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.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my take on the deepening scandal of transing kids; a fun and informative chat with Tim Shipman on the UK elections; many persuasive dissents over my piece on the ethics of IVF; eight notable quotes for the week in news; 15 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a dreamy music video for our Mental Health Break; a gorgeous view of the French coast; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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Happy to be back. I’ve found time in my schedule to read and listen. Just cannot take MSM anymore. I’d rather give my money to people who are truly independent and have integrity. I’m now running from “woke”, and thanks to transgenderism and the conduct of governments during COVID, I think I’m becoming a libertarian!
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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.
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: Erick Erickson on the left’s spiritual crisis, Anne Applebaum on autocrats, Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty, Van Jones, and Stephen Fry! Send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
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.
Dissents Of The Week: The Right To Create Life
Among the wave of dissenting readers over my latest column, one writes, “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.
Read five more dissents here, with my responses. 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.
Even more dissents are 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.
This 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 Biden’s replacement, the Farage surge, and several pieces on education. Below are a few examples, followed by a brand new substack:
A journalist is threatened with jail for reporting on the trans-shooter manifesto.
Erik Hoel defends the growing homeschool movement against the likes of Scientific American.
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations 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 contest). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. A gem from last week’s results:
For this week’s VFYW Reimagined, I went back to a more realistic but fanciful style to exaggerate the solar panels on the house in the foreground, the palm and other trees, the sea, the stylized mountains, and the dramatic clouds:
