOGE is recklessly damaging the government, and he used his cherry-picked examples of great things that a handful of government employees are doing, implicitly giving the impression that this is the type of thing that government spending mostly goes to. This is as nonsensical as the opposite claims that all government programs are as useless as the gender queer cultural USAID programs.

What most people want solved is how we get the federal budget back to reasonable levels while retaining the core competencies, such as the ones that Michael highlights. The trillion dollar question is how we do that. That is the question that you should have asked former bond trader Michael Lewis, who surely understands that ongoing federal budget deficits of 6%+ are a one-way road to financial and economic crisis. And you should have asked if he has any ideas on how to solve these problems. Instead it was just bitching and complaining about how Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing.

I think I made the point in the podcast that because Musk is only able to tackle 14 percent of federal spending, there will be minimal impact on the debt (especially when extending the 2017 tax cuts). The only way to cut the debt is to tackle Medicare and Social Security.

Another points to a news item published this week:

I’m a big fan of yours (and a paid subscriber for many years), but you really need to issue a correction on the podcast from this week. You let Michael say, “Elon Musk has no experience running large institutions, and the only one that he has run [X] has dropped 60% in value.” This is demonstrably not true: “Elon Musk’s X regains $44 billion valuation in major comeback.”

It’s a little unfair to accuse Michael of not knowing something when we taped before this news came out. But I’m happy to include the info.

Another looks to the lesser known villain of federal workers:

I am partway through your excellent episode with Michael Lewis — basically right at the part where you discuss Russell Vought. I think Vought is in some ways the most contemptible of the characters that Trump has handed the government over to.

Vought, from his position as OMB head, is leading the charge to destroy basic biomedical research in this country — yet, he is personally one of the biggest beneficiaries of that research. He has a daughter with cystic fibrosis — a deadly, life-altering, and life-shortening disease that until very recently was untreatable. Within the past decade, building on NIH-led scientific research, Vertex Pharmaceuticals has developed three miracle drugs for treating CF. With the benefit of these drugs, many people with CF can live something much closer to a normal life. The impact these drugs have had on CF are roughly analogous to the impact that the development of antiretrovirals had on HIV/AIDS — just a complete game-changer.

Vought’s daughter has had her life changed for the better by the miracle that is Trikafta (one of the three Vertex drugs), and yet he is devoted to destroying the system that, for all its many flaws, saved his daughter’s life. Contemptible.

Zeal warps the mind. Next up, “from a fed”:

This is odd, but I’m writing to thank you for having Michael Lewis on to talk about DOGE and federal employees without having listened to the show. And I may not ever listen. Not because I don’t want to hear what he has to say, but because the way I am handling being in the center of this strange and horrible storm engulfing federal employees is to let most of it sail on by.

I did cancel my subscription to The Free Press after Nellie Bowles decided it was fun to mock the feds who spoke up about the extremely weird, unprofessional, and anonymous emails from “HR” (that’s not a thing — government employee personnel actions are handled through each agency) telling us to quit. But so far that’s been about the extent of my engagement with any of it. I don’t have the energy to explain all the nuance and detail about how federal employment works — nuance and detail that is mostly not showing up anywhere in the media or Substack. (Though Jeff Maurer had a good column about the childish DOGE emails.)

Sure, there are idiots and assholes who don’t deserve their jobs in government, just like everywhere else. But to have an entire section of the American population actually jeering at people who are upset over losing their jobs … wow. Would Americans do that to any other group? And what other instances are there of a group of employees whose employers are leading the jeering and derision?

So. Thanks again. Maybe I’ll listen in a few months after I’m either fired or this stuff has settled down.

One more listener on that episode:

What a pleasure it was to listen to your conversation with Michael Lewis. He’s delightful! A couple of quick points:

The dull process point is that I sent you a snippy email last month complaining that your interview tics often interfere with exactly what I’m interested in. This conversation with Lewis didn’t do that; you let him finish his stories for the most part, and then your questions and responses augmented the conversation rather than derailing it. The form, and not just the substance, of this episode was a joy to listen to.

The more substantive point is that you discussed Michael Kinsley and reminded me that I would love for you to go in depth sometime about that man. I absolutely adored his writing in the ’80s and ’90s, and it sounds like he was a creative and life-affirming editor. Would you sometime flesh out an encomium to Kinsley? (I’m guessing that his Parkinsons takes a pod conversation off the table.) If I were wealthy, I’d commission an anthology filled with stories from you and other writers about Kinsley. My fear is that it will only be his (far in the future, I hope) death that would trigger it. How much better would it be to celebrate him while he’s alive?

Kinsley is the GOAT. I put out feelers for a pod but worry it may be pushing it. Thanks for encouraging me to re-engage. Here’s another guest rec:

I recall a while back that you were telling us that Van Jones was going to be a guest on the Dishcast. Did that ever come to be? I seem to have missed if it it did happen. Also, what are your thoughts on have Pete Buttigieg on the show? Please!

Van agreed to come on the pod, but his PR team canceled it. I’d happily have Pete on. I’ve tended to avoid politicians because they are inevitably constrained in the kind of frank, free-wheeling conversations a podcast does best.

Next up, readers continue to debate the free speech of Mahmoud Khalil. One writes:

Your dissenter points out that it might not be a good idea to visit Slovenia and protest their government. I don’t know much about Slovenia; maybe he’s right. But this is America, and we should be big enough that we can handle a tourist coming here just to protest against us, or say anything else that would be covered under the First Amendment. Can’t we handle that? Let’s show the other countries how it’s done.

Here’s Thomas More — my confirmation saint — showing how it’s done:

Another writes:

The case of Mahmoud Khalil is even worse than you say: the Trump administration happily welcomed the Tate brothers — two anti-Semitic, light Holocaust deniers — back to the United States. From the Times of Israel:

Last year, Mother Jones magazine reported the Tates “have increasingly pivoted to criticisms of Israel that promptly segue into antisemitic claims clearly rooted in the blood libel.” [Andrew] Tate opened up vociferous anti-Israel criticism after October 7, 2023…. Almost immediately, Tate announced to his followers he was raising money for Palestinians. Declaring that Israel was “genociding the Palestinians,” Tate — who in 2022 claimed to have converted to Islam — has also celebrated slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as “defiant in the face of evil,” calling his death in October “heroic.” When asked last year if he would condemn Hamas, Tate responded, “No, I’m not going to condemn the masculine spirit of resistance.”

Last year, Tate also began flirting with Holocaust revisionism, writing on X, “If they lied to us about Gaza and Israel… Do you think they lied about [the Second World War]?” He added that the war “was such a large cultural event,” and was being used by governments to “psyop the populace” — a reference to psychological operations — into believing “bad guy = Nazi.” “I think you should at least understand why the war really happened,” said Tate.

The Khalil deportation completely fails even basic grounds of consistency; it is purely for the purpose of expanding Trump’s power over the American people.

Good point, but Andrew Tate is an American citizen born in the US. But if Trump was really serious about combatting anti-Semitism, why did he dine with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago?

Another reader:

Your piece about the dangers of the Trump attack on free speech is very welcome. As you probably know, it is only getting worse. Now he wants to declare any news outlet that has negative stories about him “illegal”:

“I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6 percent bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat party, and in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal,” Trump said, again using his nickname for MSNBC. He also bashed other outlets, including CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, for their reporting. He claimed that the mainstream outlets were influencing judges and “I don’t believe it’s legal.”

Another looks to recent history:

Your invocation of Irish-Americans who supported the IRA made me think of this media moment from 2011:

For Representative Peter T. King, as he seizes the national spotlight this week with a hearing on the radicalization of American Muslims, it is the most awkward of résumé entries. Long before he became an outspoken voice in Congress about the threat from terrorism, he was a fervent supporter of a terrorist group, the Irish Republican Army.

“We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry,” Mr. King told a pro-I.R.A. rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.” […]

A judge in Belfast threw him out of an I.R.A. murder trial, calling him an “obvious collaborator,” said Ed Moloney, an Irish journalist and author of “A Secret History of the I.R.A.” In 1984, Mr. King complained that the Secret Service had investigated him as a “security risk,” Mr. Moloney said.

Another looks to Soviet history:

I’m sure you are very much aware of it, but maybe revisit Article 58 of the old Soviet Constitution. A lot of it sounds familiar to what’s now being said about enforcing national security in the US.

Before WWII, my great uncle visited the USSR and eventually married a Russian girl. He was expelled in 1935. His wife survived the siege of Leningrad. After the war, she was arrested on the street in Leningrad under Article 58 and spent many years in a camp in Moldova. The problem was her suspicious “biography”; she had married a foreigner and spoke fluent English. (She thankfully reappeared in 1964 following Khruschev’s famous speech.)

That’s all it took: a biography.

This next reader is disappointed by the Dems:

The deportation of Khalil is unjust and counterproductive, but what most of my Jewish friends and family members are positively enraged about is the following: for over a year, the Democratic Party has said nary a word about the dramatic rise of antisemitism on college campuses (with some rare exceptions). And now they are defending Khalil as a truth teller and hero. They’ve ignored kids getting abused, spit on, their religious items torn down and destroyed, their student groups boycotted, their events disrupted, etc.

In fact, the highest-ranking Jewish politician in US history, Chuck Schumer, told Columbia administrators not to bother complying with a House panel on college antisemitism because Kamala was on the way and would save them. And yet American Jews are expected to come out and vote for the Democrats time and again. And if we don’t, we’re accused of not standing with other minorities (who haven’t done a damn thing to support us since October 7). Our concerns are constantly dismissed, and the guy in the group abusing us gets their support.

That doesn’t mean that Khalil should be deported, but a little recognition that he is a part of a group that is truly rancid would be nice, especially if Democrats would like to keep our votes.

Consider yourself recognized. There has been a double standard here, and I see why many find it rich that the woke censorship brigade has now found a free speech martyr. I don’t think I can be put in that camp. I found aspects of these protests both moronic and menacing, and Columbia handled them atrociously. But we can’t tackle one double standard with another, as you note.

From another reader looking back at the Biden era:

Just a simple question: which unelected bureaucrat is/was more powerful: DOGE head Elon Musk (2025), or Biden Chief of Staff Jeff Zients (2023-2025)? One is firing people, canceling contracts, and posting on X. The other may one day be portrayed by Andrew McCarthy in a role similar to the one McCarthy played in Weekend at Bernie’s:

One more question: does Zients have even 3% name recognition among Americans?

In response to my column “The Bully In His Pulpit,” a reader initially wrote:

Get serious. You had the opportunity to endorse Harris. You refused, mocked her and Biden, and now you’re getting what you deserve. Enjoy it! You’ve earned it!

That reader follows up:

Thank you for the link to your Harris endorsement. I was wrong, so I’ll happily eat those words and re-subscribe to the Dish. It’s comforting to know that reason prevailed when you did endorse a candidate.

However, I will say this in my defense: the fact that I didn’t know you had endorsed Harris in the face of the clear and present danger that is Donald Trump means that you spent too much time this past election focusing on the wrong issues, for the wrong reasons. If your counterargument is that you were giving voice to the issues and public sentiments that would decide the election, then you’d have been 100% correct — but it felt like more than that to this long-time reader. I felt like issues surrounding “wokeness” prevented you from seeing the forest for the trees when it came to the much more important issues of respect for our democracy and democratic institutions, the separation of powers, etc.

Now I fear we’re all paying the price for this lack of focus. If our democracy ultimately fails and the roots of that failure were sown in Donald’s re-election, will anybody care about institutions being “too woke” if Donald had lost? I think we’ll all be more concerned with the fact that we don’t have a democracy anymore to even begin to care about how “woke” our remaining institutions are.

I disagree — because those very issues were part of how Trump got re-elected. I was not just against uncontrolled mass migration and child sex changes because they have had dreadful consequences, but also because they were Trump’s best weapons. If you really want to save democracy, why give him so much easy ammunition to fire at you? In many ways, I think the nomination of Harris was a huge sign that the Dems did not take the Trump threat seriously.

One more email for the week:

Hello from Asia. I spent much time in my boyhood in your hometown, East Grinstead, attending the Queen Victoria Hospital for the treatment of a childhood complaint. It’s been decades since I have visited the hospital or the town. Do you go back to East Grinstead, or are your family and friends more in Reigate?

I spent a lot of time in East Grinstead last summer, as my mother declined and died. That’s home. But I often get together with Reigate Grammar alums in Reigate when I’m over there, a group that once included Keir.

Please keep the emails coming, especially the dissents: dish@andrewsullivan.com. You can also sound off in Substack Notes. This week, while noting a NYT piece about a French scientist denied US entry because of Trump criticism found on his phone, I wrote:

The coming tourist season in the US is gonna be interesting. Will there even be one when noncitizens know they are visiting what is, for them, a police state — a country where the government can break into your hotel room, ransack your phone, and whisk you away to interrogation centers or prison for days on end with no ability to communicate with anyone.

The Trump recession is gonna be brutal.

A reader in Australia replied, “Yes, I have a 3 week vacation booked to the US in July which I am going to have to either divert to Canada or cancel entirely so we can go to Europe instead.” Another:

None of my relatives (I am Canadian) are travelling through the States this year, even it means adding two hours on travel time. Canadians are pissed, especially regarding the 51st state talk.

Another wrote, “Just imagine the World Cup here next year.”

I also noted a NYT piece of a very different sort:

The incoherence of the genderqueers finds sublime expression in Masha Gessen’s new piece in the NYT. Take this total non sequitur passed off as profundity:

In his Inaugural Address and one of his first executive orders, President Trump asserted that only two sexes exist: male and female, established at conception and immutable. Trans people, in other words, do not exist.

Two things: Trump, to my dismay, did not actually say this. He said: “two genders.” Somehow the NYT fact checkers did not catch this. Will they run a correction as they should? Let’s see.

This matters because officially the queers argue that sex is different than gender and in all legal, social and political categories, gender should replace sex. So according to Gessen’s own ideology, it does not follow at all that because only two sexes exist, trans people do not.

Trans people are either male or female by *sex*. Not a single human has ever produced eggs and sperm. But they identify as the opposite gender. So of course only two sexes does not imply trans people don’t exist. At all. The distinction between sex and gender is critical to the queers. But Gessen ignores that entirely.

I suspect a highly intelligent person like Gessen could write this because she almost never talks to anyone who disagrees with her. And literally no one at the NYT — I guarantee you — would ever dare challenge Gessen. Or correct her.

A reader added, “It is profoundly sad that Pamela Paul was let go from the opinion section and we are left with pieces like this.” Another dissents:

Get a life Andrew. Their [Gessen’s] piece was pointed: the denationalization of trans people in the United States, how they [Gessen] had experienced the same as a stateless child immigrant in much the same way German Jews were denationalized by the Nazi government. But you choose to parse over syntax, like some hall monitor looking to issue a citizen’s arrest citation. It’s so trite, and petty.

They [Gessen] routinely engage with people who don’t agree with them including the former Mr. Pamela Paul, a.k.a. Bret Stephens.

While you’re playing in the weeds, they’re coming not just for them, but for you. And for me. We — the others. Though queers like them [Gessen] and me have your back, I’ll be damned if I’d turn mine on you for a nanosecond.

I went back and forth with that reader here.

And finally this week, here’s a glimpse at what the Dish has to compete with on our weekly deadline:

That’s the real pressure I face every Friday as I try to put this newsletter to bed, and Truman needs a walk. The Pit-Pom is with his uncle Chris this weekend, as I’m in LA to do Bill Maher’s show. Miss him already.

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