Joel Mathis

Ben Smith's profile of Andrew Sullivan was about as respectful -- even loving -- as you can get while still rejecting Sullivan's long-and-ongoing history of just asking questions about whether some groups of people are genetically inferior or superior to each other. Sullivan opens his response thusly : Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! But the press is mercifully free and Ben Smith can write what he wants . To be fair to Ben, he’s a man with ambitions at the New York Times. After the woke coup there earlier this summer, he had no choice but to call yours truly a racist if he seeks a future at that paper. He knows what happened to James Bennet for crossing the critical race activists now in control of what was once the paper of record. And he reported a lot about my career that the far left wants to erase entirely from the record, for which I am grateful. In other words: Sullivan refuses to consider the possibility that Smith really believes Sullivan is wrong about thi

Here's what we've always known about Andrew Sullivan, blogger : He's smart, but he's also passionate, contrarian, paranoid and reckless. On his best days, that's made him an entertaining -- if sometimes annoying -- read. (And important: His work on the Bush Administration's torture policies was crucial.) On his worst days as a blogger (we'll put aside his career as an editor ) it's led him down the path of outright calumny. But I've kept reading. Why? In part because he's just about the biggest thing going in the political blogosphere. His traffic, it's well known, forms the cornerstone that keeps other very smart blogs alive at The Atlantic's website. He's a one-man industry. In recent years, he's added staff that allowed him to function as a kind of meta-blogger -- he didn't necessarily comment on every story or debate out there, but at the very least he would point you to the most important debates happening elsewhere o