Greg is a lawyer, journalist, and author. He’s also the president of FIRE — the best free-speech group out there. His books include The Coddling of the American Mind (written with Jonathan Haidt), The Canceling of the American Mind (written with Rikki Schlott), and War On Words (written with Nadine Strossen). You can find him on Substack at The Eternally Radical Idea.
An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of our convo — on whether Biden or Trump has been worse on free speech, and how to decrease wokeness on campus — head to our YouTube page.
Other topics: his Russian dad’s 100th birthday the day we taped; how he fled the Soviets as an orphan and came to America speaking 7 languages; his British mom coming over as a nanny; growing up among immigrants in Danbury as both a football player and nerd; studying 1st Amendment law at Stanford; the wane of gifted-and-talented programs (which Greg once taught); the declining support for free speech; family breakdown and protecting kids from bad speech; the perils of social media; race wars on X; censorship against porn and age-restriction laws; where Greg disagrees with Jon Haidt; free speech as a form of bullying; Nick Fuentes; how banning people from X increases groupthink; Jon Rauch; sex changes for kids; gay promiscuity; Covid censorship; AI worries; the killing of Charlie Kirk; the infamous Larry Bushart case; the Ozturk case; Rubio’s anti-speech crusade against immigrants; Israel and BDS; antisemitism on campus; heckling vs shout-downs; viewpoint diversity; the FCC and Carr; jawboning and merger threats; the Ellisons; Trump threatening law firms; “hate” crimes; mass arrests in UK over speech; the Varsity Blues cheating scandal; and South Park.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Tom Junod on his dad and masculinity, Jerusalem Demsas on the state of the left, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” HW Brands on the life of George Washington, Ben Rhodes on Iran, Harvey Mansfield on modernity, John Gray on Trump’s new world, and Robby George on everything. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Here’s a review of the Dishcast from a new paid subscriber:
Great guests. Thorny questions. No answers. Keep up the good work!
On last week’s episode with Jeffrey Toobin on the pardon power, a listener writes:
Thanks for the very interesting conversation.
My dissent here has to do with the brief discussion at the very end about the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision. I was a bit surprised by the ease with which you and Toobin dismissed this as benefiting Trump and Trump alone, on the rationale that the only reason that Trump was prosecuted after leaving office was because he was the only president who had merited being prosecuted.
As you are someone who has written many times on the parallels between the twilight days of the Roman Republic and the current American situation, you of all people should know that politically motivated prosecution of Roman magistrates for whatever they had done during their term of office was commonplace — very often for “offenses” that were offensive only to their political opponents. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he had been put into just such a situation: faced with enemies who refused to negotiate, he could either give up his command and come back to Rome to face political prosecution and very likely death or exile, or bring the fight to them.
The specter of post-term prosecution highly incentivized holding on to consular or proconsular office (with its attendant immunity) for as long as possible. Is it really hard to see how a similar dynamic could play out in the US — party politics being so absolutely toxic — if the door were open for the previous president to be prosecuted every time the office changed parties? That isn’t to say that the immunity decision was necessarily the right one — just that I think it deserves a bit more consideration than you and Toobin seem to be allowing it.
Points well taken. Another has a suggestion:
Why doesn’t the government instigate a safety check, where any pardon must be agreed to by a majority of the Senate? That way any senator who’s going to run again can be held accountable for a pardon issued by a president who is walking out the door with no future accountability. I somehow doubt all J6 convicts would have been pardoned for serious crimes committed at the Capitol.
Some accountability is needed — or it’s a hole below the waterline of the rule of law. Another listener sends “a poem for you regarding your Derek Thompson conversation about human need”:
I’ve been reading and listening for a while, so thanks for all the thought provoking conversations. Just wanted to share with you a poem I wrote over 30 years ago, when all this stuff of modernity was starting to be troubling, confusing. I’ve lived alone now for a good many years, and I — like everyone I guess — continue to find ways to be needed.
P.S. My grandfather was the 17th of 18 children. They lived on a farm deep in Oklahoma Territory, where every kid was needed for something.
NEED
How do we find a way to need each other, now
That there are no fertile fields to plow?
No bread to be baked from our own wheat?
No herds to drive?
No sheaves to be sheaved?
You do not need to fill my womb
With a dozen sons, strong-backed, strong-armed,
To shoe the horse,
To fence the farm.
What do I do so joyfully freed
From that place that still longs to need your need?In truth, there’s little too heavy for me to lift.
Most things I can hoist and place with some sweat and strain.
I know a Crescent from a Phillips now.
Don’t laugh.
I do.
But if I lie and pretend I don’t
When you offer to come by
And fix the stove, carburetor, chimney flue,
It’s to let you find a way for me to need you
That you can give,
Because that’s the kind of giving you were made to do.An earthquake shook my house one night so hard
That plaster, brick and mortar rained all round.
Ceilings cracked, beams twisted, and great shards
Of glass fell, mixed with wine and ash.
Doors unlocked, swung free unhelped,
As if by the hand of the Holy Ghost himself.The sun rose. Smoke cleared the air,
I smiled at the shock of grey in my hair.
I never felt so steady,
Yet ready to be held.
How do we need each other now?
Foundations shifted, aquifers’ course changed,
How do we find the source again?
What tools do we use to dig and fill that well?
Here’s a guest rec:
As a long-time subscriber and an international environmental lawyer, I’m worried about a creeping climate-skepticism finding its way into your restacks. Before celebrating our collective corporate and governmental retreat from clean energy ambitions, sit down with Bill McKibben — or any other sober environmentalist (there are many) — talk through the science (and its gaps; I swear we know about them), refresh yourself on policy pathways, and grapple with many strong arguments that favour unwinding our dependence on fossil fuels. After all, conservatives and conservationists are only ever a suffix apart!
I’m still a big believer in non-carbon energy; my concerns are solely about the transition and avoiding shortages that discredit the whole endeavor. Bill is an old acquaintance, and we featured his work frequently on the old blog.
From a reader on last week’s column, “And Augustine Wept”:
You have written so many columns I have admired, and my favorite had been one you wrote some years ago, “This Is What a Tyrant Looks Like,” comparing Trump to Shakespeare’s Richard III. This new one tops it — just extraordinary.
Another writes:
Excellent piece. I’m wondering what you think of the US decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, and what you think Augustine or Niebuhr would say?
A very tough one. I don’t think just-war theory would allow for it: mass extermination would have horrified Augustine. We know what Niebuhr thought. In his essay on the bombing, he wrote:
We reached the level of Nazi morality in justifying the use of the bomb on the ground that it shortened the war … the bomb was merely the culmination of our own strategy of total war, involving the use of ever more powerful obliteration bombing and incendiarism.
“Nazi morality.” Another reader:
You’ve repeatedly written how “any remaining serious nuclear threat had been ‘obliterated’ last year” to show that the war is aimless and unnecessary. Perhaps the Trump administration was lying about obliterating the nuclear sites and therefore the nuclear threat is still present? He obviously lies every time he opens his mouth, and early reports also claimed the nuclear program was not obliterated, but set back. So, if the nuclear threat is still present, then I could see that as a rational reason for the war. But what makes that argument dubious is that the Trump administration never made it — instead, they threw a bunch of other reasons at the wall to see what would stick.
Indeed. A war president who lies every time he opens his mouth cannot properly conduct a war. Here’s a dissent:
You captioned a quote from JD Vance by writing that he “converted to Catholicism about five minutes ago.” Come now, Andrew; whatever one might think of Vance, the tendency for people to cite his being a Catholic convert as some kind of failing ought to be beneath you.
When I converted to Catholicism, after 20 years as an Anglican, I took John Henry Newman as my Confirmation Saint. Perhaps an imperfect analogy (my theological gifts are few), but the Church — the barque for all humanity — does not teach that converts are forever second best. I’m sure you’ve disagreed with any number of popes about any number of things over the years and, toasting first to conscience, your right to do so is not predicated on your being a cradle Catholic.
Fair enough. It was uncharitable. My snark was simply because Newman didn’t immediately tell the Pope to be careful in pronouncing on morals. Vance has some chutzpah.
Next up, an expert on Iran urges me to “give war in the Middle East a second chance”:
