There are two complementary cults in America today, it seems to me: the cult of Trump and the cult of Woke.
They exist alongside but also currently control the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. And they have a sick, mutually perpetuating and advantageous relationship. By “cult”, I mean a collective embrace of a compelling figure or dogma, the worship and protection of which dominates everything else. (I presaged this almost a decade ago now: “America’s New Religions.”)
That our politics will not recover until these two cults are unraveled is in some ways the core conviction of The Weekly Dish. And the good news, I think, is that it’s finally happening. Cult leaders, however charismatic, are usually sociopaths when they aren’t simply sexual abusers, and so cults tend to implode when the leader’s flaws emerge beyond any denial. Fixed dogmas can also collapse when the lies required to sustain them simply become too absurd, too huge to believe, when the avatars of the system are exposed as frauds and liars. And to my eyes, the emperors’ clothes on both sides are now unmistakably falling.
I.
I’ll start with the scene in the Oval Office last week when DC’s US attorney, Jeanine Pirro — a longtime Trump cult member if ever there was one — arrived to defend her decision not to prosecute a man accused (by a US president, no less) of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s reassuring, I guess, that in her 20-page court filing she essentially withdrew all her previous public accusations because ... no evidence existed to back them up. That, of course, doesn’t matter to Trump. But Pirro stood her ground, and the prosecution has been dropped. Reality mattered. Courts — which demand provable facts and evidence — have helped.
Stupid facts also explain the increasingly funny desperation of the Trump defenders. I’ve begun to watch clips of Fox’s dead-ender Jesse Watters these days, just for the ever shriekier tone with which he tries to spin a catastrophic war that cannot be spun (while weirdly calling the ayatollah gay). I get serious hathos when I read Walter Russell Mead trying yet again to put some lipstick on a pig, or when The Free Press tries to spin the collapse in munitions or what passes for Trump’s “diplomacy”.
I mean, how do you spin handing the Strait of Hormuz over to Iran? Wrecking our own missile defenses? Or slower wage growth, for that matter? Higher inflation? Fewer manufacturing jobs? ICE brutality? Unprecedented corruption? There is a reason Trump is now 29 points underwater on the economy, 43 points on inflation, and is less popular than he was in the days after January 6. He’s got nothing. His “strong” approval ratings are now lucky to break 20 points.
My point is that there is nothing solid holding even this up — exceptan increasingly deranged narrative that comes solely from the president himself. And that narrative is now quite a weave, as elaborate as his new hairpiece:
Jeanine Pirro made a mistake. It was vandalism. … Number one, look at the grass, where the grass was all knocked out with a very powerful ingredient. We know very well what it is. But like I say, the name, because people get ideas. But they put a terrible phrase, I won’t say that either, but a terrible phrase, on a massive piece of grass that we had just replaced. Kill the grass. We had to replace the grass. A lot of grass. In addition, they took knives or cutters, and they cut the material. And they put their hands and they pulled it. And there was also some maintenance things that we would have routinely fixed. But we had that up, and it was perfect. And then you had the bubblers, which get rid of what forms in the water ...
Out. Of. His. Mind. The reporter who has followed Trump most closely, Maggie Haberman, tells us that around 70 percent of the president’s mental bandwidth is now occupied by his various cockamamie — and grotesquely kitsch — construction projects around DC. If the Democrats were not completely useless, this presidency would be over.
And who in the world takes anything Trump says seriously anymore? Every definitive statement is abandoned in days, if not hours. No deal is ever finished. Major gambits, like the tariff wars, collapse under the weight of incompetence. The sheer fecklessness of the Iran War has undermined deterrence everywhere. China has eaten Trump’s lunch on trade. The IRGC treats him as a mere noise machine. Pretty soon, a supermajority of Americans will be there too.
And by November, if the cult is emphatically rejected at the pols, the Trump era could be done. He will do the only thing he can if he loses the House: double down on claims of fraud. But this time, I don’t think he’ll carry more than a handful of his followers. It’s too obvious, too familiar, too cheap — even for them, as they struggle to pay for their daily commute. That’s when the cult crumbles, I think. It will be messy. But it’s coming. At some point, gravity dictates Wile E. Coyote falls off the cliff. Far too late of course. But better late than never.
II.
The cult of woke is far less easily defenestrated because it’s not just one unhinged man. It is an elaborate, networked edifice of lies and power grabs, with deep tribal appeals to the worst of human nature, sustained by an elite overwhelmed with self-regard and incapable of self-reform.
Some argue that wokeness is over, and they talk about vibes and shifts. But they never point to actual legislative or institutional change — because no such change is happening. Women still have dicks, America is still a “white supremacy,” all gays are queers, all cops are suspect, borders are racist, and oppression is omnipresent. These lies are still held as sacred truths by every major institution in America.
And with the case of Jason Arday, we have the apotheosis of this moral and intellectual rot. You probably know all the incredibledetails by now — the facially absurd claims, the fabricated data, the plagiarized papers — and I won’t repeat them all here. (His record would make Claudine Gay cringe.) But what we have is proof of principle that our current academic establishment — which underpins the entire rancid edifice of wokeness — is as big a farce and as massive a fraud as Trump is.
Arday became a celebrated professor solely because he is black, “neurodivergent,” has extraordinary “lived experience,” and recites the correct dogma. That’s it. Like Ibram X Kendi, his “work” is on its face embarrassing, identitarian drivel. Not since Kendi toldTheAtlantic that racism is defined by things that are racist has such genius won such affirmation.
But pick a random person off the street — and not David Remnick — and have them read some of Arday’s work: it’s either incomprehensible or obviously written by a floundering high school student, whose only real academic achievements have been in physical education. His dissertation, for example, has an obvious punctuation mistake in the title:
An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research
Why the apostrophe after teachers? It appears to have been copied and pasted. And then Jesse Singal found that Arday repeats this weird punctuation throughout the dissertation whenever he uses the word “teachers.” In a conference keynote slide, Arday referred to the “poultry numbers” of black academics to hilarious effect. Chris Brunet picked two of Arday’s papers at random and found many howlers:
- “will enviably impact attainment outcomes.” Enviably means in a manner worthy of envy. He means inevitably.
- “a need to reinvest inequitable structures.” Presumably he means “reform” or “restructure” inequitable structures. As written, he recommends reinvesting in them.
- “Racism is unlikely to ever go way, owing to its penetrative, divisive and persistence nature.” Two errors in one sentence: go away and persistent nature.
These are the sort of errors you might make in a high school paper and be corrected by your mom at the last minute. And indeed the tone used about this 41-year-old Cambridge professor by the white woke women who championed him is infantilizing. “We are so lucky to have you,” one says. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” Or this tweet from a dead-ender: “Jason is obviously a very talented young man whatever the facts turn out to be.”
And Arday did not pull this off on the low. Countless senior, “distinguished” scholars signed off on this farce. Mass media celebrated his genius. More than 16,000 signed a petition defending him against “racist” attacks, i.e. inquiries into his fraud. Simon & Schuster — despite knowing that the book Arday has written omits countless tall tales from the original proposal — is still publishing. And of course all criticism is proof of racism. Professor Nels Abbey told Times Radio, “The overlap in certain places between journalism and white supremacy has been blurred very, very significantly,” adding that Arday is a “veritable genius.” Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen played the suicide card, adding: “I cannot stand by and watch when an autistic man is on the ground and the kicking continues.”
And yes, it’s a good thing to worry about the impact of exposure on a man like Arday with such obvious vulnerabilities. But it’s harder to feel sympathy when you find out he hired a big law firm to scare off any scrutiny, and ultimately sicced the cops — yes, the cops — on a journalist: “The Metropolitan Police spent four months looking into the claim of harassment before deciding in February to close the case.” He also called the police on a skeptical professor. And it seems pretty clear that Arday faked multiple, in-person death threats by masked men. Jussie redux.
And think for a second about Arday’s recourse to the police. Behind “Be Kind” is an iron fist. Notice also the content of his work — the usual, jargon-filled piffle on being oppressed in a field about “oppression” in a school of “education”. We know this is all bullshit — Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose blew grievance studies out of the water years ago — but still these departments exist. They’re funneling more money to the right race, sex, or gender, fomenting hate, and degrading every other department in the university. Why is any public money being funneled to these factories of hate?
III.
Cults spring from desperate human needs in the absence of religion: economic frustration, personal ennui, civilizational boredom, social change. They can jump-start change but can never accomplish it — because they are rooted in emotion and built on lies. But we can see them plainly enough now as the layers of untruth and menace have unfolded and continue to unfold. Trump is a farce we have to somehow outlast; wokeness is a joke everyone is now in on. They will continue — but their force is now clearly waning after one hell of a wax.
I’ve spent the last decade tilting against them — and it has seemed pointless half the time, as the Trump faction has doubled down on its hero at the expense of our Constitution, and the woke have kidnapped the culture at the expense of our liberalism. But lies always fail in the end. And in the quiet these days, you can hear them dying. Our task now is to ensure that whatever follows both of these noxious, illiberal cults is something rooted in empirical truth, everyday English, and constructive solutions to our common problems.
Politics, in other words. Not cults. Know hope.
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The Dish is taking its annual August break as of tomorrow. We’ll be back the week before Labor Day, with Dish pods filling the gap. Thanks for another bumper year — we’re exhausted but fathomlessly grateful. If you haven’t yet, subscribe!
(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: a great chat with Ross Barkan about the DSA and Mamdani; a ton of reader dissents over my piece on Fauci; four notable quotes from the week in news; 17 pieces we recommend on Substack on a variety of topics; a wacky, beautiful music vid for a Mental Health Break; a fantastic window from Banff; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge.)
A new paid subscriber writes, “I am enlightened and amused by the Weekly Dish.” Another works at a “civic engagement platform”:
Your willingness to hold institutions accountable without a partisan lens is exactly the kind of thinking we want our users to bring to their own legislators.
New On The Dishcast: Ross Barkan
Ross is a journalist and novelist. He’s the editor-in-chief of The Metropolitan Review, and a columnist for the Nation and UnHerd. He’s the author of six books, including his new novel, Colossus. A new non-fiction book, about the rise of Zohran Mamdani, is coming soon. Find much more of his writing on his substack, “Political Currents.”
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on whether the DSA is truly dangerous, and the US elites’ obsession with Israel. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s pod with Megan McArdle and a ton of reader discussion on my Fauci column, with my replies throughout.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: John O’Sullivan on conservatism, Emily Eakin on postmodernism, Azam Ahmed on terrifying new drugs, and Arianna Huffington on anything but politics. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Dissents Of The Week
My Fauci column last week got a huge response from readers. One writes:
I’m confused, Andrew. You acknowledge that Fauci “had backed a US grant for exactly that kind of work at Wuhan,” as well as the possibility that he “may have played a part in the novel virus’ emergence,” but then dismiss the idea that Fauci is “responsible for probably more deaths than any other individual in the medical world.” Rand Paul has amassed a lot more evidence than you’re acknowledging, having to do with Fauci evading the gain-of-function research ban by outsourcing it to China (just like how torture was outsourced to CIA black sites).
Well, we don’t have evidence that the grant is directly connected to Covid and I’d rather be careful. Another dissenter writes, “Nice job on bemoaning the release of Fauci’s diary … and then commenting on the contents.” The diary was so public that I didn’t help disseminate it.
More of my replies to dissenters are here and here, accessible to paid subscribers. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
In The ‘Stacks
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 the far-left win in Michigan, why Denmark is the best country, and why East Asia didn’t conquer the world. Examples:
Jill Filipovic addresses the “thin shaming” of Arianna Grande.
Ben Sixsmith talks about his own suffering with anorexia.
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 at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. From last week, here’s the VFYW chef who makes a meal every Sunday inspired by the window location:
Daughter no. 1 decided to have a pizza party last Sunday, so we had to make Atlanta-style pizza. Fortunately, when I asked Google what that was, it replied, “Atlanta pizza is uniquely defined by its incredible culinary diversity rather than a single signature style.” “Uniquely defined by diversity” is up there with “most iconic” in my book.
When I texted this to my daughter, she deadpanned, “Oh good, that language applies to my pizza.” Here is a selection of the uniquely diverse pizzas she made:
On the left, she is finishing up a street corn pizza, with her pizza oven in the background; in the middle, we have a creamed shishito pepper and mozzarella pizza; and on the right, we have a Georgia peach, prosciutto, and burrata pizza.
Next is a sneak peek of the contest write-up going up later today — and the pizza doesn’t look as delicious this time:
Just two weeks after contest #516, durian again rears its ugly, stinky head!
I had hoped that after the Kuala Lumpur contest, I could avoid seeing, reading about, or thinking about durian for a long, long time. No such luck. It turns out that durian, the world’s smelliest fruit, is extremely popular in [city redacted]. The city holds an annual durian festival and has recently experienced a surge in the sale and consumption of durian due to a government-backed and influencer-driven marketing campaign promoting the fruit.
I have to say that some of the photos of durian dishes at the Durianism Cafe (like the durian pizza seen below) make the fruit look much more appetizing than anything I recall seeing from the Kuala Lumpur contest. Even so, I don’t think I could be convinced to try it:
See you back for a full Dish on September 4, with pods published in the meantime.
