This is not conspiracy-adjacent, but I think that nice secular people like you and Sam are sort of blind to some obvious supernatural realities about the world. “I think that the medical establishment is wrong about Lyme disease, because I had Lyme disease. We were joined by the leftist historian Samuel Moyn, who co-teaches a class with Douthat at Yale called “The Crisis of Liberalism.” “I have a bunch of what you might call conspiracy-adjacent views,” Douthat said with a grin, after I asked him how he’d come to write the column. It’s happened because institutions and experts have so often proved themselves to be untrustworthy and incompetent as of late.”Ī few days after Douthat published the column, I met him for lunch at a dimly lit French restaurant in New Haven. If asked to debate Kennedy, he continued, “I wouldn’t speak on behalf of the vested authority of science, but on behalf of my more moderate doubts about official knowledge, a much more cautious version of the outsider thinking that he takes to unjustifiable extremes.” In Douthat’s view, the widespread distrust of science and embrace of conspiracy theories about vaccines, among other topics, “hasn’t happened because of bad actors on the internet. And I’m sorry, but that’s just a total flop.”ĭouthat is highly skilled at addressing liberal Times readers in a manner that makes clear he is not one of them, without allowing them to think that he actually holds views-about Donald Trump, say, or the importance of vaccines-that would render him beyond the pale. “Right now the main alternative theory seems to be to enforce an intellectual quarantine, policed by media fact-checking and authoritative expert statements. “If you don’t think he should be publicly debated, you need some other theory of how the curious can be persuaded away from his ideas,” Douthat wrote. Douthat argued in his New York Times column that an unwillingness to debate Kennedy-who has claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, that 5G networks are part of a mass-surveillance system, and that COVID was designed to spare Jewish and Chinese people-was an insufficient response to voters who are increasingly distrustful of the establishment.
This summer, Ross Douthat, liberal America’s favorite conservative commentator, wrote a piece about liberal America’s least favorite Democrat, Robert F.
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