Andrew Sullivan

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Andrew Sullivan, affectionately nicknamed "Sully", (1963–) is a conservative author, editor, and blogger at andrewsullivan.com, though he has been characterized as a "crypto-liberal" by many on the right. This is probably because he is a displaced Brit writing for an American audience, where a conservative is a moonbat in American terms. And the fact that he's an open homosexual and happily married to another man.

His blog icon on The Daily Dish featured the slogan "Of no clique or party." The Daily Dish is notable for helping to popularize the idea of the political blog.

Political views and religion

Sully loves the British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who was the subject of his dissertation. He is very outspoken in regards to LGBT issues, particular being a leading advocate for the gay marriage cause in the 1990s and 2000s. (Though, in a clear demonstration of the "your mileage may vary" aspect of Sully, he also wrote some columns in the early 2020s that were seen as transphobic.) He was very critical of the Bush administration after endorsing Bush in 2000 and later endorsed John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Ron Paul. Initially, he supported the War in Iraq but later changed his mind and became a critic of Dubya's detainment and torture policies, especially Gitmo. He has also stated that he can't take neoconservatism seriously. As a result of this, he has been disowned entirely by the American right and Forbes actually named him as one of America's top 25 liberals (with Forbes throwing in some mild homophobia just for good measure). Sully quickly replied:

Not many liberals, I wager to say, endorsed Ron Paul for president for the GOP in the primaries. Not many liberals, I dare to say, have written books on conservatism that rest on a reading of key conservative thinkers such as Burke and Oakeshott and Montaigne and Hobbes. And the conservatism I adhere to, as any reader can tell, has remained very constant for twenty years. There is very little shift in tone or argument from my first book, "Intimations Pursued," to my last, "The Conservative Soul." It spans twenty years.

When it comes to religion, he is a Roman Catholic but came up with some crap about how the Bible doesn't actually condemn being gay, was critical of Pope Benedict XVI, and described himself as a "secular Catholic." He debated arch-atheist Sam Harris over the internets.

Among his most annoying features is his insistence on bringing up The Bell Curve every once in a while (despite his readers' complaints). While Sullivan insists that he is doing this to facilitate conversation and that speaking of the book is often stifled by "political correctness," he almost never has anything to add other than simply rehash Murray's thesis. He justified this initially in 1995 with:

The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief.

This is presumably a special new meaning of "racist" unclear to anyone else. He has continued to push it as a meaningful contribution to the world in the two decades since, going so far as to ponder the genetic size of black men's penises as a genuine search for truth as well as noting the genetic differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

Sully is a prime example of "your mileage may vary" for his noted ability to be right on the money one second and completely clueless the next.

He stopped blogging in early 2015 because of the toll it was taking on his health (which was already somewhat vulnerable on account of his being HIV-positive). Most of his readers migrated to his former home at The Atlantic, whose "Notes" feature, launched in mid-to-late 2015, was essentially a revival of Sullivan's old style of blogging but done with different people. In 2017, he took up writing for New York Magazine, essentially bringing back his old blog.

In 2020, however, Sullivan resigned from New York, complaining in his last column that, in his view, his complaints about the "woke program" of critical theory made him toxic to other people at the magazine. (According to employees at New York and others, it was indeed Sullivan's continued embrace of biological determinism and scientific racism that most of his peers found abhorrent.)

Sullivan then went on to start a weekly blog on Substack shortly after his resignation, which remains active as of November 2022.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, especially recently with the death of George Floyd, he's gone so far as to say that one cannot both be a Christian and a supporter of the movement, to the extent that he praised Giants pitcher Sam Coonrod, who refused to kneel in support of the movement because it offended his religion. He has also claimed that the movement is an attempt to destroy liberal democracy and mocked the protestors in Portland as being part of a cult, that you can't really know what's going on since you can't trust the mainstream media.

Trig Palin conspiracy theory

Sully boarded the crazy train during the 2008 elections when he became the prime proponent of the Trig Palin conspiracy theory. He made over twenty posts to his blog over a two day period about Sarah Palin, alleging that she had somehow faked her pregnancy in order to cover for Bristol. The Internet collectively said "Sully, you're a fucking idiot," and got on with its life while he cranked out more posts about the Trig Palin conspiracy theory.

External links

• The Weekly Dish, Sully's Substack site