### The relentless dumbing down of the discourse empowers strongman populism.  (Matt Cardy/Getty Images) --- I’m sure some of you had something like this moment if you were an adult in the 1990s, but this conversation has stuck in my mind over the succeeding years. At *The New Republic* when I was editor, one day the business manager, if I recall, decided to bring up a weird subject at the weekly editorial conference. He didn’t usually say much. But he nervously cleared his throat, and stiffened his sinews to ask: What did we think we were going to do about this new thing called the Internet? If discourse went online, as everyone seems to think it will, what would happen to the magazine? Various dismissals and grumbles followed. “But is it good for the Jews?” was the final, sardonic response, and we all laughed. But I remember saying that if the web was what it seemed to be, then magazines would surely cease to exist, because they depended on a weekly or monthly group of writers and articles, held together, by paper and staples. Take the paper and staples away, and nothing coheres in the same way. So we’re doomed, I confidently said. But something else soon became pretty obvious to me: if images and video could be as accessible online as words, they would always win any contest for eyeballs. Visuals carry more visceral punch than sentences and paragraphs, and require less reason and effort. Words would endure, of course, but they would increasingly be spoken and heard, not written or read. The Internet, in other words, held the power to return us to the pre-literate culture from which a majority of humans had emerged only a few hundred years ago: images, symbols, memes. The art of mass deliberation, rooted in reading, reason and thinking, and only really in operation for a couple of centuries or so, was in danger of rapid obsolescence. And that was well before social media and the smartphone. I’m not touting myself as some kind of Cassandra, and my memory is probably flattering me. But, as I tried to imagine *practically* how a literary and political magazine could adjust to the web, I just didn’t see how it could — except as a peripheral, minor preserve of a few. (Hence my gravitating toward blogging a few years later.) What I failed to consider was how this would have a huge cultural and thereby *political* effect that would shake the reasoning and deliberating foundations of liberal democracy. It meant we would think and read less, and see and feel more. It meant our attention span would attenuate to make long-form reading rarer and rarer. And that, in the end, would *matter*. A brilliant little [Substack essay](https://substack.com/home/post/p-173338158) last week reminded me of all this in a flash. James Marriott helps you see how a post-liberal politics is deeply related to a post-literate culture. Deep reading is in free-fall everywhere in the developing world, as the smartphone has hijacked our brains. Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have lost the ability to read at length and in depth; talking has replaced reading; images have replaced ideas; engagement has supplanted reflection; and the various cognitive skills that reading once conferred to the masses since the printing press are fast atrophying. Which cognitive skills? Neil Postman explains in *Amusing Ourselves to Death*: > Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading. No wonder global IQ levels are now [falling](https://futurism.com/neoscope/human-intelligence-declining-trends) for the first time. No wonder the reading scores of American high-school students are the worst since 1992, according to a [new report](https://www.slowboring.com/p/american-students-are-getting-dumber). No wonder the next generation communicates in memes, not words, let alone sentences. AI is surely compounding this even further, allowing you to have an increasingly sophisticated bot read something *for* you. College itself, as a period when you devote yourself to long and deep solitary reading, is becoming [obsolete](https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-end-of-thinking): > \[L\]arge language models have created an existential crisis for teachers trying to evaluate their students’ ability to actually write, as opposed to their ability to prompt an LLM to do all their homework. “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” one student said. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” a professor echoed. No wonder that Gen Z and younger — having been denied the solace of knowing actual history, experiencing serious religious faith, and being transported by big, complex novels into other distant minds and places — feel adrift, searching for meaning and perspective, lost in phones, prey to cults. Trans-furries and budding neo-Hitlers: an emotive, irrational, grievance-obsessed generation of lonely souls — increasingly prone to [violence](https://www.pittparents.com/p/that-could-be-my-son). One reason Trump is president now is because all this made his ascendance possible. A post-literate president rose through the irrational, emotive Twitter revolution, with social media simultaneously making it hard to gain any perspective, overcome any emotional trigger, or concentrate for more than a couple of minutes. I noticed this as the Dish progressed toward its 2009+ era: the perfect pace to maximize traffic was a single brief post every 20 minutes. We had no serious analytics; but you could feel the collective attention span wither and die after a few seconds as surely as that pace and frenzy turned my own brain and body into a twitchy, dopamine-addled fog. You want a perfect example of a post-literate moment? Ponder the UN speech by President Trump this week. Even written down, it was “the weave” — a series of unconnected rants and digressions, baseless assertions and unseemly insults, a stream of addled and angry consciousness with no real relationship to coherence, or reason, or persuasion. Imagine the head of a small country standing up at the UN and saying: > I’m really good at predicting things, you know?… I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. We’d all be embarrassed, no? It would go viral as a cringe clip. But since this absurd, meandering thug is the US president, we let it go. Or consider this gem: > In the United States we have, still, radicalized environmentalists, and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. “We don’t want cows anymore.” I guess they want to kill all the cows. Yeah that’s right: stop all the factories and kill all the cows. If that august body was aghast, it was because few had ever witnessed, outside a comedy movie, the head of state of a country speak like that before: no dignity, no coherence, no real argument as such, just loopy madlibs and inappropriate outbursts: “Your countries are going to hell!” The America whose values many across the world once aspired to is now, in its public posture, coarse, irrational, emotional, petty. It’s a global joke. It’s up there with a Sacha Baron Cohen performance. And then we remember a core truth of this president who so perfectly represents us, something that could not have been said about any other predecessor. Trump has never actually read an [entire book](https://theweek.com/articles/915606/trumps-lethal-aversion-reading). He rarely even reads the [daily intelligence brief](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/breaking-with-tradition-trump-skips-presidents-written-intelligence-report-for-oral-briefings/2018/02/09/b7ba569e-0c52-11e8-95a5-c396801049ef_story.html). He needs pictures and images and people to talk to him. He picks his staffers because they look the part. He darts and lunges this way and that in his policies like a distracted animal: unreasoned, impetuous, feral. We may be witnessing not just our first post-liberal president. We may be staring at our first post-literate one as well. More, no doubt, are on their way. --- ### Back On The Dishcast: Wesley Yang  Wesley is an essayist and podcaster. He’s written extensively for Tablet, Esquire, and New York Magazine, and many of his essays were compiled in a book, *The Souls of Yellow Folk*. More of his writing and podcasting can be found on his substack, “Year Zero.” He’s been chronicling the gender revolution aspect of the successor ideology on X these past few years — and he eloquently lets rip more emphatically than ever in this conversation. **Listen to the episode [here](https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/wesley-yang-on-gender-madness)**. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the violence that can spring from trans ideology, and the paralysis of Dems on trans issues. That link also takes you to listener comments on recent pod episodes and a bunch of reader debate on Jimmy Kimmel and more. --- ### The Two Guilty Men In the story of the West’s 21st Century slide into authoritarian populism, there’s an obvious question future historians will ask: could it have been prevented, assuaged, or managed better? The warning signs had been around for a decade — beginning in 2016 with Brexit and Trump’s win. It was very, very obvious a decade ago that mass migration, along with economic insecurity and wokeness, was driving the surge in anti-establishment fervor. Merkel’s 2015 decision to flood Europe with Syrian refugees is why neo-fascists are now so strong again there. So those who wanted to stop Trump and Brexit after 2015 should just have neutralized them on those issues, right, while working to improve working-class living standards? Just slow down immigration, cut wokeness, and redistribute downward while trying to boost growth. In the UK, Boris Johnson had a chance to make the Tory Party unbeatable for decades by coopting and moderating the far right this way; in the US, Joe Biden had a chance to head off populist authoritarianism, by showing how Democrats can control immigration too. But — surprise! — they both went full steam in exactly the opposite direction. Both chose — and it was a choice — to flood their own countries with unprecedented numbers of foreigners, legal and illegal, in the greatest migration wave in modern times. They were absolutely indispensable to the collapse of our political order. I present to you two graphs of migration into the US and the UK. Here’s over 30 years of immigration into the UK:  All of that was *after* Brexit. How did Boris respond [this week](https://x.com/MrHarryCole/status/1970983560468365728) when confronted with that graph? “I’m very, very proud of what we did.” (Watch the clip. Boris is utterly incapable of defending it.) Here’s the US over a smaller time period:  Biden and Boris. These two men — made perhaps the dumbest decision of any president or prime minister this century. Without Biden, no Trump 2.0. Without Boris, the Reform Party would not now be leading all the polls in the UK. You are not angry enough at what these clueless cretins did. --- ### Money Quotes For The Week “Leftists are enraged by the spectacle yesterday. They are calling us Christian nationalists. They say that we want to usher in a new era of Christian nationalism. They claim that we are more radicalized than we’ve ever been. And they’re 100 percent correct on all counts,” - [Matt Walsh](https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1970164294827246001). “If only Tylenol had given Trump a plane,” - [David Frum](https://x.com/davidfrum/status/1970243066956313039). “Look, Tom Homan has not had a trial and has never been proven guilty. So let’s all take a step back and do what he would do — send him to a secret prison in El Salvador until we can figure this out,” - [Bryan Tucker](https://www.threads.com/@btuckertime/post/DO2B0a0jXzR/look-tom-homan-has-not-had-a-trial-and-has-never-been-proven-guilty-so-lets-all-) on Homan allegedly taking a $50,000 cash bribe. “So no, we don’t care what you say about Tom Homan. We do not trust you. We only care about defeating you,” - [Megyn Kelly](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/megyn-kelly-defends-declaring-not-151645095.html), attorney, at the end of a long rant. “Just because someone has committed a crime, it doesn’t make them a criminal. That is completely different. Being a criminal is more so about your mindset,” - [Jasmine Crockett](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/crockett-argues-person-committing-crime-103025776.html), Dem congresswoman and public defender. “If the Trump Administration follows through on its F.C.C. threats, we’ll all be robbed of the joy of legacy media failure,” - [Matt Taibbi](https://www.racket.news/p/the-ultimate-reason-not-to-censor). “One of the things I am really going to enjoy about this new Trump era is it is actually, authentically going to be a time of radical free speech and anti censorship. All the former gate keepers and overlords of what can and cannot be said are finally neutered of their power,” - [Meghan McCain](https://x.com/jdcmedlock/status/1970481941834276958) on January 7. “Hiking. Will call back,” - [Gavin Newsom](https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/19/newsom-harris-hike-call-biden-race-2024/) texting back Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out of the 2024 race — and he never called back. --- ### The View From Your Window  *Washington, DC, 5.39 pm* --- ### Dissents Of The Week A reader writes: > I don’t think you correctly understand what Kimmel said. He was not saying that the killer was “in fact” MAGA. He was pointing out that MAGA immediately tried to claim that the killer was *anything other than* *one of them*. Kimmel wasn’t expressing a view either way as to the killer’s beliefs or motives; he was commenting on MAGA’s scramble to put the killer in any group other than theirs. > > So while you’re right that lots of others prematurely speculated about what group the killer belonged, Kimmel didn’t at all. He was criticizing the same thing you are: premature speculation or misguided certainty. Was it a knock on MAGA only (and not those on the left doing the same thing)? Yes. Is that worthy of criticism? Sure. But he wasn’t claiming that the killer was MAGA, and he wasn’t “lying”. Yes he was. Re-read the sentence. Its *premise* is that the killer was MAGA, hence the “desperation” of the GOP to claim he wasn’t. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there’s some ambiguity here: Kimmel could simply have said on his return that he didn’t mean that, that almost all the evidence pointed in the left direction, and his point was merely to criticize the GOP for instantly politicizing it. But he didn’t. So screw him. (One should not also under-estimate the Kimmel writing team’s possible immersion in sites like Bluesky where disinformation about the killer was rampant, or Substack’s Heather Cox Richardson, who also used the occasion to mislead.) From another dissenter: > I’m not a Kimmel fan, and I agree with your general take on the reaction to what he said. The right-wing hypocrisy is astounding and dangerous regarding free speech — after rightly criticizing the woke left’s previous attacks on it. But Kimmel’s comments regarding the MAGA reaction to Kirk’s killing were certainly not untrue. Inartfully stated perhaps — unfunny and overstated to boot. That’s Kimmel: hit or miss. After all, he’s a comedian! I don’t get how you can rhapsodize (correctly IMO) about South Park’s satire and give Kimmel grief? > > Also, with regard to context, Kimmel delivered those words after the weekend and before the Utah DA’s press conference regarding the killer’s leftist bent (still not an ironclad case, since he may well be just an over-stimulated online junkie with a trans lover). Kimmel was very clear last week about his condemnation of violence and sympathy for Kirk’s family. If you can’t see the difference between the quality of South Park and Kimmel, then, well, we’re done here. Another writes: > Good column, but I disagree in one respect: the right, especially the far right, has *always* embraced cancel culture. In fact, I would argue they invented it. Growing up in the Bible Belt, I would routinely hear about TV shows, actors, and products that were being boycotted for supposed nefariousness — most infamously the claim that Proctor and Gamble’s logo was Satanic. I knew tons of people in my parents’ generation who would not go to Jane Fonda movies because of her Hanoi shenanigans. And it continued through the ‘90s — remember Falwell blowing a gasket because he thought Tinky-Winky was gay? > > Like everything else, it’s been ramped up to 11 under Trump. Boycotts against *Hamilton*, Nike, Keurig, Gillette, Bud Light, and the NFL — cancelling Colin Kaepernick pretty effectively. And I would say they have taken it a step further. The Oscars canning Kevin Hart, while stupid, is not the same as digging up any random person and trying to wreck their life over Charlie Kirk comments. I think there’s a distinction between bemoaning and boycotting culture you dislike and actively seeking to get specific people fired for it. But, sure, the aim of cultural control through varieties of soft and hard censorship is nothing new to the right or left. It waxes and wanes. One more reader: > Andrew, didn’t you mean to write “Budapest”? Where did “Belgrade” come from? The capital of Orbán’s Hungary is Budapest. Yes, brain fart. Within a couple hours, I fixed it. Thanks for the correction. As always, please keep the dissents coming: **[email protected]**. --- ### Mental Health Break All the Portland stereotypes packed into one hippie: <iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/-7p0hrNNDgc?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen="true" width="728" height="409"></iframe> --- ### In The ‘Stacks - Trump is dialing lawfare [up to 11](https://www.wakeuptopolitics.com/p/the-white-house-office-of-justice). - When it comes to autism, Matt Yglesias [points the finger](https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-dangerous-war-on-tylenol) at diagnostic practices, not Tylenol. - Ken Klippenstein [talks](https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-ice-shooters-motive) to friends of the “anti-ICE” shooter. - Michael Tracey [calls](https://www.mtracey.net/p/charlie-kirk-christian-revival) the Kirk memorial “a tremendous display of unbridled state religion.” - Nate Silver [asks](https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-schumers-shutdown-endgame), “What is Schumer’s shutdown endgame?” - Trump [turns against](https://www.thebulwark.com/p/so-wait-trump-loves-ukraine-now) Russia, at least on Truth Social. - Europe isn’t prepared for a drone war, [argues](https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-ive-seen-the-future) Niall Ferguson - Oliver Wiseman [reviews](https://www.thefp.com/p/kamala-harris-burn-book-politics-democrats-culture) Kamala’s book: “the self-exculpation is unrelenting.” - Richard Hanania [shares](https://www.richardhanania.com/p/ten-further-thoughts-on-right-wing) “Ten Further Thoughts on Right-Wing Cancel Culture.” - A [fascinating piece](https://www.pittparents.com/p/that-could-be-my-son) on white boys made to believe they are intrinsically flawed. - Streaming platforms are [jacking up](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/subscription-prices-gone-wild) prices. - Free school lunches are [skyrocketing](https://jjmilt.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-free-school-lunches), but how “free” are they? - Why isn’t the liberal media [rallying around](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-choice) the Mississippi Miracle? - Kamala very belatedly [discovers Substack](https://kamalaharris.substack.com/). --- ### The View From Your Window Contest  Where do you think? Email your entry to **[email protected]**. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. **The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST).** The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions. See you next Friday.