Undoing Biden's Left-ExtremismTrump is doing nothing more than return us to sanity on immigration and identity.
To say I have conflicted feelings after a week or so of Trump’s return to power would be an understatement. Some of his early decisions remind me why I couldn’t vote for him. His decision to pardon even those among the J6 mob who assaulted cops jibes with his own instinctual love of vigilante justice against anyone in his way. That’s why his egregious withdrawal of security detail from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is so instructive. Trump is no longer fond of these men, so he has all but invited a foreign hostile government to murder them. His embrace of anti-police vigilanteism at home is matched by his removal of sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank this week. He’s a thug who loves thugs. But for all this, a large part of me is exhilarated by this first week. Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even. I wasn’t quite expecting this, but I can’t deny it. I suddenly feel more oxygen in the air as the woke authoritarianism of the last four years begins finally to lift. And let me put the core reason for this exhilaration as simply as I can. On the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense — a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. My conservative soul is glad. Joe Biden brazenly lied when he promised moderation in 2020. Check out my column on his initial flurry of executive orders four years ago this week:
All Trump had to do was wait. But Biden’s EOs on “equity” were even more extreme, effectively ending any pretense of color-blindness in American law and society. Biden, I wrote four years ago, was:
It was a direct and proud embrace of systemic race and sex discrimination by the federal government. It was accompanied by a massive shift in the private sector toward illegal race and sex discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion. This was buttressed by actual mandatory workplace indoctrination in critical race, gender, and queer theory. This was authoritarian brainwashing, accompanied by blatant race discrimination. Biden also decreed by executive order that the postmodern notion of “gender” would henceforth replace biological sex in determining who is a man or a woman. He mandated that any school or university getting federal funds should remove distinctions between boys and girls — even in sports and intimate spaces. His administration fully backed the medically irreversible transing of children with gender dysphoria, lied about the science, and secretly urged removing all age restrictions on transition — subjecting countless gay and autistic children to the permanent destruction of their future ability to have kids or even an orgasm. Biden was, in these respects, an unremitting extremist; and almost all Trump is doing this week is unraveling this insanity. The one actually radical act from Trump is rescinding LBJ’s “affirmative action” directive of 1965. Reagan wanted to do this, but he faced bipartisan opposition. One justification of the feds moving from anti-discrimination to being pro-discrimination was because, in LBJ’s words, African-Americans “don’t have their 12 percent” in federal employment, i.e. their proportion in the country at large. Today, African-Americans are almost 19 percent of federal employees — much higher than their population share. The MSM won’t frame it this way. But that’s the truth. And Trump’s EO language suggests he now has a staff shrewd and determined enough to push back. This week was more regime change than shit-show. It is, however, far too soon to declare the war on left authoritarianism over. It is far from dead; it has replaced Christianity entirely for many, as we saw with Bishop Budde at the National Cathedral this week, or the Oscars giving an unpopular film 13 nominations just so they can give a Best Actress award to a biological man. The Ivy League will do everything it can to keep discriminating against members of “oppressor classes.” The MSM is too far gone to reform itself. If you want proof of that, notice that the NYT has two emphatically “queer” columnists pushing gender woo-woo, and it just fired the only writer in that publication, Pamela Paul, who helped expose the medically baseless transing of children. Not only will the Trump EOs end the systemic racism in the federal government and its contractors, his people are also aware of attempts to foil color-blindness by their own woke bureaucrats, and will be vigilant. More importantly, the new administration will deploy the DOJ to restore equality of opportunity in the private sector. After so many major corporations have been openly bragging about their race and sex discrimination these past few years, they sure have been asking for it. The Trump peeps have even said they intend to focus on nine major corporations who have run afoul of civil rights law, which might prompt a few of the worst offenders to clean up their racist acts (or, more likely, start deleting all their old emails). Among my nominees for robust civil rights investigation: Google, Apple, the New York Times, Yale University, and the Ford Foundation. Within higher education, federal funds should also be conditional on the total abolition of DEI administration. Imagine how much money the colleges would save. The University of Michigan, for example, spends $18 million a year on salaries and benefits for DEI busy-bodies, enough for a thousand new in-state students a year. My sense of liberation also comes from the EO that defends women’s rights against the assault by the genderqueer left. Every human being in the entire history of our species produces either sperm or eggs — that is the core truth of our species’ reproductive strategy, and it applies to intersex people too. No sane society should replace this truth with ideology about purely subjective “genders” of which there are now over a hundred (and counting). My heart jumped for joy at this:
Does this mean a war on transgender Americans? Of course not. They are protected from discrimination by the Civil Rights Act — according to Trump’s own SCOTUS pick, Neil Gorsuch. Adults should continue to have full access to transition medication and be treated with decency and respect. If they are not, I’ll complain as loudly as I have about the transing of children. But there should be no biological men competing with women in sports; no violation of women’s privacy by having biological men waving their dicks and balls around in intimate spaces; and an end to the grotesque practice of allowing biological men with sex offenses into women’s jails. Seriously, what madness was all this? The MSM will portray all of this as some radical, bigoted, racist, homophobic, and transphobic return to the Dark Ages. It’s all they know — even after Trump’s multi-racial victory in November. But look at where public opinion is: big majorities in favor of not using race or sex or gender or orientation as a reason to hire or promote; and big majorities in favor of trans rights — but also, including most Democrats, against unfairness in sports, biological men in women’s intimate spaces, and the transing of children. On immigration, 66 percent of Americans now favor mass deportations, after the Biden open-borders catastrophe. Trump is in the center on immigration and gender. Biden was on the extreme left. But I feel particularly liberated in this moment as a man who has been openly gay before many of these transqueers were born, who lived through the AIDS epidemic, and was front and center in the fight for marriage equality and military service (and thereby loathed by the transqueers). My gay and lesbian world has been captured by gender and “LGBTQIA+” zealots ever since we won marriage equality. They control every aspect of our community with a grip that tolerates no debate or dissent. Their ideology has abolished sex and thereby same-sex love, replacing it with a nebulous concept of gender that insists that heterosexual sex is now part of gayness; and that biological women are fully gay men and biological men fully lesbian. Lesbian bars are being shut down by governments just like the old days. But this time, it’s because these lesbians don’t want biological men in their spaces. The left is now doing to gays and lesbians what the far right used to do: police our bars. The transqueers and their MSM stenographers have renamed us — without any actual debate — as “LGBTQIA+”, deliberately stripping us of our identities as gay men and lesbians, and conflating us with trans people with whom we have almost nothing in common. They unilaterally decided to call all of us “queer” despite it being deeply triggering for older generations. They replaced the rainbow flag with their own ugly, intersectional bullshit. They have brazenly falsified history to sustain their “LGBTQIA+” invention. They have indoctrinated the very young with lies that have led directly to the transing of many, many gay kids, destroying their lives and bodies irreversibly — and shown no remorse or reflection when confronted with these appalling acts of abuse. They have lied about the science and concealed it from view. They control all of what passes for gay media. This week, for example, Scott Bessent was nominated to be the highest-ranking openly gay official in US history: Treasury Secretary. He was there with his husband and kids in the Congressional hearing: a staggering leap for gay visibility and cred. Now go to Out.com or The Advocate and look at their news round-ups. Not a word about him. You don’t know what epistemic closure is until you’ve lived for a while in the totalitarian, tribalist world of queerdom. But let me tell you: feeling its power and control ebb a little is a revelation. There is hope for sanity yet. What an incredible, paradoxical, bewildering thing that it took Donald Trump to give us this respite. One final note: the Democrats need to realize that Trump is actually doing them a favor in all this. If immigration is returned to Obama-era sanity, and if wokeness is defeated, he has taken the two most damning weaknesses of the Dems off the table. Since they cannot reform themselves, they should accept this gift quietly and work to rebuild along classic class lines. It could be the best thing to happen to them in years. The person who understands that has a golden political future. (Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: catching up with John Gray on the state of liberal democracy; reader dissents on my guarded optimism for Trump 2.0; listeners continuing to debate “settler colonialism”; 10 quotes from the week in news, including two Yglesias Awards; 16 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break from the frigid National Mall this week; a colorful Caribbean window; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!) From a new subscriber:
Back On The Dishcast: John Gray
John is a political philosopher. He retired from academia in 2007 as Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and is now a regular contributor and lead reviewer at the New Statesman. He’s the author of two dozen books, and his latest is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. I’d say he’s one of the most brilliant minds of our time — and my first podcast with him was a huge hit. I asked him to come on this week to get a broader and deeper perspective on where we are now in the world. He didn’t disappoint. For two clips of our convo — on the ways Trump represents peace, and how heterosexuals have become more like gays — pop over to our YouTube page. 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: Sebastian Junger on near-death experiences, Jon Rauch on “Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy,” Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Yoni Appelbaum on how America stopped building things, Nick Denton on the evolution of new media, and Ross Douthat on how everyone should be religious. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. Dissents Of The WeekA reader excerpts my latest column, “Regime Change Or Another Shit-Show?”
Read my response here, along with three other dissents. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. In The ‘StacksThis is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Trump’s moves on immigration, his biggest challenges for term #2, and vaxxing chickens. Some examples:
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com. The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing! The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. From a sleuth last week:
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Undoing Biden's Left-Extremism
January 24, 2025
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