John Ellis On The News And GOP History

A wide-ranging chat with a news veteran.

John is a journalist, media consultant, old friend, and George W Bush’s cousin. He’s worked for NBC News as a political analyst and the Boston Globe as a columnist. In 2016, he launched a morning brief called “News Items” for News Corp, and later it became the Wall Street Journal CEO Council’s morning newsletter. News Items jumped to Substack in 2019 (and Dishheads can subscribe now for 33% off). John also co-hosts two podcasts — one with Joe Klein (“Night Owls”) and the other with Richard Haas (“Alternate Shots”).

For two clips of our convo — on the nail-biting Bush-Gore race that John was involved in, and Trump’s mental decline — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: born and raised in Concord; his political awakening at 15 watching the whole ’68 Dem convention with a fever in bed; his fascination with Nixon; the Southern Strategy; Garry Wills’ book Nixon Agonistes; Kevin Phillips and populism; Nixon parallels with Trump — except shame; Roger Ailes starting Fox News; Matt Drudge; John’s uncle HW Bush; HW as a person; the contrasts with his son Dubya; the trauma of 9/11; Iraq as a war of choice — the wrong one; Rumsfeld; Jeb Bush in 2016; the AI race; Geoffrey Hinton (“the godfather of AI”); John’s optimism about China; tension with Taiwan; Israel’s settlements; Bibi’s humiliation of Obama; Huckabee as ambassador; the tariff case going to SCOTUS; the Senate caving to Trump; McConnell failing to bar Trump; the genius of his demagoguery; the Kirk assassination; Brexit; immigration under Boris; Reform’s newfound dominance; the huge protest in London last week; Kirk’s popularity in Europe; the AfD; Trump’s war on speech; a Trump-Mamdani showdown; Epstein and Peter Mandelson; and grasping for reasons to be cheerful.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Wesley Yang on the trans question, Michael Wolff on Epstein, Karen Hao on artificial intelligence, Katie Herzog on drinking your way sober, Michel Paradis on Ike, Charles Murray on finding religion, David Ignatius on the Trump effect globally, and Arthur Brooks on the science of happiness. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan on last week’s pod on the Constitution:

Hi Andrew! I just heard your wonderful episode with Jill Lepore; she’s fantastic (as are you, of course).

Please invite Akhil Amar for a discussion of his new book, out this month, on the Constitution and birth equality!

Another listener dissents:

I thought your discussion with Jill Lepore was going to be an interesting exchange of ideas, and it was for 15 minutes or so before you strangely turned it into an ideological battle. Some of your statements seemed to come out of left (or maybe right) field, making impassioned arguments as though you were refuting positions that she never expressed. You didn’t even pose them as questions. You just made a statement and thought she owed some sort of explanation.

Of the few liberals you have had as guests since I subscribed to your podcast about a year ago, James Carville is the only one you treated with respect. You should really try to get more liberals on your show, or even conservatives like David Frum or Max Boot, or people like Anne Applebaum; but I could understand if they would decline to participate.

Then you should really check out the pod archive, since we’ve had Anne on twice, and Frum three times. The number of liberal guests are too many to list here. I don’t quite recognize your account of our conversation, to be honest. My problem with the book is that it wanted to make an argument — that we should keep amending the Constitution — while posing as just history. In op-eds, Lepore has made her position clearer and I was trying to get her to flesh out her argument.

A recommendation for a future guest:

Would you ever interview Drew Gilpin Faust, the former president of Harvard? She’s also a leading historian of the American South and the author of a book on how death was handled in the Civil War. She’s also the biographer of South Carolina politician James Henry Hammond, a white supremacist on steroids.

What does she think about erasing bad things from history? And what is happening to Harvard? Any parallels between HIV death toll and Civil War?

Hmm. Another rec:

I appreciate your show immensely. I don’t normally do this sort of thing, but the late Hitch’s brother, Peter Hitchens, has long been one of my favorite commentators on just about anything he chooses to speak on. Notwithstanding his opinions on marijuana, it occurs to me that his thoroughgoing and authentic English conservatism probably appeals to you as well. I imagine he’d fit in especially well with a few recurring Dish topics: England’s present and future, Christian faith, and of course Christopher.

Peter is also the co-host of one of my new favorite podcasts, “Alas, Vine and Hitchens.” I know I’d enjoy the crossover, and I doubt I’m the only one.

Another points to recent guest:

I’m a subscriber to the Dish and I love most of your insights and writings and share them with my dad as a counterweight to his media diet. Recently, I found an interesting article from the Sunday Times refuting arguments about America’s decline into authoritarianism. The author quoted your posts on the matter. Perhaps you could reply to this piece, or discuss where the Times went wrong or right? Just a friendly suggestion from a Dishhead.

That piece was written by my good friend Niall, who was on the Dishcast a couple weeks ago. Here’s an exchange over Trump’s authoritarianism:

A reader writes:

Your column on Charlie Kirk was one of your very best. Every callout was richly deserved but delivered without venom. I fear your readers are mostly convinced already, and that the people on both warring sides who really need to heed your message have already classed you with their respective enemies — because you have espoused at one time or another some view they want to cancel instead of debating. But there’s always hope, so please keep it coming.

Another reader:

I was glad you took the time to watch Kirk’s videos yourself and not rely on the mainstream media’s summaries that painted him as a fascist, racist, or religious fanatic. Do you remember when he was booted from Twitter for “misgendering” Rachel Levine, most likely because of pressure from the Biden administration?

And in the first hours after his assassination, the NYT and all the other usual suspects tried to control the narrative and paint him as a right-wing racist fanatic, a misogynist MAGA extremist “provocateur.” You were able to see the dignity with which he carried himself and the empathy he had shown towards others, even the students he debated.

What made Kirk a target of the left was his influence on college students. By having a short conversation and getting them to question everything they had been taught up until then, he could reverse 10 years of indoctrination. The left — and I mean the radical postmodern left that has taken over from the traditional liberals — can not argue their position when going up against facts. “If you seek the truth, you must leave the left,” wrote Thomas Sowell (a former communist). Not mentioned much is that Kirk only attended one semester of college. He started TPUSA almost right out of high school, which I bet angered academics even more.

The president-elect of the Oxford Union, George Abaraonye, also celebrated Kirk’s death. Abaraonye debated Kirk just a few months ago:

Andrew, you were president of the Oxford Union and hold a lifetime membership. There is going to be a motion to put forward a vote of no confidence to remove the president-elect from office in October. Oxford has already made it clear his post did not violate the university’s code of conduct, so he will be just fine. I just implore you to please publicly cast your vote to remove him. What he did was wrong. He is not some naive kid; he is, after all, a man of Oxford. And if that is to mean anything going forward, the members have to say NO to his kind of behavior.

I never do this usually, but I signed a petition by previous office-holders in the Union, calling on Abaraonye to resign. I liked the way the letter framed the issue:

We reiterate our belief that for the university to punish you for your comments would itself be a flagrant attack on freedom of speech. But two wrongs do not make a right. Serving as the President of the Oxford Union is a privilege, not a right, and your words make you unable to carry out the duties of the Presidency.

Here’s a dissent:

Nice work, Andrew, but you are too laudatory of a guy whose views, from what I can tell, were truly abhorrent — e.g. opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That is not a mainstream view by any measure, although it’s a view he should legally (and safely) be allowed to hold, even if he should bear professional (not violent) consequences for holding it.

As if to bolster your point that the mainstream left will not rein in, condemn, control — or even acknowledge — the doings of the radical left, check out the NY Times’ editorial against political violence. The BLM riots of 2020 are completely elided! I guess burning down a police station, attempting to burn down a local courthouse with prisoners inside (Portland), or running over police officers in cars does not count as “political violence.”

The Civil Rights Act position is indeed not in the mainstream. Chris Caldwell made the strongest case. Check out our pod discussion on it. But the critique of the act is a principled one, and not “hate speech” or bigotry.

Another has a “bit of a dissent”:

I want to address the lecturing of the chattering, podcast, media class this week over the demands to “lower the temperature,” saying “this is not who we are,” and the constantly reminding us that Kirk was a husband and father; we listeners should be less divisive and give grace to fellow Americans on social media; and we should be less in our bubbles. This is a turning point — and the decision is ours.

But I’m trying to figure out why this event has had a different response compared to the assassinations in Minnesota in June — both in type and degree. Was it because Kirk was young, charismatic, handsome, and more popular than Melissa Hortman? Was she not a wife, mother, and dog owner?

There are many other assassinations, shootings, and slaughters we’ve collectively moved past: Annunciation Church, Midtown Manhattan, the CDC in Atlanta, Abundant Life, attempts on Trump, Paul Pelosi, and the endless roster of public venue and school shootings. (I vividly remember Columbine; it was my first year in high school.)

I’m still processing my feelings. To be clear, I’m equally horrified and dismayed by Kirk’s assassination as I was by Hortman’s, but I wonder why media people have had such a different reaction. I dare to say the media class is having an outsized reaction because he is one of their own.

We face some major forces in this country: easy access to tools of violence, a collapsed civic culture, inadequate mental healthcare, and unregulated technology and media that are built to amplify negative emotions. This has led to politics centered around trolling and “owning” the opposing side, resulting in the election of the King of Trolls — twice.

I don’t aim this directly at you, Andrew, as I believe you’re fair, open-minded, and focused on discussion and truth over trolling (it’s why I pay to read you). However, I believe there’s a severe level of ignorance among the media class about their role in escalating and profiting from this heated atmosphere. I question who is better positioned to influence culture and reduce the temperature in this country. (I’m a citizen without social media, a podcast, or reach.)

Furthermore, I fear that this event, by design, is good business for the media class: clicks, views, and engagement over the coming weeks and months. Within minutes, people were cashing in on YouTube with reactions, thoughts, and lectures about how wrong this is, and how it could have been them.

I’d love to see guns, social media, and tech companies regulated, but gun money and tech wealth will protect them. It feels like a forgone conclusion. Addressing cultural problems and mental health is challenging; even the best therapists in the world struggle to cure people who are just plain angry.

I believe asking citizens to make a Boy Scout promise to improve their tone and have more flexible views is a hollow gesture if nothing else changes. The parade of horrors will continue while media and tech profit from engagement. This is our society by design in 2025. This, sadly, is exactly who we are.

And so, on behalf of the majority of people in this country who are peace-loving and want to live in a safe and free society, I ask the media class and the tech CEOs who have real power and influence on our culture: how will you disentangle outrage from profit? What are you going to do to change the tone and tenor of political discourse?

Here’s another on the media:

How is it acceptable that millions of social media users can be pushed an incredibly graphic snuff video with zero accountability from tech leaders? I didn’t have to click on a play button and wasn’t warned of graphic content. (I lost my partner in a violent fashion, and I can’t overstate how deeply disturbing the assassination video was to witness.) Millions of Thread users of all ages had a close-up video of Kirk’s jugular exploding on our screens unprompted. And people want to blame video games for violence? Give me a break.

To my mind, this started when Daniel Pearl was beheaded by Jihadists over 20 years ago — when people had to proactively seek out these sorts of videos — and it’s been escalating unchecked ever since. At this point I don’t see how society can walk this back. There seems to be zero appetite for regulation, and the general public is just fine with it. AI will likely make matters worse.

In the meantime, I’ll be taking Sam Harris’ advice: “Get off social media. Read good books and real journalism. Find your friends. And enjoy your life.”

Good advice. Another writes, “I am disgusted by the number of liberal friends of mine who justify, without justifying, the murder of Kirk:”

They give quotes out of context, generalizing his quotes to mean much more than he said, and demand that Kirk was vile because he didn’t agree with them. As a liberal Democrat and atheist, I didn’t agree with a lot of what Kirk argued for, but as a free speech advocate, I sure as hell defend his right to say it.

It disheartens me that my side is doubling down on the two false beliefs that justified the shooter’s actions:

1. That disagreeing with far-left orthodoxy means you are full of hate.
2. That words — and even, OMFG, silence — are violence.

Are my liberal friends trying to back away from either of these bonkers ideas? No, they are doubling down to justify the shooting committed by one of their own. They will claim that they are not justifying it, and yet — and I’m not sure how the mental gymnastics works — they use the shooting to strongly imply Kirk had it coming.

Then I see that socialism has a net popularity among Democrats of +36 points, and capitalism has a net -13 points.

I want off this boat, but the Republicans are worse. If Romney was still the Republican ideal, I’d jump ship — not because I necessarily like Romney, but because my side is so crazy that I don’t want to be associated with them anymore. And Romney — god love good ‘ol boring Romney — I could use some boring. But Romney isn’t the face of the Republican Party; Trump is, and frankly Vance isn’t far enough from Trump to soothe my misgivings about the Republicans.

So, I will vote for a moderate Democrat in the primary and hope they win. Then I’ll hope they don’t pull a Biden and morph into a leftist once in office.

And another:

I found the following statement you made in reply to a reader’s email arresting, admirable, and thought-provoking: “If I had to pick between a red Caesar and a blue Caesar, I’d pick the red one too. But my entire politics is about preventing such a choice happening.”

It made me think about whether I’d use the term “Caesarism” to describe what I fear from the left, and how I think about the relative threat posed by each side. Caesarism is definitely how I understand the threat from the right. Historically, the right is scariest when it controls the state, though in US history, state-sponsored repression has also worked hand-in-glove with right-wing vigilantism.

Caesarism isn’t really how I understand the threat from the left. Obviously there are plenty of historical examples of left repression resting on control of the state, but those examples seem to me to come principally from overseas: Stalin, Mao, the Khmer Rouge. Certainly there are examples of the American left using the state for repression. All the stuff you wrote about the Biden administration’s use of state power to enforce a radical-left social agenda provides examples of that. I also think examples could be found of the left using the state to curtail property rights in ways that really are scary (as distinct from ways that the Chamber of Commerce finds scary but actually do not represent incipient communist tyranny).

But mostly when I think about the threat from the left, I think about its control of sense-making institutions outside of government. Again, these can certainly work with and be amplified by government much in the way that right-wing vigilante groups can, but they’re not the same as government.

Actually, there seem to be multiple related but distinct threats emanating from sense-making institutions controlled by the left. One is cancel culture — and the very real and scary effects that it had on the lives of ordinary Americans. The sheer cruelty of the baying left-wing mobs going after people who ran afoul of its shibboleths repulsed me. I remember reading Donald McNeil’s essay on being fired from the NYT and thinking, this reminds me of Rubashov in Darkness at Noon.

I think the left at best underestimates and at worst dismisses as unfounded the real and well-founded fear felt by many Americans — and I don’t mean MAGA Americans; I mean not-very-political, maybe vaguely right- or left-of-center Americans — that they were going to lose their jobs, and therewith their ability to support their families, if they said the wrong thing. Is that as bad as the government cracking down on free speech? No. But “could be worse” isn’t a morally sparkling defense of cancel culture. It was plenty bad.

Then there’s the fact that the power wielded by sense-making institutions has tended to reach far more frequently and deeply into private spaces than state power when wielded by the right. I don’t want to downplay what I’m sure are real disparities in how Americans experience state power. (For instance, I bet poor Americans and black Americans have disproportionate experience with, say, the police busting down the doors of their homes.)

But I think the experience of having kids coming home from school and announcing they have switched genders, or haranguing their parents for some perceived complicity in social injustice, was an experience that united Americans in annoyance, revulsion, and fear across race, class, and other divisions. That probably felt a whole lot more invasive — and thus scarier — to Americans than not being able to get a water bottle while waiting in line to vote in Georgia.

Personally, I don’t find that experience particularly scary relative to other threats posed by the left. When my 11-year-old stepdaughter announced while baking cookies that she was now “they,” I said, “Oh, that’s interesting, can you please pass the chocolate chips,” figuring it was a phase, which is what it was, for all of a week. Though I did find it infuriating that she was being assigned Ibram Kendi at the same time the left was telling me that Critical Race Theory was a figment of right-wing imagination. But I can easily understand why, for Americans over the past 10 years, the left feels like a more immediate, pervasive, daily threat than the prospect of right-wing Caesarism.

To me, the choice in the last election was between accelerated decline (Trump) and managed decline (Harris). The point being: the left doesn’t have any better idea than the right of how to alter the trajectory of what remains the last best hope of freedom.

I guess what I’m saying is that your arresting framing is helpful in that it emphasizes the virtually equal severity of the threat from each side, but I think it misses an important asymmetry. It’s hard to wrap my mind around the concept of a threat being asymmetrical and equal, because asymmetry implies inequality, but asymmetrical and equal seems to me a more accurate and precise way of framing the relative threats than a framing which relies on a purported symmetry.

All good points. I don’t disagree. Following up on last week’s Dish, a reader has a “dissent of a dissent”:

The first dissent you published last week really annoyed me. Thankfully the reader did not completely parrot the source he linked to, but his summary is still misleading. His source is James Taylor, who runs the Heartland Institute — one of the oldest and most prominent “climate change is a hoax” organizations. The Heartland Institute also worked with Big Tobacco to try to legitimize that there are no harms to second-hand smoke. (I recommend the book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.)

Another writes:

You led with a dissent about the benefits and costs of wind energy:

I believe the main issue with wind and solar is that they are produced in China. When you add all the fossil fuels to mine, manufacture, transport, install (massive amounts of concrete) and maintain, wind is not as clean as advertised. And once the subsidies are removed, and you consider the lack of continuous energy generation, wind and solar are not a great deal. Nuclear seems to be our best bet, and I’m glad to see the current administration placing an emphasis on this clean alternative.

That’s so rife with inaccuracy and misinformation (and links to an article from the Heartland Institute; they’re about as impartial on the energy transition as Ibram X Kendi is on BLM). Wind isn’t perfect, but it’s reliable, predictable, and affordable — if government gets out of the way. The rest of the world knows this, but America does not. We have ample solutions to the intermittency of solar and wind (look at where grid-scale battery prices have gone in the last few years). And nuclear is a lovely idea … except nobody can ever build it on time or on budget — quite the contrary.

I know that climate and the energy transition is well-outside your regular coverage, but it is an issue that is 1) very much “in front of our nose and hard to see” and 2) very much influencing geopolitics. I’m sure you get endless suggestions for guests, but you may want to consider Michael Liebrich to help walk you (and your audience) through the state of play in 2025. He’s an authority and has an excellent podcast on the subject. (Don’t hold his Cambridge training against him.) I’d suggest myself, as I teach this subject extensively in Engineering and Business Schools — and happened to apply to be a Dishtern 13 years ago! — but Michael is much better choice.

Thanks much. One more email for the week:

I just wanted to remind you that you have plenty of right-wing-nut subscribers like me. Sometimes I agree with you, sometimes I don’t. I know you are actually saying what you believe, which makes you pretty special (paging Malcolm Gladwell).

As I remind my kids, people are complicated. Your friends are not “red” or “blue”. They each believe in a different array of causes, and don’t try to pin them into a specific category. We’re done with that.

When I look at my own family, I continue to be impressed how everyone develops different political ideas. My parents were both Reagan Republicans (delegates to the ’80 and ’84 conventions, which was fun!). My sister is a Trumper. I’m a quiet never-Trumper and my other sister is a socialist. My older child is a DSA member and the second one is more conservative, but it’s complicated. Her best friend since kindergarten is trans, and it taught me a lot when that friend socially transitioned in 1st grade. Her parents wisely won’t let her physically transition until she’s an adult. My daughter will fight anyone who says there’s no such thing as trans, but she’s also a star high school basketball player who led the campaign in our local high school federation to prevent trans women from playing in women’s sports — and her teammates are 100% behind her on that.

The point of this, as you understand, is that people’s opinions are complex. Love you for seeing that. Keep up the good work!

Love you for seeing that too — and for subscribing to someone you often disagree with. Since almost everyone disagrees with something I hold, the Dish would not exist without that kind of intellectual and ideological generosity. I am deeply grateful to all of you, in ways hard to express adequately. Liberal democracy may be dying out there — but not here, not at the Dish.

Thanks as always for the great emails, especially the dissents, and you can send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com. See you next Friday.

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