For God's Sake, Withdraw
For God's Sake, Withdraw
Joe Biden cannot win this election. There is time to make way for someone who can.
This is not a hard column to write. In fact, I wrote it twice already! But last night’s debate performance by Joe Biden is the end of his campaign. It’s over. Done. No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years. No sane person can vote for him.
And watching him barely capable of finishing a sentence, staring vacantly into the middle distance, unable to deliver a single coherent message even when handed an ideal question, incapable of any serious rebuttals to Trump’s increasingly deranged lies … well, the first thing I felt was intense sadness. This was elder abuse — inflicted, in part, by his wife.
The second thing I felt was rage. His own people chose to do this. That alone reveals a campaign so divorced from reality, so devoid of a rationale or a message, so strategically incompetent, it too has no chance of winning. It is an insult to all of us that a mature political party would offer someone in this physical and mental state as president for the next four years. And it has always been an insult. That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?
And if they have not told him the truth on this, what else are they afraid to tell him?
The mainstream media also bears responsibility for once again being an arm of the DNC establishment, running countless stories about Biden’s acuity and sharpness from inside sources, while attacking the few journalists who actually dared write the most obvious truth about this election: Biden has deteriorated rapidly in the last four years, he is unrecognizable from the man who ran in 2020, and we’ll be lucky if he is able to function as president for the next six months, let alone four years.
I watched MSNBC after the debate. It was like watching State TV in Russia. It took them an hour to acknowledge what the world had just seen, as they danced pathetically around what was staring them in the face. They are literally administration spokespeople — Jen Psaki has the exact same job she always had — waiting for instructions on what to say out loud. And they have all lied through their teeth for months about Biden’s fitness, only to refuse any accountability. Joe Scarborough recently declared on his show:
Start the tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth: and F— you if you cannot handle the truth. This version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever.
To which the only response is: No, F— you, Mr Scarborough. And fuck all the lies you have told.
But there is a huge, gleaming, hopeful silver lining, as I’ve noted many times before. For the first time this year, we have a chance of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office with a new nominee from a younger generation. No, I don’t know who — except it obviously cannot be Kamala Harris, who would lose by an even bigger margin than the ambling cadaver. But that is what politics is for! There is time for a campaign before a convention that could now be must-see television. A future campaign already has a simple message that vibes with the moment and instantly puts Trump on defense: it’s time for the next generation to lead. We are choosing between the past (Trump) and the future, between the old and the young, between the insane versus the coherent.
All it takes is a credible Democrat of stature to say they are running against Biden. Then all the bets are off. He or she need not criticize Biden, and, in fact, should lionize his service. But they can say they’re running because beating Trump is the first and most important objective, and, at this point, it is obvious that Biden simply cannot beat Trump.
Does anyone have that courage? The person who shows it will instantly become the front-runner. Go for it.
Heads Up
Hours before the debate last night, I got some very bad news about my mother, who appears to be nearing her final hours, and has refused any more food or medicine. I’m getting on a plane to England in the next few hours to be with her and my siblings. I cannot promise to deliver a column next Friday, but we will be running a pre-recorded podcast, and readers airing their own experiences of using IVF.
Please pray for her. Be with her now, Lord, at the hour of her death.
Back On The Dishcast: Tim Shipman
The best political reporter in Britain returns to the Dishcast to discuss the UK elections on July 4. Tim has been a chief political commentator at The Sunday Times since 2014, after serving eight years as political editor. His first two books, All Out War and Fall Out, are indispensable to understanding the politics of Brexit, and his new book is No Way Out: Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the fall of Rishi Sunak, and Nigel Farage entering the “clusterfuck,” as Tim calls it. That link also takes you to commentary on Oakeshott, IVF, the UK election, and the American one.
The Real Reasons For Transing Children
In 2021, President Biden selected Admiral Rachel Levine as his assistant secretary for health, calling her a “historic and deeply qualified choice.” Since then, I’ve never seen Levine publicly address the serious questions many people have about “gender-affirming care” for children, take questions from the press, or just explain why she believes the systematic reviews of these treatments that have found no evidence supporting them are somehow false. Instead, she repeats mantras that we all now know are lies: a) that no medical authorities question these experimental techniques, b) that they are “life-saving”, c) that no gay child has ever been transed by mistake.
In fact, a) the largest and most thorough review of all the studies, the Cass Review, has blown apart the idea that “the science is settled,” b) we have no evidence these treatments reduce suicide rates (which mercifully remain very rare among gender-dysphoric teens), and c) we now have countless gay and mostly lesbian de-transitioners who were transed in error as kids or teens. We know this. It is not in doubt. Gay kids have been mistakenly given conversion therapy they can never recover from — and gay groups are among the most enthusiastic about it. That’s why the far left has been so insistent in fusing gay and trans identity into a single “queer” or “gender diverse” category. It gives them cover for transing gay kids.
Why does the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, WPATH, keep supporting these experiments as emphatically as Levine? Thanks to the wonders of legal discovery, we are beginning to find out. Emails and internal documents from a lawsuit now show that, in 2018, WPATH commissioned a systematic evidence review like the Cass Review, from Johns Hopkins University’s Evidence-Based Practice Centre (EPC). Then they killed or buried it.
As Jesse Singal explains, these reviews are routinely fiercely independent of their sponsors — as in the Cass Review — so they have credibility and proof that no pressure was applied to come up with any given result. But not here! WPATH suddenly insisted — against the original contract — that no findings be published without their permission, and that they would have the final say on the reports. Why? Because research must be “thoroughly scrutinised and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care in the broadest sense.” Of the six studies promised, only one was published, and it was edited and controlled by WPATH itself.
Why is a scientific outfit suppressing the truth? Because WPATH is not a scientific outfit; it’s a professional association. It’s designed to protect its own members, and their very lucrative and booming revenue stream. Science? A lower priority.
The Biden administration, more to the point, takes the same approach. As WPATH was preparing its most recent guidelines for treatment, the authors did something unexpected: they removed any lower age limits on sex reassignment. At a moment when all the science was questioning these experiments on children, when puberty blockers were being banned in the UK, and Nordic counties were dialing back their own experiments, WPATH insisted that no child was too young to be transed. There was no need for this. It seemed weirdly aggressive in the context.
But thanks to discovery, we now have a possible reason for the defiance: Rachel Levine intervened. Money quote from the NYT exposé:
One excerpt from an unnamed member of the WPATH guideline development group recalled a conversation with Sarah Boateng, then serving as Admiral Levine’s chief of staff: “She is confident, based on the rhetoric she is hearing in D.C., and from what we have already seen, that these specific listings of ages, under 18, will result in devastating legislation for trans care. She wonders if the specific ages can be taken out.”
Another email stated that Admiral Levine “was very concerned that having ages (mainly for surgery) will affect access to care for trans youth and maybe adults, too. Apparently the situation in the U.S.A. is terrible and she and the Biden administration worried that having ages in the document will make matters worse. She asked us to remove them.”
So the key motive in drafting what are supposed to be entirely science-driven guidelines for care was politics. Levine understood that suggesting age cut-offs would open the whole debate about when and if children and teens can meaningfully consent to irreversible sex reassignment. And debate is emphatically not what Levine and her activists want. As GLAAD has made clear, today’s gay rights groups want to trans thousands of children without any debate or scrutiny, and are prepared to lie, bully and demonize any reporters who raise questions. (Jesse deserves a Pulitzer for his early, dogged reporting on this critical issue, if they still gave Pulitzers for journalism.) The American Medical Association, after refusing to endorse the WPATH guidelines, was called out by WPATH’s president Walter Bouman: “[The AMA is] white cisgender heterosexual hillbillies from nowhere.”
We have to fight back. This is not science and it is not medicine. It is ideology and bigotry, period. Gay children are in acute danger. And no one is helping them.
The View From Your Window
Porto-Ota, France, 8.25 am
Money Quotes For The Week
“The cheapfakes are getting really good,” - Nellie Bowles on Biden’s performance last night.
“Democrats needed Jamaal Bowman to pull a fire alarm to cut the whole thing short,” - Erick Erickson.
“Forget the election, this is heading into 25th amendment territory,” - Sarah Isgur.
“Trump is proposing a de facto amnesty. … Anyone who claims to be an immigration restrictionist and doesn’t call this out is a fraud. This is a policy that *Biden himself* could have come up with — and if he had, I can guarantee that every right-winger would outraged. Instead, you’re about to see mass cowardice,” - Pedro L Gonzalez on Trump’s offer of green cards with college diplomas.
“Can’t we just drone this guy?” - Hillary Clinton on Julian Assange in 2010.
“A 16-point drop in two years is pretty astonishing, erasing all of the moral liberalization of the past decade, bringing GOP public opinion roughly back to where it was (at 39 percent) in 2014,” - Damon Linker on Gallup asking Republicans about the “moral acceptability of same-sex relations.” The transqueers are slowly destroying much of the progress the gay rights movement made.
“Ceasefire now, y’all! That’s what we’re doing! Ceasefire now, let’s get it poppin’!” - Jamaal Bowman in a campaign ad with AOC, before losing his primary.
“I haven’t seen any Jewish people in America running up on mosques with Israeli flags,” - Van Jones.
Dissents Of The Week: The Right To Create Life
Among the wave of dissenting readers over my latest column, one writes:
The core of your conclusion is discomfort with creating and destroying embryos, which you recognize as a human life — so long as it’s in a lab. But the very same thing residing in a female body is disposable? Why? Well, first because of “property rights.” Alright. Do we really want to say that person’s right to live is subsumed by another’s right to control their property? This notion at least needs more serious treatment.
Then your Thomas Aquinas comment. Come on now. A 13th century monk did not know when life began, so who am I? That’s fallacious, and also inconsistent with your IVF discomfort — the very point of this piece.
Yes, we do have to take into account that a nascent human life is inside another human body, and that an individual in a free society should have control over her own body. My point about Aquinas was in a paragraph where I tried to be fair to the opposing argument. It doesn’t negate my broader point.
Another reader insists, “There is a difference between a person and a potential person”:
A fertilized embryo has the potential to become a child, but that’s not tantamount to actually being a child — unborn or otherwise. You even acknowledge this point when you mention that similar in-utero processes create the same outcomes. Yet, we do not mourn or concern ourselves with fertilized ovums that fail to embed in the uterine lining or “miscarry” at such an early stage that the mother is not even aware of what is occurring!
Why do I find myself humming this musical number from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life?
Actually, I know why: the song parodies what happens when a moral stance is taken to an absurd end.
Another dissent:
Thank you for consistently putting liberal democratic values to the fore with all-too-rare sentiments like, “Yes, this is in part an excruciating contradiction. But living in a liberal democracy requires excruciating contradictions all the time.” In the case of IVF, however, I wonder if this sense of contradiction is misplaced. You go on to say, “An embryo is an embryo; and all embryos are human persons, however they were conceived.”
I find that a rather radical definition of “human person.” Unlike a fetus — which has a spinal column and proto-organs, responds to external stimuli, looks like a baby, and shares all the obvious characteristics that makes abortion an understandably contentious issue — embryos are minuscule masses of barely differentiated cells. There’s not only “no memory, no sentience ... no mind or will yet,” there’s not even a single actual brain cell or nerve that could generate memory, sentience, mind, or will — frozen or not. Embryonic development in those early days are much closer to that of sperm or egg than to a fetus or person.
The most obvious sign of that difference is the process that enables storing embryos at all: freezing. To wit, one cannot successfully freeze a fetus or an adult, but one can freeze sperm, eggs, and yes, embryos.
Anti-IVF sentiments become worrisome when they not only ignore the science but begin to smuggle religious worldviews into medical conversations. Fertility and birth are topics where, religion or no, many people can see that there are ethical questions to resolve. Caitlin Flanagan’s brilliant piece on abortion, which you have referenced before, cuts through the left’s tendency to sometimes ignore inconvenient facts.
To call a blastocyst a “person” or a “sibling”, or to say that creating embryos is “creating new lives only to destroy them,” seems to ignore facts as well. You assert the crux of your concern at the end: “If you see in humanness anything equivalent to an inviolable and eternal soul, it is evil.”
And there’s the rub. That’s an undeniably religious outlook, entirely unfalsifiable, informing an opinion about a cluster of 200 or so undifferentiated cells as a person. You are obviously quite wise to acknowledge where that opinion fits as only one in a liberal democracy. And you certainly have every right to any opinion you wish. But I hope you can also see why it’s nonetheless quite troubling to see someone standing in such judgement as to call the act of IVF “evil”. That’s a rather critical, chilling, even menacing word that, to my eye, doesn’t fit the science.
The point about freezing and de-frosting, as it were, is one I hadn’t considered. It’s a good one. I don’t think that recognizing the humanness of a blastocyst requires religious revelation though. An atheist could come to the same conclusion. But yes, my view about the inviolability of the human soul deeply informs my approach. But it doesn’t determine it.
Next up, “a physician, a Catholic, and a father of two struggling to have more children”:
Rates of miscarriage of six-week-olds approach 30 percent. If we think of human life in the early first trimester as truly possessing the characteristics of personhood, the majority of heterosexual couples that have unprotected sex for an extended period of time are likely to have had an un-noticed conception, perhaps a blastocyst that has failed to implant into the uterine lining and is washed out with the next menses.
Much life at this stage fails to develop because of chromosomal or early abnormalities that are completely incompatible with developing even a simple nervous system (something like triploidy or anencephaly). Many embryos at this stage fail to implant in the uterus and cause life-threatening ectopic pregnancies. It sticks with me — even many years after my OB-GYN rotation in med school — that after I assisted in a salpingectomy in an ectopic patient, the embryos were casually discarded onto the tool tray. But isn’t that right? This was a thing that was going to kill my patient, had no experience of life or chance to experience it, and was maybe a centimeter or two.
For many years, I embraced pro-life notions that extended to conception itself, and I had to be very expensively educated out of it. My wife — also a physician and a Catholic — had the same thoughts, and so we did not think about names for our children before 12 weeks, knowing as we did that our now beloved children, at that time, were more potential children than the beautiful beings that we so cherish today. Although I am against late-term abortions (though later-term complications include perils you have sensitively covered in the past), I think the pro-life movement’s failure to reckon with the fragile, contingent nature of first-trimester human life robs it of much of its moral force.
More good points. Another reader brings up IUDs:
I can’t recall an instance where I so profoundly disagreed with you. Whereas I am, like you, pro-choice, I can understand the position of the pro-lifers. A fetus is a life, to be sure. At some point during late gestation, I think even the most staunch pro-choice advocates would agree abortion should be prohibited. No reasonable person would support the notion that a woman has the right to discard her child, say, as she is going into labor.
But to have this debate over IVF, the most extreme absolutist positions must be discarded. Just as it’s untenable to support abortion of a full-term infant, it is equally untenable to suggest that a single-cell embryo constitutes a human life. There are those who see IUD contraception as equivalent to abortion, since it prevents implantation of the fertilized embryo. It is awfully difficult to draw a bright line between those who would outlaw IUDs (and perhaps those who would outlaw all forms of contraception) and your position on IVF.
Another reader addresses the question of souls:
I support all IVF — and have a wonderful child created with IVF. If religious people object to embryo destruction, then presumably it’s because they think that embryos have a soul. But how do you know which conglomerates of cells have souls and which do not? Perhaps it’s only once a conglomerate of cells becomes sufficiently complex to be a human being, or a “person”, that it gets a soul?
Even if you had grounds for thinking that each embryo has a soul, why is it a problem if that embryo does not develop into a human person? Don’t they just go direct to heaven? Or maybe they just get bumped along to the next embryo until they manage to occupy one that develops fully. There are innumerable early-stage embryos that are lost naturally. If God thought this was a problem, then He could fix it — but He does not.
We do not know what the state of the soul is prior to becoming conscious. Does God create a soul whenever a certain chemical reaction takes place on earth? Or are souls eternal, as God is? In that case, all the souls that will ever exist are joyfully in God’s presence, and at some point they get wrenched away to be paired with some conglomerate of cells in the universe.
One more reader on souls:
The Soul does not necessarily enter the body at conception. It chooses when to enter the body — any time between conception and birth. The Soul, being divine in nature, can see the circumstances of the pregnancy and can choose not to enter the body unless and until it is likely that the pregnancy will be brought to term.
Since 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, does it really make sense that a Soul would enter an embryo that had some genetic flaw that would keep it from surviving? What would be the point of that? Would a just, loving God really enforce such a rule? And if you agree that it doesn’t, then, I submit, it’s equally implausible that it would enter one that was going to be frozen.
There are times when readers add depth and nuance and personal experience to a debate that are essential adjuncts to any case I might make. I hope it’s clear that I’ve tried to create a space for disagreement and dissent here so we can collectively better sort things out and determine the truth so far as we can. I feel more conflicted about my already conflicted piece than I did before your dissents. And believe it or not, even if I haven’t entirely changed my mind, I’m grateful for it.
More dissents are over on the pod page, and we’re compiling a series of IVF stories for a separate post next week. If you have one to share, please pass it along: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Mental Health Break
A dreamy music video:
In The ‘Stacks
Noah Smith prepares us for a second Trump term.
Lee Fang debunks a “bedrock of Kamala Harris’ political identity”: being an environmental SJW. Freddie thinks through the “Kamala conundrum.”
Ross Barkan makes the case for Michelle Obama.
“The Tories’ attack ads are getting worse,” observes Tom Hamilton.
Farage and Reform are clobbering the Tories among the young.
An update on Israel’s looming war in Lebanon.
Filipovic isn’t optimistic after the SCOTUS abortion victory in Idaho.
Will the release of Assange embolden the intel community? Taibbi looks back at his long saga.
A journalist is threatened with jail for reporting on the trans-shooter manifesto.
Laura McKenna sounds the alarm over the “autism and ADHD tsunami.”
Erik Hoel defends the growing homeschool movement against the likes of Scientific American.
Yglesias makes the case that “high-pressure youth sports is bad for America.”
Welcome, Oren Cass!
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.
See you next Friday.