Dear Ms. Pluckrose—

I remember Andrew Sullivan...

I remember Andrew Sullivan back in 2001...

I remember him writing: "The fact that Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of 'compassionate conservatism' shows how uphill the struggle is.... A certain amount of B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state.... I just hope the smoke doesn't clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again..."

Thus when I see you put the words "Andrew Sullivan" and "good faith" together in the same sentence, the words that come to my mind are "easily confused".

And then I run into your: "‘queer’ refers to a set of political and philosophical beliefs about sex, gender and sexuality which holds that having categories for these is an oppressive social construct which should be disrupted as a form of progressive political activism..."

And I think: some people I run across do use 'queer' that way; others do not and use 'queer' to simply mean "not 100% heterosexual"; to refer to someone as 'queer' is to sometimes attribute a political identity to them, but more often, in my experience at least, is not.

Dollars will get you doughnuts that Mamdani means it in the latter way, that Sullivan knows that Mamdani does so, but thinks that by claiming Mamdani is celebrating those who demonize gay men and lesbians he can put one over on you.

And it worked, didn't it?

I do know that a willingness to presume good faith is one of the glories of liberalism. And that one should be proud that people can easily grift one in this way—that it is a lot better than the alternative.

But, please, may I ask you not to be so be gullible when Andrew Sullivan or others of his ilk try to pick your pocket again in this way? And may I comment to you a piece by my friend John Holbo, "Vavilovian Philosophical Mimicry" <crookedtimber.org/2019/…>?

I do get a lot from your writings. I hope you and yours are well, or, rather, as well as one can be in a world in which while one may well be, personally, quite comfortable, we live in a world in which no man is an island.

Yours, J. Bradford DeLong

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