“[A week after] I was asked to leave New York Magazine, they ran an 8,000-word piece I’d written, about plagues through history, so it wasn’t about the quality of my work. It was about their desire — not the editors, again, but other people — their desire to simply say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with this person, that he’s morally awful.’

“And you know, America is weird like this. There is a part of American history — Americans have tended to enforce orthodoxy through civil society, not through government. So this is the country that gave us the Salem witch trials, the country that gave us the Hollywood Blacklist, the country that gave us the Scarlett Letter, the country that gave us McCarthyism, and [now] the country that’s given us wokeness.

“These are attempts to enforce morality upon people in every part of their life…the language they use, the mannerisms they have, the places they work. This is the puritanical strain within American history, which is not equivalent in many other countries…this moralizing attempt to persuade and coerce to save your fellow citizens.

“If America were as bad as bad as the establishment left now believes, why would all these people want to come here? 86% of our immigration is non-white. What [form of] white supremacy invites 86% of its immigrants to be non-white? It’s completely bonkers.” — Andrew Sullivan speaking this morning to Megyn Kelly on her podcast.

The good stuff starts around 8:15.