Robert Merry On McKinley, Tariffs, Conservatism

His biography of the 25th president describes the dawn of the American century.

Robert is a journalist and historian. He served as president and editor-in-chief of Congressional Quarterly, the editor of The National Interest, and the editor of The American Conservative, and he covered Washington as a reporter for the WSJ for more than a decade. He has written many history books, including the one we’re discussing this week: President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. It’s a lively read, a fascinating glimpse of fin-de-siècle American politics, and of a GOP firmer on tariffs — but a hell of a lot more virtuous than it is under Trump today.

For two clips of our convo — on McKinley’s heroism during the Civil War, and the reasons he differs so much from Trump — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: Robert’s journalist dad and his conservative influence; his own career as a journo; McKinley’s roots in Ohio; his abolitionist parents; his mentor Rutherford B Hayes; his time in Congress; the economic depression of the 1890s; the debate over the gold standard; McKinley’s “front-porch strategy” besting the great populist orator William Jennings Bryan; his underrated presidency; his modesty and “commanding quiet”; his incremental pragmatism — in the spirit of Oakeshott’s “trimmer”; ushering in American empire; the Spanish-American War; the sinking of the Maine; taking over the Philippines; annexing Hawaii; leaving Cuba to the Cubans; the Panama Canal; McKinley’s strong support of tariffs; his later pivot towards reciprocity in trade; his lackluster record on race relations; his assassination by an anarchist; Teddy taking over; his bombast contrasting with his predecessor; trust-busting; McKinley’s remarkable marriage; his wife’s epilepsy; HW Bush; and if a McKinley type of conservative could succeed in today’s GOP.

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: Chris Matthews — who just revived “Hardball” on Substack, Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness, Paul Elie on crypto-religion in ‘80s pop culture, and Johann Hari coming back to turn the tables and interview me for the pod. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan on last week’s pod on Biden’s decline and cover-up:

I found every minute of your interview with Tapper and Thompson fascinating, and I appreciate you holding their feet to the fire a bit when it comes to the media’s dereliction of duty throughout the Biden presidency.

There’s plenty about the actions of the political class that should make your blood boil, in particular Ron Klain’s coup in using Biden’s lack of acuity to turn it into a Liz Warren-type administration, despite voters’ wishes. But at its core, the mission of the political class wasn’t honesty; it was to win. One can understand why they’d say, “We have to lie for the good of our team,” but that should not have been on the minds of journalists. Whether in the end they helped or hurt Trump is beside the point; we shouldn’t have a media that overwhelmingly sees its mandate as achieving a partisan outcome instead of telling the truth, wherever it may lead.

I appreciate that Tapper and Thompson wrote this book. Like you, I am eagerly awaiting the sequel that digs into how the press failed so badly.

I could have gone harder on the press, I know. But of all the knee-jerk defenders of Biden, I don’t think Tapper was among the worst. A partial dissent:

I appreciate you not engaging in a congratulatory circle-jerk with Tapper and Thompson, as did every other podcast I’ve listened to. But I still think you were far too easy on Tapper (I’m not familiar with Thompson’s work). The cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline is not primarily a story about a secretive and troubled family, interesting though that is. (Nearly every major political family has a great deal of dishonesty and skeletons in its closet.) And it is not primarily about the complicity of elected Dems; politics is ugly stuff, and look no further than the obsequiousness of prominent Republicans vis-à-vis Trump with regard to politicians only caring about their own careers.

Primarily, then, the story of Biden’s decline is about a media that is so biased and ideological that it was an active participant in the cover-up — until that cover-up exploded in spectacular fashion on the debate stage. When Lara Trump spoke about Biden’s decline in 2020, for example, Tapper browbeat her for supposedly mocking someone with a childhood stutter:

Glenn Greenwald also pointed out that CNN ran multiple segments speculating about Trump’s supposed decline because he once walked slowly down an icy ramp or held a cup of coffee in a strange way (really). Yet Tapper had the gall on your podcast to say that he and nearly all of his colleagues supposedly missed Biden‘s decline because “the sources” weren’t great. Really??? The “sources” were their eyeballs. Literally every week, there were new clips on social media showing Biden’s precipitous and impossible-to-miss decline. Here’s just one of literally hundreds of examples, from 2022:

And one more, from just before the June debate:

Americans’ level of trust in mainstream media is now in danger of falling into the 20s. Anyone concerned about people fleeing to Alex Jones and X accounts like Catturd (I certainly am) can hardly blame them when there was a concerted effort to lie and gaslight the public throughout one of the more consequential cover-ups in US history. Now would be seem to be a uniquely important time for an honest accounting of the partisanship, insularity, dishonesty, and condescension of the mainstream media. Instead, I see nothing other than heads in the sand.

I went over many Tapper clips. I don’t think that his blaming the stutter was so bad … because it was in 2020, before the obvious signs of deterioration became hard to ignore. Another on the media angle:

I wonder if the biggest problem is the pool from which so many journalists are drawn these days. That pool would be the one that I have swum in my entire life. I’m a physician who graduated from elite schools. I’m not close friends with any reporters, but I have a few on the periphery of my peer group, including two whose names I sometimes see attached to articles in the NYT, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker. My peer group is full of earnest, hard-working, very smart, generally ethical people who have achieved success by following the path that got them into good colleges in the first place: learn what the group is looking for, and then excel at it. That my peer group is a blue blob is also true, but it’s not as relevant as their institutionalist mindset.

It was interesting that you delved into Thompson’s life story as a Mormon, and then let Tapper off with “college, journalism career, let’s move on.” I’d guess that Tapper and I have fewer than six degrees of separation, whereas I know very few people who were raised as Mormons, let alone who have gone through the process of questioning and then breaking with that church. I believe that both of them are super smart, hard-working, and ethical, but I’d argue that Thompson’s personal history is as valuable to society as are his reporting skills.

Agreed. I’m trying to find guests without that kind of background. And it’s not always easy! But Thompson is terrific.

Another listener gets personal:

I nearly fell over this week when I heard your surprise at Biden’s behaviour around denial, blame, addiction, dysfunction, and not acknowledging grandchildren.

I am an Irish Catholic, as are my family. I’ve polled among my friends, and we all agree that Irish families have denial down to a fine art. I can tell you from own experience with my parents’ alcoholism that Irish families close ranks against those who tell the truth or present some inconvenience to the continued denial. My brother and I were in a care home when my dad was hospitalised with Korsakov syndrome (wet brain). His mum blamed my mum and had no contact with me or my brother for years afterwards. Of course, this doesn’t make it right, but it’s a typically observed dysfunction.

I am not unfamiliar with the pattern, believe me. I think I began my career as a journalist in some ways by calling out the bullshit in my own family as a kid and teen. On habits of denial, another listener writes, “Given that so much of this episode was focused on armchair psychoanalysis (I don’t mean that as a criticism), I will offer some thoughts of my own”:

First, I think you and your guests don’t really take into account the power of denial and the extent to which it can impact people. You ascribe conscious manipulation with regards to Jill Biden. You note that since she saw Joe every day, and even helped him more and more, she must have seen his deterioration, and thus any denial was merely fabrication and manipulation.

But let me offer this: I watched my father-in-law deny my mother-in-law’s worsening dementia for years. I watched him validate her outright denial that conversations ever took place; I watched him let her continue to see patients as a psychotherapist and deny she was losing her memory as her practice was collapsing; I watched him get a neuropsychologist’s 20-page report diagnosing her with neuro-degenerative disease and completely wipe it away from his consciousness.

And when my wife or I would speak to him privately, he’d still say everything was fine — and he earnestly believed it. He couldn’t see what everyone else could. He had convinced himself that nothing was wrong, even as the evidence was undeniable and his own actions would suggest otherwise. So don’t underestimate Jill’s own denials to herself.

Second, it is surprising to me that nobody has considered pseudo-dementia caused by depression as an explanation for Joe. The authors say it themselves — that Joe declined after his Beau’s death and Hunter’s relapse. Depression in the elderly often mimics dementia.

Next up, a fan of the Tanenhaus pod:

Thanks for the episode on Bill Buckley — twas a good one! I’m 35 and had never heard of him, and I found the episode both entertaining and so informative about periods of recent history that I know virtually nothing about. I’m trying to become more informed and principled in my politics and I think I’m leaning towards conservatism. Episodes like this help me understand at least some of the things I need to understand to know what I believe.

Another fan:

I’ve been waiting for this book for ten years. Can’t wait to get it. Buckley was my hero in San Francisco in the late ‘60s when I was in high school, and he’s the reason I went to Yale. So listening to this episode was pure pleasure. Thanks and God bless.

Buckley wasn’t a hero for this listener:

I really enjoyed the episode. No doubt, Buckley was a consequential figure of the 20th century, but for me, he encapsulates the essential hollowness of conservatism. He had no answers for the complex challenges of governing a state. He was really just the obnoxious rich kid in class posing as the contrarian intellectual all his life. As you noted, Buckley and his predecessors, his mentors, and his peers had no real answers for the Great Depression — for which they helped start — and for them, conservatism was all a subconscious desire to return the elites as rulers, with some Greek/Roman/Enlightenment philosophy added in.

Fast-forward to the present and we see this in the past few decades of Republican institutional mendacity about spending, taxes, trickle-down economics, religion, etc. — and none of it really addresses the “problems” they say they can solve. Their utopia of small government, less spending, and low taxes while claiming that the free market and religion will solve the other problems is just fiction. But if I’m wrong, please tell me where it has been realized?

Any time in America before FDR maybe? Another listener looks to the racial theme of the episode:

It was a delightful and intriguing interview. Just fantastic. But I have a thought that has nagged at me since listening to it. Could the contradiction between WFB and his family’s support for segregation and the kindness and generosity they showed to the very people they wanted to keep segregated be explained by their own experience of having been discriminated against as Catholics? In other words, their attitude may have boiled down to:

You don’t need the government to help you, so don’t go begging to them. Do it independently, within your own community. It’s much more rewarding and effective, if not necessarily expedient. And with the help of God and the Holy Spirit, we will help you acquire the schooling and land to forge ahead in that endeavor.

No wonder WFB so admired Malcolm X.

I hope this doesn’t come across as a Pollyanna-ish apology for the defense of segregation. But if there’s one thing Hitch’s support for the Iraq War taught me, it’s that solid, good-faith arguments can be found to have been mounted in favor of even the most noxious ideas. And to mitigate the arrogance that often accompanies hindsight, I try to apply that notion to history. It does have its limits (paging Mr Godwin), but I find it also yields a much richer and thorough examination of the timeline of civilization — human nature being the undercurrent of all human events.

Another on the race angle:

The portion of your talk with Sam on the Buckley’s racial paradoxes in Camden, SC brought to mind the third of the three great Alabama icons, George Wallace, as presented by the band Drive-By Truckers in their song “The Three Great Alabama Icons” from the 2001 album Southern Rock Opera — the duality of the Southern thing, as they called it:

I don’t lean on music for all my history lessons, but this song has always stood out from a first-person Alabaman point of view. Well, and the band is great, too.

In the same vein, Jason Isbell — a member of Drive-By Truckers during the 2000s who experienced the traditional rock journey of substance abuse — has a Dylan lyric tattooed on his arm that “reminds him about the idea of salvaging things,” and for him it “evokes the idea of loss as well as learning and growing from the experience.” I imagine that Buckley — in his later years and minus the loud guitars — might have enjoyed a conversation with Drive-By Truckers.

Here’s a recommendation for the pod:

There’s a fascinating review of TV mogul Barry Diller’s new book in The New Yorker. An excerpt:

His gay life, sadly, is mostly a source of early misery and bitter feeling — a reminder of how recently, and how blessedly, homosexuality has been normalized. He was certain, for a time, that being gay was a kind of disease; facing an AIDS test in the eighties, he was seized not just by the rational fear of illness but by a larger dread of losing control. His tentative steps toward self-acceptance are touchingly cumbersome. Fully coming out was the work of years. He speaks of an affair with, among others, Johnny Carson’s stepson.

As it happens, the mainstreaming of gay culture was one of the engines of his creative era. Diller doesn’t say this, but [when he was CEO of Paramount Pictures] it’s striking that “Saturday Night Fever” took a gay subject, disco dancing — adapted from a New York magazine story about a working-class subculture now known to be fictional — and played it straight, projecting onto the hero an improbably heterosexual life.

Diller could be a good interview subject!

Well, yes, but I’m afraid I feel a little too conflicted, having been a friend of his for many years, and an employee (when the Dish pitched our tent at the Daily Beast) for a few years. He’s an extraordinary man, but I also felt nothing could top Maureen Dowd’s profile, and I decided to let it go. I do have a couple of hilarious stories about a dinner party he once brought me to — featuring Calvin Klein, David Geffen, Elizabeth Taylor and her then-beau, Larry Fortensky — but maybe I’ll leave that for my memoir, if I ever do one.

Next up, a reader continues the debate “regarding the complaints from a few of your readers about the percentage of foreign students at American universities”:

Their complaints are typically American: they want what they want, but don’t want to pay for it.

Universities admit foreign students (as well as out-of-state students) because they can charge full tuition to those students. Particularly for public universities, the revenue from foreign students has grown in importance as public funding for education has shrunk. Complaining about the percentage of foreign students is like complaining about British investment in 19th century America. Americans wanted internal improvements but didn’t want to pay higher taxes, so they borrowed money from British investors to pay for infrastructure and then complained about that British investors had too much power.

Now, if your readers want to argue that public universities could lower their costs (and thereby decrease their need for foreign students) by firing a bunch of administrators, cutting back on the ridiculous amenities offered to students, and ending athletics programs that lose money, I couldn’t agree more. But universities spend money on amenities and sports because the American people demand that they do.

I personally think the American people shouldn’t demand that, but should instead put education at the core of higher education. I also happen to think that faculty are complicit in the dire straits in which universities currently find themselves. And I think that there is a real problem with (some) Chinese students in the US serving as CCP agents. But intellectual honesty demands seeing all these factors at the same time — not pretending that the problem is simply one of too many foreign students.

Amen. Another makes a distinction between public and private schools:

One of your dissents was representative of others:

The American taxpayer gives significant amounts of money to Harvard — both directly and via its tax-exempt status. I find it outrageous that 25 percent of the Harvard student body is foreign. There are many qualified American kids who would love to go there, but it’s now almost impossible for them to get in there or any other Ivy League school. These are our schools; we fund them; and foreign students should be restricted to 5 or 10 percent at most.

That reader complaining about the high percentage of foreign students are conflating public and private universities. Public schools are indeed “our” schools — funded significantly but nowhere near fully by states. That public funding helps cover student tuition. In California (my home state), there was growing public outrage about increasing numbers of out-of-state and foreign students being admitted to the UC system’s most prestigious campuses, reducing opportunities for in-state students whose parents had ponied up state taxes for decades. The non-Californian students pay a premium, which makes them very attractive to individual campuses.

Private schools are a different matter, in my opinion. Federal support is overwhelmingly (if not entirely) going for research grants, not tuition. There are Pell grants, but that’s not a huge amount of money flowing in; there are relatively few students at Yale or MIT receiving those grants. Foreign students aren’t eligible for them, anyway. Most students at these schools are paying full freight; it is sheer familial wealth and not foreign national status that’s at work here.

Another makes a distinction between grad students and undergrads:

Given many of your readers’ unhappiness with the high percentage of foreign students at Harvard, it seems to me that some clarification is in order. While 27% of Harvard’s students overall are international, only 15% of the undergraduates are from other countries. When we think of how difficult it is to be admitted to Harvard, we are typically thinking of admission to the undergraduate college (with its 3% acceptance rate) — not admission to the graduate programs, which vary enormously in their competitiveness.

The criteria for admission to Harvard’s undergraduate college are very much deserving of discussion. (For example, does the college really need a ski team, whose members excel in this sport because they can afford to ski in Chile during the summer?) But the criteria for admission to graduate programs are a totally different matter. In a PhD program, you want the smartest students in the field —that’s it. And the fact of the matter is, a lot of the smartest students come from other countries.

I remember that one year when I was at Berkeley, the mathematics department didn’t offer admission to a single American applicant to the PhD program. All of the best mathematics students were being produced in other countries, and the university wanted them — as it should have.

To my mind, it should be a source of pride for Americans that: (a) we have traditionally fostered the strongest graduate programs in the world; (b) those graduate programs attract the strongest students in the world; and (c) we have been able to recruit those students and retain a lot of them on our shores after graduation. There is no doubt about their excellence in their fields, and no doubt that the US benefits enormously from that excellence.

I was one of them, of course, paid by the Harkness Foundation to be a grad student at Harvard. I like to think it all worked out ok. Another looks across the Pond:

Cambridge and Oxford also show nearly half of their students are foreigners. I don’t like how elite colleges are run, but the argument that ours should be exclusive would make our American citizens studying abroad much more difficult, because I would expect Europe and other places to keep us out as well to “favor” their citizens. College is a waste of time if it’s not science, law, or medicine, so if you’re going to go and it’s not for one of those three things, then you go to discover new friends, cultures, ideas, and to have your personal life bubble challenged, and that is only accomplished with a good amount of foreigners added to the mix.

It’s supposed to be a melting pot, after all, and I for one would never want to take away the chance for our children to be able to use college as an excuse to travel and learn from other cultures, so it would only be American to allow them to do the same. We are always saying we want immigrants to benefit us, and that comes largely from their interest in our “elite” universities. Much needs to be fixed about how they’re run, but the number of foreign students is absolutely not one of them.

I might just add that, in my view, liberal learning in the humanities is very, very much worth doing as a way to become a fully formed human being. It distresses me hugely to see how the critical theorists have tried to ruin this. But there are still a few classes and teachers actually interested in teaching philosophy, literature, and history beyond neo-Marxist reductionism. Another reader adds:

Just for comparison: “Approximately 46% of the students at the University of Oxford are international, meaning more than 12,000 students are from outside the UK. This includes 23% of undergraduates and 65% of graduate students. These students come from over 160 countries and territories.” Try to imagine the UK government mugging Oxford as Trump is Harvard. One can’t, can one? (At least until Farage is elevated to PM.)

One more reader on academia:

I’m an English professor at a state university, and I share many of your concerns about the illiberalism of higher ed. Nonetheless, I found myself gobsmacked by your reader’s dismissal of my profession: “Insufficient monetary incentives and agency problems mean the profs are lazy, and tenure only makes them worse.”

Seriously? At my institution, the weakening of tenure has resulted in higher course loads for professors, larger class sizes, and a fear that fighting the administration’s agenda will put a target on your back. In search of larger tuition revenues, we’re taking in more and more underprepared students. This means that I have to spend more of my time doing outreach and student support.

I suppose I could be “lazy”, since there’s “insufficient monetary incentive” for me to work harder. It would be easy enough to do less, just pass the students with a C- or higher, and stop worrying. And yet, I don’t do that, and I don’t know a single professor who does. In spite of your reader’s ridiculous stereotype, most university professors care deeply about our students and work very hard at our jobs.

Here’s one more email for the week, from a closeted trans reader:

I know this is a long email, so I sincerely appreciate your attention. I saw your Substack note regarding the Pew survey on LGBTQ adults. I’m a paid subscriber to the Dish, and reading the note reminded me to buy your book Virtually Normal, which I didn’t know about until Brianna Wu mentioned it in your interview of her. So regardless of anything I say next, know that I have a great deal of respect for you.

As someone who has suffered from gender dysphoria since childhood, I often get very frustrated with your commentary on these matters, especially given the anti-trans rhetoric and policies we’re currently seeing. In particular on your note, you asked why gays and lesbians are in an alliance with trans people, suggesting you have more in common with regular heterosexuals than trans people. I don’t entirely disagree, given that transsexuality involves changing your body, dress, and behavior to “live” as the opposite gender, whereas homosexuality involves none of that and is just about loving someone you form a bond with.

But I would just make two observations where the Gs and the Ls have a lot in common with the Ts:

1. They are all (or have been) viewed as deviant by mainstream society.
2. More importantly, they all have a coming-out (and/or closeted) experience that regular heterosexuals just don’t have.

I don’t think there’s any question — as I know you’ve experienced — that homosexuality has been sneered at by mainstream Anglo-American society in the past. I can tell you that as someone who doesn’t live in a place like Brooklyn or Malibu, transgenderism/transsexuality is increasingly sneered at. I’ve heard an increasing number of people make critical or snide comments on that topic, including my mother. They make those comments not knowing of my gender dysphoria, and while I suspect some people may think I’m gay, I don’t think anyone believes I’m trans.

But those comments presumably result from increased negative coverage of trans people. Not all of that coverage is unearned. I also think the sports issue is crazy, and I concede there probably have been teenagers in recent years who were wrongly diagnosed with gender dysphoria. But some of it is just mean-spirited, including from people who would have been sneered at themselves 30 years ago.

On point #2, I am closeted; I’ve only had this conversation with a few therapists over the years, and anonymously online — not with any family or with what few friends I have. There are several reasons why that is. One is that only in the last few years have I begun to come to terms with feelings I’ve had since at least middle school, partly I suspect because I’m constantly hearing about transgenderism in a way I wasn’t even four years ago. Two is because I still have religious hang-ups about transitioning, which I’m still working through in my mind.

And three is that the consequences of coming out would be enormous. You say that trans people have civil rights, but if I came out as trans tomorrow and started transitioning, I am very skeptical that a reason wouldn’t be “found” to fire me from my job. I don’t work in a profession and a part of the country where this would be welcomed or celebrated.

Moreover, one difference between Ts versus Ls and Gs is the current level of acceptability. I have a colleague who is an open homosexual and has brought his partner to office parties. I suspect not everyone religiously approves of the relationship, but they are both treated with respect. In contrast, whenever the topic of transgenderism is brought up, I can assure you that it isn’t addressed with respect.

So there are still very steep personal and professional consequences for being trans. I suspect they are similar to those you once feared as a gay man, as I saw your C-SPAN interview with Brian Lamb when you suggested that you thought your hiring as editor of The New Republic might not be publicly welcomed. And I suspect you overestimate the strength of Bostock, which given the recent Supreme Court ruling on trans people serving in the military, seems to be negotiable.

My sense is that your worldview on this topic is colored in large part by the organized LGBT political movement and by the actions of transgender activists. I am a very long way away — metaphorically and to some extent geographically — from those movements. I suspect many transsexuals, closeted or not, are as well. Even if I came out, my goal would not be to “revolutionize all of society” or “end the sex binary.”

It’s my understanding that it used to be in most states that if you went through counseling, hormone therapy, and surgery, the state would reissue your birth certificate to reflect the gender you “transitioned” into, and you could go on about your life. Society can have a discussion on whether that went too far, but transgenderism was not even brought up in my part of the world until Caitlyn Jenner came out. It didn’t involve revolutionizing society; it just recognized that a tiny amount of people have a legitimate problem and should have a pathway out of the misery they’re in. And having dealt with depression, anxiety, catastrophizing, loneliness, and obesity for many years now, I can tell you, it’s pretty damn miserable. And when I look at attempts by some to criminalize or hinder treatment even for adults, it’s scary even for someone who is not out.

Again, I get that there are legitimate issues around this topic: sports, minors being diagnosed, etc. And I can see why you would find some of these activists annoying. But I hope you realize that not every trans person or person with gender dysphoria is an extremist. Most have a legitimate problem that they’re trying to deal with, and I think most of us would appreciate people supporting us — even for those of us who never come out. I just wish that people would look past the activists and political hysteria and see real people who feel isolated and hated, like myself, and be willing to empathize and push for reasonable accommodations and a society that embraces them.

That’s a beautiful letter. The distinction between regular transsexual or transgender people and trans activists is a vital one to make — like the distinction between most gay men and lesbians and “queer” activists. I do try and have tried to emphasize the dignity and equality of trans people in my writing on the subject.

The trouble is we have gone way past civil rights toward cultural revolution. I support the former but not the latter. The points my reader agrees with me on — sports, minors being diagnosed and irreversibly treated on the brink of puberty — are not just “annoying.” They reveal the true nature of the new project — to deny all biological sex differences between men and women and replace them with chosen, socially constructed genders of an infinite variety.

Yes, obviously there remains discomfort, prejudice, and fear around trans people among many. But compared with a decade ago? The media, corporations, academia, foundations, and government have all rushed to embrace trans people; there has clearly been a social contagion in favor of transing among teen girls; you can’t watch the TV for long without the issue being presented positively; Bostock gave trans people full civil rights in 2020. At some point, the cliche about a despised and vulnerable minority seems a little worn thin.

And some discomfort is inevitable. Recognizing an individual’s sex is near-instant in the human brain, and involuntary. When a face presents feminine but looks male, you’re in an uncanny valley, and it’s completely understandable that people will feel awkward. Same with some dudes’ gut issues with gayness and butt-fucking. It’s human, and it need not concern either you or me — if we can develop the self-confidence to treat these natural but regrettable offenses with indifference and get on with our lives.

I know most trans people don’t want to overhaul everyone else’s sex and gender to align with 0.5 percent of the population. But the movement sure does. It’s that revolutionary movement and its cooptation of gay men and lesbians that concerns me. And I will continue to speak out against it. But I bear no ill will and a great deal of empathy for trans people. I just believe they deserve representation that isn’t illiberal, aggressively intolerant, and the result of a hideous outbreak of critical gender theory.

Speaking of which, here’s a link to a new NYT podcast series on the treatment of gender dysphoria among children. Trans activists are already denouncing it without having heard a second of it. I haven’t had time to listen either, but I know the reporter, Azeen Ghorayshi, has done good work in the past, so I urge you to take a listen.

I’m eager to understand more from all sides of this debate, even as my own views have hardened the longer I have looked into it. Maybe I’ll learn something that will alter my views a bit. Maybe all my priors will be confirmed. I don’t know. But the core point is that we need more open, free, and fearless discourse on this subject, whichever side you are on.

So thank you, NYT, for doing this, given the huge pressure not to. It matters. A lot of children are at risk. And they should count for something.

See you next Friday!

Invite your friends and earn rewards

If you enjoy The Weekly Dish, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.

Invite Friends