Yes, he did. That’s the core headline. Biden had to convince the American public, and to some extent the world, that he retains the vigor and marbles of his former self. And this he largely accomplished.
He still looks very old though. The first thought I had watching him emerge into the House was that he looks less like Biden than someone wearing a Biden Halloween mask. The features are all there in some kind of uncanny valley, buoyed by fillers, stretched by Botox into a mask whose weirdness hovers somewhere between Joan Rivers and John Kerry, the pure black raisin-eyes peering from within the carved carapace of what was once a face. The Botox is so severe that he has a habit of looking and listening to someone without any measurable change in expression, as if frozen until his mouth can prove he’s not a mannequin. That gives him the open-mouthed squint expression that makes him seem angry at something and yet clueless about why at the same time.
And the vigor was achieved by shouting half the address at about twice the speed required for it to be fully intelligible. The unholy pace made it inevitable he would slur his words as well, so at times, I felt like I was trapped in an Irish pub with a drunk unintelligibly yelling at me for some reason, and I couldn’t get away. And then there was the occasional tone of a fierce, marital squabble: the sudden rising cadence and rhetorical stamp of the foot, as he expressed his volcanic displeasure at something or other. In time, as the adrenaline (or something else) wore off a bit, he became more understandable, but I confess I kept turning the volume down. The Abraham Simpson vibe was strong.
Before you get all pissy that I’m not addressing the substance, let me say I thought it was … fine. Sometimes, more than fine:
Now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, do whatever the hell you want. That’s a quote. A former president actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. I think it’s outrageous, it’s dangerous, and it’s unacceptable.
Biden also was able to paint a more glowing and more accurate picture of a resurgent US economy than the Republican caricature; he was strong on abortion and NATO; he was right to remind America of the enormity of January 6; effective on drug prices and Medicare; and who doesn’t want more Snickers in their Snickers bars? But he had nothing new to say about immigration, except that the bill he backed after three years of inaction had been foiled by “my predecessor.” And he didn’t inoculate himself completely on crime.
But he will have cheered Democrats, who were beginning to shit themselves about November; he will have stopped the momentum of any possible rival in his own camp; and he was reassuringly Biden, who still has reserves of Irish charm in his role as the decent, if somewhat batty, old codger. It’s also safe to say that Katie Britt did not undercut him immediately thereafter — as the sheer scale of her cringe became an instant legend.
Which leaves Biden again the last one standing, competing, as he would put it, not against the Almighty but against Trump. That choice is Biden’s final appeal to people like me. And, although he did fine last night, it seems increasingly clear to me that he’s going to need 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: a deep and disturbing dive into the WPATH Files; an engrossing talk with Christian Wiman on suffering; dissents over my piece on Google AI; eight notable quotes from the week in news; 17 pieces on Substack we enjoyed on a variety of topics; a timeless skit from The Carol Burnett Show for an MHB; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a fence-sitter no longer:
Your revelatory piece on Gemini was the camel straw that roused me from procrastination; I’m now a paid subscriber. Thank you for the cautionary and entertaining look at Google’s illiberal indoctrination.
The Medical Abuse Of Children — In Plain Sight
A transgender child takes part in the NYC Pride March as part of World Pride commemorating the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. (Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty)
One of the striking aspects of the sex-reassignment craze for children is the 100 percent rock-solid reassurance that nothing ever goes wrong, nothing has ever gone wrong, and every expert and decent person agrees on this. Every naive question a normie might ask has a clear, resounding, and definitive answer: everything is fine. Fine, I tell you. I know because over the years, I have naively asked some of these questions and always received categorical answers, devoid of any hint of doubt. To wit:
How can you tell if a child really is trans and isn’t gay or just experimenting with identity? The children know who they are every single time and not a single gay kid has ever been mistakenly transed. What if they change their mind once they’ve started puberty blockers? Puberty blockers are easily and instantly reversible — so no harm done! Why can’t the kids wait till they are more mature to make these kinds of decisions? Because they’ll be dead by then! If transition doesn’t happen now, suicide will. Can children on the verge of puberty really understand what it means to change their sex and end any future chance of having a biological child or an orgasm? All these children, along with their parents, offer fully informed consent. Nothing to see here at all.
Every transqueer activist group, from HRC to GLAAD, the Biden administration, the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, Jon Stewart, and the entire educational and medical establishment now say — in unison and loudly — that child sex changes are simply “settled science” and, in the immortal words of Principal Skinner, let’s have no more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up.
Actually let’s. Every single categorical reassurance above has now been debunked. We have no way of knowing whether any single gender-dysphoric child is going to become a trans person or a gay person, but the vast majority end up gay. Eighty percent of kids referred to Britain’s transing clinic were same-sex attracted. If there were just one detransitioner, the expert certainty of “no errors ever” would be misplaced. But there are countless of them. When real scientists and doctors find evidence calling their previous views into question, they stop, reconsider, acknowledge legitimate doubts, and double down on research. When transgender health experts uncover such evidence, they instantly cover it up and double down.
Imminent suicide if a child isn’t transed? A deeply irresponsible, unspeakably manipulative and unethical lie. The risk of suicide for children with gender dysphoria is higher than for children without it, but it is still extremely low — around 0.3 percent in a new BMJ-published Finnish study — and disappears entirely when you control for other psychiatric factors. (We already know the number of suicides among the 15,000 children referred for transition in the UK from 2010 to 2020: four.) So the slogan used to shock parents into approving a child’s sex change — “do you want a live boy or a dead girl?” — is wrong at least 99.7 percent of the time. How can any doctor know this and still give parents a life-or-death ultimatum?
And this week, on the critical question of whether children can give truly informed consent for irreversibly changing their sex, we got some inside dope. Leaked troves of documents from meetings and forums of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) give us scads of evidence that the doctors themselves know they are lying to the public.
(Read the rest of that 1500-word piece here, for paid subscribers.)
Christian is a poet and author, and, in my view, one of the most piercing writers on faith in our time. He served as the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, the NYT Book Review and others. He’s the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books, and his new one is called Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. Matt Sitman and I did a pod episode with him 12 years ago; so it was a real delight to reconnect for a second. I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve yet produced. But make up your own mind.
Listen to the episode here. You can also find two clips of our convo — on finding God through suffering, and getting a glimpse of the divine through psychedelics. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s episode with Rob Henderson on overcoming trauma, along with an assortment of reader emails on Gemini, anti-gay laws in Africa, and drug decriminalization in Portland. Plus, more Truman pics.
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: Abigail Shrier on why the cult of therapy harms children, Richard Dawkins on religion, Johann Hari on weight-loss drugs, Adam Moss on the artistic process, and George Will on Trump and conservatism. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
A reader feels that some key context was missing from last week’s column on Gemini:
Your piece on Google’s woke AI mess is, in retrospect, highly misleading. It’s true that what Google did was implant what it saw as corrective logic in its Gemini prompts. It did this not just because the corporate culture of Google is woke (the crux of your argument), but because Google had already been caught in an even worse debacle a decade ago with Google Photo, where it used rudimentary AI and wound up tagging gorillas as black people — a wildly racist outcome. This is known as the “Gorilla Incident.”
Because that incident was so racist and wrong, Google now attempts to correct for this kind of thing by attempting to add as much information as possible to avoid racist outcomes. It knows that trying to get an image of “CEOs” will probably spit out a bunch of images of white men, and while that may reflect society at this time, it doesn’t want to be put in a position like the Gorilla Incident again, because that is even worse. I agree with you that woke crap sucks, identity politics is often illiberal, and a lot of this stuff is poisonous to our democracy, but if you fail to mention the Gorilla Incident, you’re not giving your readers a fair picture of their motivations.
Read my response to that dissent, along with three others, here. Another dissent is on the pod page. Send yours here: 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 Super Tuesday, the escalating dangers from plastic, and lab beagles. Below are a few examples:
Mike Solana goes “inside the DEI hivemind that led to Gemini’s disaster.” Great reporting in the age of Twitter takes.
A modern “Victory Garden” in Ukraine is assembling army drones at home.
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). Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. From last week’s results, here’s a sleuth who got creative:
What’s the deal with these two MFers? Just chillin’ in their cars like they don't know each other. Definitely sus.
Seems like we have a couple of possible backstories here:
Recently widowed, looking for action at LA Fitness. Met on a geriatric version of Tinder (how about Ember? <— send me seed money for more startup ideas.) They’re about to hook up at the hotel, post-workout. They’re texting the grandkids, “MeeMaw is going to be late for your game. Sorry sweetie, Grams needs to lay flat on her back after her workout.” In the other car, PeePaw is getting ready with a blue pill and jamming to swing music.
Recently divorced couple who still have their family gym membership and are super pissed that they showed up at the same time for the Silver Senior workout class. Now it’s a standoff to see who goes in first, and if hands will be thrown by the other. It’s a stand-off at the savannah watering hole in the middle of the dry season, watching from the corner of their eyes, waiting for an attack. They both need what they came for, but who dares make the first move? Tension.
They don’t know each other and are about to start their New Year’s resolution workout. Yup, that’s probably it — but so boring.
