Andrew Sullivan: I was fed up with being 'woke-checked'
Author and commentator Andrew Sullivan discusses the Afghanistan withdrawal, 'woke' journalism and his new book with Brian Kilmeade.
Author Andrew Sullivan tore into the "woke" trend in America that appears to have most people walking on eggshells, having experienced firsthand what it's like to be censored.
"Well, look, when I wrote a piece last summer, saying I really found the destruction and rioting and looting happening in New York and other major cities – I wanted to write a piece about it, and I was told that I could not use the word ‘riot’ because that was offensive," Sullivan, editor of the newsletter The Weekly Dish and author of the new book, "Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989-2021," told Brian Kilmeade on Fox News Radio.
"And at that point I'm just – after a year of being woke-checked, basically being told – every sentence being torn apart – I just decided I have to go and write for my heart again and actually get out there and tell the truth as I see it. I'm not interested in caving to woke Puritans. I've had a long career, and I'm not going to be shut up or coerced at this point in it."
Sullivan stepped down from New York magazine in July 2020, revealing how some staff believed his columns were "physically harming" them. In January, he called out the New York Times for referring to Black Lives Matter riots with the tamer description, "isolated instances of property destruction."
"Last summer was just 'isolated instances of property destruction.' That's how the NYT describes $1 - 2 billion of damage this summer in a news story - the biggest in US history," Sullivan wrote.
Sullivan told Kilmeade that as an immigrant, he is especially dismayed by Americans' increasingly "apocalyptic frame of mind" and hatred of their own country.
"I came here because I love this place, and I love the freedom," Sullivan explained. "I love the individuality. Here we have to fight threats from the left to turn us all into these racial groupings or section groupings that divide us from one another."
"And I'm tired of hearing people who [have] really begun to take this country for granted," he continued. "There are people trying to get into this country. Why would they be doing that if this is a disgusting, White supremacy-still country? It's just not true. And sometimes it takes immigrants to say this is not true. Stop running down your own country."
Sullivan argued that some people have become "obsessed" with America's past, again singling out the New York Times for its 1619 Project, which is based on the idea America's true founding was in 1619, the year the first African slave ships arrived.
"I think that some people have become obsessed with the past," Sullivan said. "I mean, you look at The New York Times trying to redefine America as founded in 1619 because America is understood to be a Slavocracy."
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Sullivan's sentiments are shared by Somali-Dutch scholar and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In a recent interview with Fox News, Ali said that "woke" initiatives like critical race theory are teaching children to "hate one another." As for wokeness in general, she called it "the worst philosophy" she'd ever encountered.
"It divides us into people of different races, and it says that these racial differences are irreconcilable and then divides along gender, along transgender, along immigrants … It sees no reconciliation, no coming together, unless the people that they describe as eternal victims – Black people, people of color, women, transgender people --unless they unite to destroy and dismantle our existing institutions," she said. "It's a very nihilistic, zero-sum game. It's the worst philosophy I've ever come across."
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