Latest news with #Douthat
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Andor' showrunner denies hit 'Star Wars' show is a 'left-wing' political story
"Andor" series showrunner Tony Gilroy said Thursday he does not believe his "Star Wars" series is "left-wing." In an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on his podcast "Interesting Times," Gilroy denied that he wrote the show to represent a left-wing revolution against fascist authoritarians. "I never think about it that way. It was never- I mean, I never do. I don't," Gilroy declared in response to Douthat asking if he agreed the show is a "left-wing work of art." 'Star Wars' Actor John Boyega Says Series Was 'So White' In New Documentary The second season of the critically acclaimed series debuted on Disney+ in April. It follows the adventures of Cassian Andor, a key player in the rebellion against the Galactic Empire. He was a main character in the hit 2016 movie "Rogue One." The show, which lasted two seasons, provides a dark and realistic depiction about how individuals ban together to resist a creeping authoritarian government that uses deception, censorship and violence to cement its own power. Read On The Fox News App In the interview, Douthat said he believes Gilroy's depiction of the rebellion against the empire in the series is distinctly left-wing. While introducing his guest, he said, "The 'Star Wars' serial 'Andor' has somehow managed to pull off originality within the constraints of a familiar franchise, pleasing obsessive fans and critics alike. Part of its originality is that it has an explicitly political and, to my mind, left-wing perspective on its world, without feeling at all like tedious propaganda." Bill Maher Rips Left's 'Exclusionary Attitude' As 'Hamilton' Cancels Shows At Trump-backed Kennedy Center Gilroy admitted the work was political in that it was inspired by his fascination with revolutions in world history. "The canvas that was being offered was just a wildly abundant opportunity to use all of the nonfiction and all the history and all the amateur reading that I'd done over the past 40 years and all the things I was fascinated by, all the revolution stuff that not only I would never have a chance to do again, but I really wondered if anybody else would ever have a chance to do again," he said. Elsewhere, he told Douthat that he was particularly inspired by dictatorships throughout history, like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's regime. "I want to pay as much attention to the authoritarian side of this, the people who've cast their lot with the empire, who get burned by it all," he said. However, the showrunner denied he meant to portray the empire as a right-wing authoritarian government being undone by left-wing freedom fighters. Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture "But it's a story, but it's a political story about revolutionary ––" the conservative columnist protested. Gilroy interjected, "Do you identify with the Empire? Do you identify with the Empire?" "No, I don't," Douthat said. "But I don't think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism. I see the Empire as you just described it: It's presented as a fascist institution that doesn't have any sort of communist pretense to solidarity or anything like that. It's fascist and authoritarian, and you're meditating on what revolutionary politics looks like in the shadow of all that."Original article source: 'Andor' showrunner denies hit 'Star Wars' show is a 'left-wing' political story
Fox News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Fox News
'Andor' showrunner denies hit 'Star Wars' show is a 'left-wing' political story
"Andor" series showrunner Tony Gilroy said Thursday he does not believe his "Star Wars" series is "left-wing." In an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on his podcast "Interesting Times," Gilroy denied that he wrote the show to represent a left-wing revolution against fascist authoritarians. "I never think about it that way. It was never- I mean, I never do. I don't," Gilroy declared in response to Douthat asking if he agreed the show is a "left-wing work of art." The second season of the critically acclaimed series debuted on Disney+ in April. It follows the adventures of Cassian Andor, a key player in the rebellion against the Galactic Empire. He was a main character in the hit 2016 movie "Rogue One." The show, which lasted two seasons, provides a dark and realistic depiction about how individuals ban together to resist a creeping authoritarian government that uses deception, censorship and violence to cement its own power. In the interview, Douthat said he believes Gilroy's depiction of the rebellion against the empire in the series is distinctly left-wing. While introducing his guest, he said, "The 'Star Wars' serial 'Andor' has somehow managed to pull off originality within the constraints of a familiar franchise, pleasing obsessive fans and critics alike. Part of its originality is that it has an explicitly political and, to my mind, left-wing perspective on its world, without feeling at all like tedious propaganda." Gilroy admitted the work was political in that it was inspired by his fascination with revolutions in world history. "The canvas that was being offered was just a wildly abundant opportunity to use all of the nonfiction and all the history and all the amateur reading that I'd done over the past 40 years and all the things I was fascinated by, all the revolution stuff that not only I would never have a chance to do again, but I really wondered if anybody else would ever have a chance to do again," he said. Elsewhere, he told Douthat that he was particularly inspired by dictatorships throughout history, like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's regime. "I want to pay as much attention to the authoritarian side of this, the people who've cast their lot with the empire, who get burned by it all," he said. However, the showrunner denied he meant to portray the empire as a right-wing authoritarian government being undone by left-wing freedom fighters. "But it's a story, but it's a political story about revolutionary ––" the conservative columnist protested. Gilroy interjected, "Do you identify with the Empire? Do you identify with the Empire?" "No, I don't," Douthat said. "But I don't think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism. I see the Empire as you just described it: It's presented as a fascist institution that doesn't have any sort of communist pretense to solidarity or anything like that. It's fascist and authoritarian, and you're meditating on what revolutionary politics looks like in the shadow of all that."
New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Ross Douthat: 'In the intelligentsia, it's Catholicism or nothing'
Photo by Adam Pape On a balmy day in New Haven, Connecticut, a few hundred metres from Yale University, over chicken salad and raspberry iced tea, the most famous conservative columnist in the world was urging me to believe in ghosts. 'Do you know people who think they've really seen ghosts?' Ross Douthat, who writes for the New York Times, asked. I know someone who thinks they have seen a ghost, yes. 'Of course, because ghosts are real.' Ever since David Hume wrote those who believed in ghosts were indulging their imagination, the spiritual world has been in retreat. Hell morphed from a place where Satan planned sorties to tempt us away from faith, into a place where God was simply absent. Stories of crying statues of the Virgin Mary or cyclones sent by God to punish us for homosexuality became taboo. Tom Wolfe's 1996 piece on the wonders of neuroscience was headlined 'Sorry, but your soul just died'. Yet Douthat believes encounters with the supernatural are a reason to believe in God. His new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is an appeal to sceptics to look to the heavens. It ticks off what you'd expect from a Christian-accented defence of theism: various theodicies, the historical case for Jesus of Nazareth. Less usually, ghosts, spirits, UFOs and visions of angels during near-death experiences haunt the pages. '[Spirits] may appear as trickster gods in one context, as elves or fairies in another,' Douthat writes, 'and in our times, perhaps, as extraterrestrials captaining mysterious UFOs.' Douthat is the leading Catholic voice in the American media. A Trump critic who railed against the liberal reforms of Pope Francis, he is in many ways the liberal's conservative – an independent thinker, who takes issues on their own terms, without deference to the party line. Douthat rebuffed my hour-long defence of materialism: that souls, demons and djinn do not exist and, more uncertainly, that matter explains the subjective experience we label 'consciousness'. He pointed to the vast number of reported encounters with the up-high as proof that they must be true, and that something exists beyond what we can touch. What of artificial intelligence? Wouldn't a man-made machine that resembled a human mind suggest consciousness was material? 'I don't think trying to build a computer that can answer lots of questions is inherently an offence against God. I don't think there's anything anti-Christian about wanting to build a spaceship to explore a planet next door. God might not let us do it,' Douthat said. But 'trying to upload your mind to the cloud and live forever in the cloud is anti-Christian'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'I'm very conscious of the dangers, but the human story has to proceed to the next act, and maybe the next act is some great disaster that will culminate in a Frank Herbert's Dune-style Butlerian jihad, where we have to overthrow the machines,' he said, pushing his salad around with a fork. 'I'm totally open to that possibility. But I don't think you can foreclose it in advance and say, sorry, we're just going to stop here.' The question of whether AI is a Cartesian automaton or is, in fact, truly conscious does not unnerve Douthat. He thinks any simulacrum of consciousness shown by an AI is probably just that – a simulacrum. And even if machines acquired souls, Catholicism is comfortable with non-humans having them. '[AI engineers] are in the position of doing a bit of magic, right? Summoning, conjuring,' he said. Douthat's belief in a spiritual realm fits with his faith. But it is also rooted in his childhood. In another part of New Haven in the 1980s, a young Douthat watched his mother, a writer, drag secular friends to healing services where they would have apparent religious experiences. She wrote that something 'came into me with a roar, and clamped onto me… as if I were alone with God, or His Spirit'. Douthat was immune to such ecstasy, but found a home for his mysticism in Catholicism. What explains Maga's Catholic tinge? JD Vance converted in 2019 and his politics is drawn in stark religious lines. Kevin Roberts, the executive of the Heritage Foundation, which authored the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump's second term, is also Catholic. 'It's the last strong institutional form of Christianity that still seems to take its own claims seriously, and has the kind of intellectual heft and firepower that people educated at places like Harvard and Yale or Oxford and Cambridge want. If you're going to be a Christian in the intelligentsia, it feels like Catholicism or nothing.' Douthat offered me a lift to the station in his minivan – a 'pronatalist automobile', he joked, as I put my bags between the various car seats; he has five children. I asked him whether he regrets the Enlightenment. 'I regret the Reformation,' he replied, before caveating that he could never regret any part of God's plan. In Douthat's telling, the US was a Protestant nation before it was a liberal one. Some militant Catholics believe in integralism, the idea that their loyalty should be to the Vatican over Washington. But Douthat thinks no number of Catholics in the government could ever overwhelm America's innate individualism, pointing to the revolt against restrictions during the pandemic. 'This is America. Even the right-wing Catholics are, in some sense, functionally Protestant,' he said. 'It's easier for me to imagine America ceasing to be liberal [and] having a dictator than it is for me [to imagine] Americans submit[ting] to the Pope,' he said. 'It would still be a dictator who preached a kind of individualism, personal agency – it would be an Emersonian dictator.' Like Vance, Douthat thinks liberalism is responsible for society's decadence. But doesn't Trump's battering of constitutional rights demand a liberal revival? Even then, Douthat thinks liberalism lacks a metaphysics, an explanation for the universe which would breathe meaning into concepts such as free speech. As I left the natalist-mobile, a Confucian saying came to mind about not pondering the afterlife when we don't even understand this one. But for America's premier conservative columnist – who sees Trump as a force of history, an unstoppable wave we are destined to watch crash – religion precedes politics. Douthat noted that I was his first materialist interviewer, putting this down to my Britishness. Indeed, if a British conservative columnist – Peter Hitchens, say – defended self-proclaimed UFO abductees, they would be lampooned. But conspiracy theories, the occult, angels and demons increasingly bedevil American public life. Trump's followers worship him with mystical reverence; the president himself has ascribed surviving an assassin's bullet to the hand of God. In another interview for his book, Douthat compared the president to the Babylonians sent by God to punish the sinful Israelites. He said something similar to me: 'Trump is an expression of discontent with a stagnant and decadent order whose resilience and ability to avoid defeat by the forces of the establishment has, I think, already yielded a world-historical shift into a new era.' Throughout our conversation, Ross Douthat's sanguine tone never wavered. He parried niggling questions by pointing to God's providence. He is resigned to what unfolds and has lost faith in the power of the public intellectual – however famous – to dam the flow of history. But he is also grappling with his hope that Trump's chaos awakens America from its decadent slumber. For Douthat, that does not make Trump good. But it might make him necessary. [See also: One hundred days of autocracy] Related
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
New York Times to Bow Podcast About Trump Administration's ‘Ideas and Personalities,' the ‘New World Order' and More Hosted by Opinion Columnist Ross Douthat
The New York Times announced 'Interesting Times With Ross Douthat,' a forthcoming podcast hosted by opinion columnist Ross Douthat. The show will 'explore a future that feels more open and uncertain than ever, mapping both the New Right and the new world order,' according to the paper. More from Variety ABC News to Launch Sean 'Diddy' Combs Podcast That Will Run Through His Federal Trial 'RHONY' Star Brynn Whitfield to Launch Video Podcast Dishing About Money, Sex, Relationships and 'Everything in Between' Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Sets Debut of New Podcast Featuring Her 'Candid Conversations' With Other Women Entrepreneurs On the podcast, Douthat will interview 'leading thinkers and newsmakers.' His show will explore 'the potency of right-wing populism, examine the realignment of the parties and forecast the big shifts in technology and culture to make sense of where society is headed.' Topics will include 'the ideas and personalities defining the Trump presidency' as well as the effects of AI on jobs and relationships and religious shifts in American society. 'Interesting Times With Ross Douthat' is slated to premiere April 10, with new episodes dropping weekly on Thursdays, available on all major podcast platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. 'I think there's remarkable variation right now in possible futures for humanity,' Douthat said in a statement provided by the Times. 'You have populism in power. You have a multipolar world, with trade wars and arms races. You have an entire frontier industry, the AI business, filled with people who hope they're building utopia and fear they're hastening an apocalypse. You have big, internet-driven shifts in sex and relationships and family, as well as religious and political beliefs. You have a leap toward Mars, a renewed fascination with the paranormal, a crisis for liberalism.' Douthat joined the Times as an opinion columnist in April 2009. He is the author of several books, including 'The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery' and most recently 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.' Douthat's new podcast joins the New York Times Opinion's lineup of other shows, including 'The Ezra Klein Show' and 'The Opinions.' The newspaper's most popular podcast is 'The Daily,' hosted by Michael Barbaro and Sabrina Tavernise. Listen to the trailer for 'Interesting Times With Ross Douthat': Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week What's Coming to Disney+ in April 2025 The Best Celebrity Memoirs to Read This Year: From Chelsea Handler to Anthony Hopkins
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Wrong Way to Convert a Nonbeliever
I'm a hard target for Ross Douthat's evangelism. When I got a copy of his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I felt an impulse to answer, Nope: Why You Should Leave Everyone Alone. I come from a family of atheists and am a lifelong nonbeliever. At difficult times I've tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We're alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I've come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else. Douthat came to religion through his parents' New England Protestantism, which took a turn during his childhood from the mainline to the charismatic. His own systematic thinking and interest in the workings of worldly power led him to become a conservative Catholic. When The New York Times hired him as a columnist, he asked me for advice, which in itself showed his open-mindedness. I suggested that, as a precocious Harvard-educated blogger for this magazine, he should make sure now and then to get out of the world of precocious bloggers and talk with people unlike him—to report on the rest of the country. Douthat didn't follow my advice, and he was probably right not to. His own mind, nourished by innate curiosity and wide reading, has become the most interesting site in the landscape of Times opinion. I read him, with admiration and annoyance, religiously. But Believe suffers from the limitations of Douthat's brilliance. He has absorbed a good deal of recent literature on cosmology, physics, neuroscience, and supernaturalism, and he devotes most of the book to arguing that scientific knowledge makes the existence of God more rather than less likely. Douthat is speaking to the well-educated contemporary reader who requires a rational case for religion, and among his key words are reasonable, sensible, and empirical. Belief, in Believe, isn't a leap of faith marked by paradox, contradiction, or wild surmise; it's a matter of mastering the research and figuring the odds. If brain chemistry hasn't located the exact site of consciousness, that doesn't suggest the extent of what human beings know—it's evidence for the existence of the soul. Douthat guides the reader through the science toward God with a gentle but insistent intellectualism that leaves this nonbeliever wanting less reason and more inspiration. I can't follow him into his Middle Earth kingdom of angels, demons, and elves just because a book he's read shows that a universe in which life is possible has a one in 10-to-the-120th-power chance of being random. We don't fall in love because someone has made a plausible case for being great together. Some mysteries neither reason nor religion can explain. [Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?] The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat's, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you've guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat's book. 'What account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along?' he demands—and then goes on to portray nonbelievers as shallow, mentally lazy, and status-obsessed, too concerned with sounding clever at a dinner party to see the obvious Truth: That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design? That you defaulted to unbelief because that seemed like the price of being intellectually serious or culturally respectable? That you were too busy to be curious, too consumed with things you knew to be passing to cast a prayer up to whatever eternity awaits? This move—a dubious assumption that imputes unflattering qualities to the opposition and stacks the deck in Douthat's favor—is familiar from some of his columns, and it brings Believe closer to his political journalism. Throughout the book Douthat the divine has a reflexive habit of belittling nonbelief in the same way that Douthat the columnist disparages liberalism. He repeatedly sneers at 'Official Knowledge,' the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: 'It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.' But even in Douthat's own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we're given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife. Believe appears at a moment when nonbelief seems to be running out of gas. Douthat's purpose is to hasten the process. 'Already the time of the new atheism is passing,' he writes; 'already mystery and magic and enchantment seem to be rushing back into the world.' He has been predicting this for some time, and he is almost certainly right. Large numbers of people throughout the West feel that liberal society and the bureaucratic state are failing—not just to provide practical benefits but to offer meaning and community. Secular liberalism is not the same as atheism, but disillusionment with the former seems to be driving modern people into a new period of anti-rationalism and mysticism, with a growing distrust of established science, a leveling off of the percentage of nonbelieving Americans, and a trend toward public figures making high-profile conversions—to Christianity, in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the atheist refugee from repressive Islam; to Catholicism, in the case of J. D. Vance and others. Christopher Hitchens is dead and UFO sightings are on the rise. [Read: Evangelicals made a bad trade] President Donald Trump himself, whose first 78 years were nearly unmarked by signs of faith, has sworn a newfound religiosity since his near assassination. God saved him to make America great again, he has said several times, so 'let's bring religion back.' Days before Believe was published, Trump announced the creation of a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias, as well as a White House Faith Office, led by Paula White-Cain, Trump's religious adviser, who has said that opposing him means opposing God. (This kind of theocratic edict has turned a generation of young Iranians against religion.) The president's more ardent followers regard him as a kind of mythic figure, above history and politics, leading by spiritual power that connects him directly to the people. By this light, faith is inseparable from authoritarianism. Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat's evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be 'a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,' and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn't gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a 'man of destiny,' it isn't easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones. Douthat wants you to abandon secular liberalism and become a believer at a moment when democracy is under assault from a phalanx of right-wing ideas, some of them religious. That is not a reason to believe or not to believe, for belief needs no reason. But it should make you pause and think before following Douthat on the path to his promised land. Article originally published at The Atlantic
