60 Minutes announced a batch of new hires to replace a number of staffers fired by CBS network commissar Bari Weiss, with the most prominent addition being longtime conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (Washington Post, 7/28/26). 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton—brought in by Weiss from Vanity Fair—called Douthat “one of the preeminent public intellectuals in America today, a thinker of uncommon rigor and a journalist of deep empathy.”
FAIR has been chronicling Douthat for a while now. Here’s some of the outstanding examples we’ve catalogued of his “empathy” and “rigor.”
That Silly Commentariat
Ross Douthat was far from alone (Extra!, 6/16) in his confidence that “Donald Trump isn’t going to be the Republican nominee” in 2016, as he declared in the (New York Times (1/7/16). Douthat was a bit more confident than most in the accuracy of his crystal ball: “The entire commentariat is going to feel a little silly when Marco Rubio wins every Republican primary,” he predicted on Twitter (9/25/15).
Defending ‘Juan Crow’
ICE agents killing Alex Pretti (Texas Public Radio, 2/1/26).
Ross Douthat (5/2/10) criticized those who were “impugning the motives” of an Arizona immigration law that
has been denounced as a “Nazi” or “near-fascist” law, a “police state” intervention, an imitation of “apartheid,” a “Juan Crow” regime that only a bigot could possibly support.
But the Arizona law, Douthat argued, was just a response to the federal government’s failure to “regain…control of its southern border. There is a widespread pretense that this has been tried and found to be impossible, when really it’s been found difficult and left untried.” Real “control,” he suggested, would involve “enforcement measures that will inevitably be criticized as draconian: some kind of tamper-proof Social Security card, most likely, and then more physical walls along our southern border.”
As FAIR noted at the time, actually trying to purge some 11 million residents from the country would involve measures that would be draconian by any standard.
Douthat wrote that his vision of “control” would require “shared sacrifice from Americans accustomed to benefiting from cheap labor”—an acknowledgement that forcing millions of workers out of our economy would be serious hardship for those who remain.
“You can see why our leaders would rather duck the problem.” Douthat wrote. As FAIR (5/3/10) responded at the time, “Yes, you can see why politicians don’t want to destroy the lives of millions of people in order to worsen the economic condition of hundreds of millions.”
We Need More Babies—No, Not Those Babies
Ross Douthat (New York Times, 3/27/21).
Ross Douthat has long been obsessed with the so-called “baby bust” (FAIR.org, 2/7/23). The columnist (1/21/23) argued that those worried about climate change are naively missing the real threat: a “population bust” that will result in “a zero-sum struggle between a swollen retired population and the overburdened young.”
It’s highly debatable that a population bust is even an economic problem—and it’s certainly not an unsolvable one (CEPR, 1/17/23). But assuming the primacy of a population crisis allows Douthat to upsell his conservative wishlist: namely, reducing entitlements for the aging and ending abortion (New York Times, 1/21/23, 12/14/22).
The global population is actually expected to continue growing for at least another 25 to 50 years, as Douthat acknowledged when he noted that the population of Africa could triple by the end of the century. But Douthat sees Black and brown people not as solutions, but as part of the problem. If “even a fraction of this population” migrates, he warned,
the balance between successful assimilation on the one hand, and destabilization and backlash on the other, will help decide whether the age of demographic decline ends in revitalization or collapse.
His baby bust obsession is clearly grounded in xenophobia and white nationalist anxieties. In Europe, he argued (10/1/22):
The preferred centrist solution to both economic stagnation and demographic diminishment, mass immigration, has contributed to Balkanization, crime and native backlash—even in a progressive bastion like Sweden.
He was even more blunt in a column (10/20/18) headlined “Fear of a Black Continent”—subtitled “Why European elites are worrying about African babies.” In it, Douthat warned of the dangers of increasing African migration to Europe, but said that attempts to slow the African birthrate would be “cruel”—so, instead,
anyone who hopes for something other than destabilization and disaster from the Eurafrican encounter should hope for a countervailing trend, in which Europeans themselves begin to have more children.
If that sounds like eugenics, that’s because it is.
Pelosi’s World—and Ours
“Pondering what [Democratic House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and her compatriots are rejecting gives us a pretty good sense of what they’re for,” Ross Douthat (11/14/10) wrote. Part of that nightmare vision was “a world where the Social Security retirement age never budges, no matter how high average life expectancy climbs.” Douthat seemed unaware that the “retirement age” had already been rising when he wrote that for seven years; since 2003, every year-long cohort of retirees has had to wait two more months to reach what’s called “full retirement age.” These “budges” continued until 2026, with the “full” retirement age now 67 (FAIR.org, 11/15/10).
Get the Iraq War Wrong the Right Way
Matt Damon in Green Zone*.*
Offering a critique of the Iraq War drama Green Zone, Ross Douthat (3/14/10) offered a “narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told,” that ended with:
And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his grip on power.
This was based on the popular but evidence-free notion that Saddam Hussein fooled the US into thinking he still had chemical and biological weapons (Extra!, 1–2/04, 5–6/04). As FAIR (3/15/10) wrote, “Needless to say, when you’re complaining that a fictional film isn’t factual enough, you want to make sure that your facts aren’t fictional.”
(As a college student, Douthat was also wrong about the Iraq invasion in real time, writing in the Harvard Salient—2/14/02—that Saddam Hussein “is busy trying to acquire a nuclear bomb, to supplement his extensive collection of biological and chemical weaponry.”)
Repeal Roe and We’ll Stop Killing Doctors
Dr. George Tiller
Ross Douthat (6/8/09) blamed the murder of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, on Roe v. Wade: “By enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be,” he wrote:
One reason there’s so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions—Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? —is that Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything else.
Douthat offered what he presented as a compromise: “If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically,” because
arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester—as many advanced democracies already do—would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.
What would women gain from losing their bodily autonomy?
The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases—and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder.
As FAIR (6/12/09) noted, Douthat’s compromise was: Allow states to criminalize abortion, and anti-abortion fanatics will stop murdering doctors.
‘A Little More State Regulation’
KFF (4/27/26)
Ross Douthat (4/2/21) maintained that “abortion foes actually have good reason to feel unsettled and uncertain rather than triumphant” about the 6–3 majority Republicans had installed for them on the Supreme Court:
It’s extremely easy to imagine the end of Roe leading to a little more state regulation over all (mostly limitations in the second trimester, along the lines of many European countries), but then for the few states that go further to find themselves boycotted and besieged, leaving the goal of ending abortion nationwide as far away as ever.
When Douthat wrote that, ten states had trigger laws that would ban abortion the moment Roe was overturned (FAIR.org, 5/19/21). As of 2026, 17 states have near-total bans on abortion.
Homophobia Not a ‘Structural System of Oppression’
KXCD (10/8/14)
In a column urging the courts to stay out of the “difficult and personal” decision as to whether or not to discriminate against gay couples, Douthat dismissed the obvious parallel to discrimination against interracial marriage (New York Times, 4/4/15):
This isn’t a structural system of oppression, a society-wide conspiracy like Jim Crow; we’re talking about a handful of shops across the country. It seems possible, and reasonable, to live and let live.
Not a “structural system of oppression”? Same-sex sexual activity was illegal in every state until 1962, and the Supreme Court upheld such bans in 1986 as reflecting “millennia of moral teaching.” When the Supreme Court struck down the criminalization of gay sexuality in 2003, 13 states still had anti-“sodomy” laws on the books.
During the Cold War, the US government purged thousands of gay men and lesbians from the military and other government posts because, as a 1950 Senate report had it, “those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons.” Only in 2011 could gays and lesbians begin to serve openly in the armed forces.This is what FAIR (4/6/15) described as “a concerted, structural, systemic effort going back generations to marginalize and punish homosexuality”—brushed aside by Douthat as “a handful of shops across the country.”
Pope Benedict ‘Looking Good’ While Covering Up Child Abuse
Pope Benedict
Ross Douthat (4/11/10) cited the reporting of Jason Berry (National Catholic Reporter, 4/6/10), who criticized Pope John Paul II for his support of Marcial Maciel Degollado, a child molester who founded the influential Legion of Christ. But Douthat spun it as a positive story about John Paul’s successor:
Only one churchman comes out of Berry’s story looking good: Joseph Ratzinger. Berry recounts how Ratzinger lectured to a group of Legionary priests, and was subsequently handed an envelope of money “for his charitable use.” The cardinal “was tough as nails in a very cordial way,” a witness said, and turned the money down…. It was Ratzinger who re-opened the long-dormant investigation into Maciel’s conduct in 2004, just days after John Paul II had honored the Legionaries in a Vatican ceremony. It was Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict, who banished Maciel to a monastery and ordered a comprehensive inquiry into his order.
The problem with this testimonial is that Ratzinger was first informed about Maciel’s pattern of abuse in 1994. The cardinal’s reported response: Maciel’s case was a “touchy problem” due to the “benefits” he had brought to the Vatican. “One can’t put on trial such a close friend of the pope as Marcial Maciel,” Ratzinger was later quoted.
“It was Ratzinger who persuaded John Paul, in 2001, to centralize the church’s haphazard system for handling sex abuse allegations in his office,” Douthat wrote, offering this as evidence of Ratzinger’s zeal to persecute child-abusing priests. Unmentioned was the letter Ratzinger wrote in 2001 threatening to excommunicate any bishop who discussed abuse cases outside of the church’s legal system (Extra!, 7–8/08; FAIR.org, 5/13/08).
Nor did Douthat cite Ratzinger’s assertion that attention to clerical molestation amounted to a conspiracy against the Catholic Church (Zenit, 12/3/02): “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign.”
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