I have admired Andrew Sullivan for many years, ever since the 1990s. I encountered him when he was the editor of The New Republic. An excellent and probing writer, Sullivan’s thoughts cross-cut traditional political trenches. His voice is challenging yet inviting. Even where I disagree with him, I always find Sullivan to be thoughtful and good-hearted.

In the current issue of New York Magazine, Sullivan has announced that he is leaving in order to write for his own publication, The Weekly Dish, a re-ignition of Sullivan’s earlier publication, The Daily Dish. It’s not that Sullivan has outgrown New York Magazine. Based on Sullivan’s good-bye column, the literary breadth of NYMag has shrunk significant to accommodate the loud and incessant demands of critical theory.  Sullivan is leaving because his thoughts no longer fit inside of an increasingly small Overton Window. He is returning to an environment where he is free to spread his “conservative” wings.  Here is an excerpt from Sullivan’s final column at NYMag: 

A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program — and those few left are being purged. The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative. But that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine. And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.  It seems to me that if this conservatism is so foul that many of my peers are embarrassed to be working at the same magazine, then I have no idea what version of conservatism could ever be tolerated.

If you’d like to follow Andrew Sullivan going forward, you can sign up here, at Substack.  His new business model is simpler. People who want to support him do so with direct contributions and he writes freely.  This provides him some cancel-culture insurance, much like many other current writers who write through their own publications, such as Jesse Singal and Matt Taibbi.  This is also the business model of podcasters such as Sam Harris (who is subscription-based with an exception for anyone who is struggling financially). These intellectuals want to make certain that their thought processes are not crimped by connections between their work product and the largess of advertisers.

It appears that this is becoming the go-to approach for those who seek a free and vigorous exchange of ideas while making a living at it. It’s good to see other writers who have figured out how to fund their writing through direct contributions from readers to maintain their intellectual independence.

I’m not at that point yet. Perhaps I’ll never be.  I fund my own writings through my earnings as an attorney,  My plan is to do more of the same, keeping Dangerous Intersection ad-free in the process.