Nothing ever fucking changes. https://t.co/OhPsEOOZTF pic.twitter.com/kIgC2YOx34
— Galar Regional Medical Director (@weedlewobble) July 25, 2020
(Very) long story short, Andrew Sullivan and the editors of both NYMag and Vox Media recently came to a Parting of Ways, because for some reason the people signing Sullivan’s checks did not agree that his prerogatives included ‘Every other employee who disagrees with me on social media should be disciplined, if not fired.’ This was very much in character with previous Sullivan disengagements, so it was generally speculated on social media that Sullivan had found a new, probably easier, potentially more lucrative source of income…
my former colleagues just went through a round of actual layoffs and are probably too polite/cautious to say it so: fuck outta here with this. they showed sullivan far more courtesy and discretion than he seems willing to afford them pic.twitter.com/UpvMAsfMTB
— brian feldman (@bafeldman) July 17, 2020
… Which turned out to be — if I understand this correctly — The Dish: OnlyFans edition. Now, I was not the only person who found the original Atlantic-based Dish blog useful, back in the early aughts (it led me to Lance Mannion’s blog, where I discovered TBogg, who led me to Sadly, NO! and thence here). But even in those days, to use a classical British reference, the parts that were good were not original (i.e, were written by Sullivan’s uncredited ‘interns’) and the parts that were original (to AS) were not good…
Passing the calipers to a new generation. https://t.co/ifdsWbVSsq
— Viridian Forest Autonomous Zone (@weedlewobble) July 14, 2020
Every Andrew Sullivan take on Black Lives Matter is this picture with extra words pic.twitter.com/aoqwJbMRl4
— Chungus Khan (@MenshevikM) July 25, 2020
If I were a famous writer who wanted to portray myself as a free speech martyr, I’d wait more than 10 days after quitting my job to unlock new achievements in public racism and make my former employer look impossibly indulgent
— Jeff Bercovici (@jeffbercovici) July 26, 2020
Basically since 2004 it has taken successive teams of full-time, salaried minders to occasionally make Andrew Sullivan seem like a rational man with worthwhile opinions. I welcome the era of him and his ilk going unfiltered.
— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) July 25, 2020
It took him one week of unsupervised newsletter writing to come completely unglued https://t.co/rfFA5Q0C0t
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) July 25, 2020
Every time Andrew Sullivan goes viral on here for some batshit racist post I remember he began his career by inexplicably being given a senior editor position at the New Republic before having done anything else and nearly destroyed the magazine with how bad a job he did
— Chungus Khan (@MenshevikM) July 26, 2020
Not content with merely disgracing himself by publishing a book so racist that people could see through him in 1994, he also published the work of Stephen Glass, whose articles were entirely made up, because they also contained racial stereotypes making him think they were true
— Chungus Khan (@MenshevikM) July 26, 2020
‘Ida Bae Wells’ (Hannah Jones) is the NYTimes journalist who won a Pulitzer for the 1619 Project:
Andrew fucking Sullivan, ladies and gentlemen. pic.twitter.com/7mM9cr4gRX
— War Queer ???????? (@SJGrunewald) July 26, 2020
For some reason, I am reminded of Warren Buffet’s proverb: It’s only when the tide goes out you can see who’s been swimming naked.
trnc
I like how a lot of the responses urge him to read various writings or produce evidence for his claims as if there was actually a rationale for his complete and utter bullshit.
Calouste
I can’t even understand what Sullivan means with those tweets (besides obviously letting his racist and religious flag fly). Has the guy had a stroke?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So Sullivan apparently proves that a dumb ass can right decently. There is so much wrong with that he is saying like his fantasy that somehow Africa and Europe are genetically isolated but WTF that penis thing of his?
piratedan
in a just world, AS would fall in love with David Brooks, who would tell him that he would be interested in a relationship except for the fact that AS is not a woman half his age….
NotMax
In a word, blech. No intention, desire or inclination to waste any further breath on Mr. Bell Curve.
Xenos
Nice shout-out to the early blog days. I remember going through blog rolls to find new writers or things of interest. Still go back to SadlyNo every few months in hope it has been revived. I guess those hip dudes and dudettes have gotten 20 years older, just like I have. Those people, and through them Balloon Juice, helped keep me sane in 2004.
I found myself responding to Sullivan on twitter this last week. He’s back to his true, old self: a simple bigot as soon as you get a millimetre past his personal experience. I could go on and on about it, but I supposed we have all seen it again and again. Drags you in with well thought-out work on gay marriage, or torture under W, and then turns around and is exactly the same person who promoted the Bell Curve and the “fifth column” agitprop. This latest bullshit about BLM being the antithesis of Christianity is enough to give me a stroke.
Into the cancel bin he goes.
joel hanes
Andrew Sullivan is irrelevant and should be ignored.
We don’t any more do tweetstorms or threads about Kim DuToit, nor Anne Althouse, nor about Glenn Reynolds, nor John Hinderaker, and we don’t miss them.
Dmbeaster
Maybe except for legacy appearances on Bill Maher, maybe we are finally done with him.
Adam L Silverman
No one tell Sullivan about Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, who wrote Towards a Theology of Liberation in 1968, making him one of the fathers of Liberation Theology. Father Gutiérrez also developed the concept that G-d has a preferential option for the poor. His work is squarely Marxian, which is the correct term despite Sullivan’s use of Marxist because, despite the posh accent and the credentials, he’s an uneducated cretin. Father Gutiérrez’s work is also clearly within what scholars would call critical theory. Father Gutiérrez currently holds an endowed chair in theology at the University of Notre Dame.
I’m going to bed.
LesGS
Back about a thousand years ago, in the late 1990s, I read Sullivan’s book _Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality_. (I just now grabbed it off my shelf and am going to re-read it some 20 years later, to see how it holds up for me now.) At the time, I was grappling with my gender dysphoria, on the first steps of my path of transitioning to living as a gay man. I’m not an edgy sort of guy. The idea of being “normal” was incredibly appealing to me at the time. The book was helpful to me, and I’m grateful to him for that.
Doesn’t mean I didn’t later become repelled, once I discovered him on the internet, by his racism and misogyny.
alex
Maybe…Vox media and NY Mag were just paying Sullivan more money than he was worth…. A “not getting value for dollar” kind of thing…. remind me…. just how relevant (is) was he anyway?
Calouste
@Adam L Silverman:
He went to Oxford and Harvard, so that goes without saying. It’s become obvious to me that these institutions has turned out so many cretins, that I’d consider it a negative on a candidate’s resume.
oatler.
And now James Lileks’ blog (who has been snarling and grinding his teeth since Jimmy Carter) is growing increasingly cranky since the Minneapolis “unrest”. He has no problem with the preening, self-congratulatory circle-jerk he calls his Bleatniks.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
But the strawberries,
that’s where I had them.
I proved with geometric logic that a
duplicate key to the icebox existed.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Brachiator
@joel hanes:
Yes. He is tiresome and irrelevant. His facts are wrong, his grasp of history is weak, and he presumes that it is up to him to define BLM and to decide on its legitimacy.
Redshift
I’ve been wryly amused at Sullivan’s repeated attempts to intellectualize a reason why BLM must be dismissed without ever getting within a mile of engaging with its aims or what it’s responding to. He seems to think this hides his racism when it just makes it more obvious.
I never followed AS. He’s always seemed to me to be for much of the liberal blogosphere and their readers the same thing that people like Paul Ryan were for the media – the product of a desperate wish that there must be thoughtful conservatives to have principled disagreements with. There aren’t.
Brachiator
@LesGS:
Is there a section of the book which says that the gay rights movement is valid only to the extent that it is Christian?
ETA: I am not in any way dismissing the book or its importance to you. I had the impression that at one time Sullivan was essentially saying that gay lives matter, not separate from the lives of straight people, but as a matter of basic human rights and perhaps also Christian charity.
Kineslaw
One aspect of Sullivan that doesn’t get the attention it deserves is his misogyny. He kept after the Palin thing so long the point of absurdity was a distant memory. He also was incredibly angry with Sally Ride for not coming out during her lifetime.
He’s a prime example of the kind of misogyny some gay men with few female peers or friends can develop. It’s a misogyny that seems to come from a place of unfamiliarity and ickiness, not hatred. Although he’s also a racist a**hole.
trollhattan
@Kineslaw:
He hate, hate, HATEs Hillary with the intensity of a thousand suns, and not just because she’s not the second coming of Maggie Thatcher {dream girl}. Had any of the ten or so Democratic women in the primary gained the nomination, he’d be hard at work rationalizing why while Trump is a poor president, This Thing is worse and “I’ll sadden myself voting 3rd party.”
Having a beagle does not make you a mensch.
opiejeanne
@joel hanes: I had forgotten all of those people until you reminded me with your post. It’s funny how inconsequential they either were or became.
opiejeanne
@Kineslaw: I missed his fascination with Palin. He hated her? or loved her?
Sister Golden Bear
@opiejeanne: He was obsessed with the idea that she faked a pregnancy to avoid admitting that one of her daughters got knocked up (or vice versa, I never paid attention to those posts).
He was positively Captain Queeg-ians in his ever-more elaborate “proofs.”
mrmoshpotato
Dick-punch Sully all the way back to merry ole England.
(Sorry, Sloane Ranger, Tony Jay, etc. We’re done with him.)
Amir Khalid
@Sister Golden Bear: At the time Palin was running for VP, she already had a pregnant teenage daughter, Bristol, who was onstage with her fiancé for Sarah’s acceptance. Her other daughter, whose name escapes me, was then a pre-teen. Which daughter did Sully think Sarah was covering for?
Ruckus
Why are we even bothering to try and make any sense about this douchenozzle?
He is a complete and utter waste of molecules and seemingly has been his entire life. Don’t we have enough issues with idiot racist assholes that we do have to pay some attention to?
rikyrah
@Kineslaw:
His Hillary hate??
Sister Golden Bear
@Amir Khalid: Turns out I did have it backwards.
He was convinced that Sara Palin wasn’t the mother of Trig Palin, who has Down’s Syndrome, and that Bristol actually was. Now that I try recall it more, I believe had something to do with Sarah claiming Trig was her baby to gain respect from her fellow conservative Christians.
Or Trig was Sarah’s, but Palin lied about the circumstances of Trig’s birth—particularly her claim that she was flown from Dallas to Anchorage while in labor.
Medicine Man
Honestly, Sullivan isn’t worth an iota of ire.
I find him a little frustrating because (as others have said) he had his finger on the plot of a few important issues back in the early aughts, but even then, he was brittle of temperament and bullishly arrogant when operating outside of his experiences. Watching him project his fears and insecurities while utterly lacking self-awareness is a bit more sad than infuriating.
Bruce K
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Cripes, I needed that laugh.
LesGS
@Brachiator: I don’t recall there was. (It’s been 20+ years.) But I’ve never been a Christian, so any arguments based on that belief system would not have been persuasive to me. It’s essentially a set of essays addressing homosexuality through the lenses of four political/social paradigms. “The Prohibitionists,” “The Liberationists,” “The Conservatives,” and “The Liberals.” (These are the titles of 4 of the 7 chapters in the book.) He was attempting to put forth rational arguments normalizing same-sex marriage. Which he was actually part of moving forward on the national stage.
He’s not part of moving anything forward now.
Amir Khalid
@Sister Golden Bear:
Okay, I remember now. I don’t think Sully was ever quite clear in his own mind on what sort of Palin scandal he was pursuing; he was just casting about for something bad to pin on her.
LesGS
@LesGS: And just a follow on, I see that he’s asserting that the BLM movement is invalid because its originators are not pushing Christian ideology as their organizing principle.
Spanish Moss
@trollhattan: I stopped reading him when Hillary got the Democratic nomination, he became too unhinged and it was impossible to ignore his misogyny.
I enjoyed his Daily Dish in early days. He expressed his conservative viewpoints well, and it was valuable to hear his arguments, even though as a liberal I disagreed with so many of his conclusions. I thought his extended explorations of gay marriage, torture, and abortion were well done, particularly his sharing of readers’ abortion stories. But it seemed that as he became more successful his ego really took over and he lost any kind of balanced perspective. I can’t say I regret reading him, because he led me to Balloon Juice and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I am forever grateful for that.
different-church-lady
If you have to tell people you’re a luxury item, you’re not. This dude is like a Trump Steak with sentience.
Starfish
@opiejeanne: No one up thread has mentioned how nasty he was about Elena Kagan.
different-church-lady
Has there ever been a better example of what sealioning is all about than that last tweet?
Barbara
Christianity co-existed with despotism and slavery before it had to make do in a world with post-enlightenment political arrangements. I won’t bother looking at his new site.
tinare
I didn’t even realize he still had a gig. The Dish led me here and introduced me to a lot of other interesting voices back in the day. Haven’t given him a thought in years, though. Did enjoy the View From Your Window contests. People were relentless in tracking those down.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Kineslaw: it also comes from the fact that society even so called liberal Western society is misogynistic. Women/female presenting people and anything coded as female is seen as weaker, less than, not worth much. See also every sports coach of a men’s team and their use of “ladies” “pussy” and the like to denote weakness.
Chris Johnson
I know far too many people who are full of ‘geometric logic’. Bleah. I’ve done some damage to my own reputation at times by going off on people like that when they got onto something like ‘why not to listen to the made-up coronavirus story’, back in March and April. That mindset can be incredibly destructive. They come off as knowing saboteurs, rather than simple dumbasses too full of themselves to let the world in.
A good litmus test is ‘Sargon of Akkad’. Anybody who’s really into that guy is revealing themselves as someone with a similarly terrifying gulf between their self-evaluation and their actual competence. There’s definitely a class of people who seek mastery of the TROPES of ‘smartest person’ instead of actually being in any way smart, and it’s usually scary when they go off the rails.
Uncle Cosmo
@Calouste: Some time back I stopped using “uneducated,” first, because many of the most stupid people hold advanced degrees from highly respected institutions, and second, because many people lacking formal education are anything but stupid.
Instead I use “overcredentialed,” which IMO applies very well to nitwits with higher “education” such as Tom Cotton and Newton Leroy Gingrich (PhD, history, Tulane), famously “a stupid person’s idea of a smart person”. (As well as to the swarms of MDs, engineers & lawyers who think themselves sooooo intelligent they will know more about any particular area of intellectual endeavor after an evening reading a few articles than people who’ve spent their careers in the field.)
Anyway, “overcredentialed” is in the public domain & I commend it to anyone who cares to apply it liberally.
Matt
Shorter Andrew Sullivan: “My idea of Christianity and anti-racism are incompatible”
Sorry Andy, but you aren’t a member of a religion you’re a member of a hate group.
Bulldoze the churches, burn the Bibles, salt the earth.
BethanyAnne
With “cancel culture”, I think Sully has now predicted 75 of the last 3 “dangers to free speech”. Anyone else remember when the MLA was going to censor us all?
It was the “late term abortion” week that broke me with the Dish. He spent a week publishing the most horrific of reasons that people chose to abort late. And concluded that the reasons were moving, but not enough to override the Catholic Church’s complete ban on all abortions. He still believes that women should be forced to bear dead children, or fetuses that will kill us in birth. Fuck him.
BethanyAnne
By “horrific”, I mean stories like “our baby had few organs” and “the baby was dying in me” type wrenching things.
K488
@BethanyAnne: That was the ultimate break for me, too.
laura
Shorter Sullivan: “I will not be mocked.” Cue justified merciless mocking.
different-church-lady
@Uncle Cosmo: I’m on board.
Percysowner
Andrew Sullivan, what a blast from the past. I found him during the Bush Presidency when he was condemning torture and advocating for gay rights. I thought I might have found a reasonable conservative. It quickly became evident that, other than being against torture, Sully’s sole interest is in rights that personally apply to HIM and that he is a racist misogynistic douche. I will say that following him led me to other blogs that eventually led me here, so he accomplished something good for me, although I’m sure he didn’t intend to.
evodevo
@Xenos: Well, given that a lot of literalist fundagelical Xtianity is pro slavery and racist, he’s right that BLM is the opposite,…but I don’t think he was coming at the question from THAT direction lol
WaterGirl
If only I could automatically toss every comment that includes “Andrew Sullivan” in the pie filter!
evodevo
@Amir Khalid: Bristol. The fact that Sister Sarah had been on a plane ride from…AZ?…just hours before she supposedly gave birth was one of the factoids he obsessed on. somehow he turned it into a massive conspiracy, the underpinnings of which I never got into…
mskitty
@Percysowner: AS as “reasonable conservative” – hah! Back when I was building a bloglist too quickly to want to remember names, my original listname for Balloon Juice was “Reasonable Conservative”.
Llelldorin
I was going to say—there were two kinds of “reasonable conservatives” during the Bush administration: those that were not actually reasonable and those that ceased to be conservatives.