How Cis White Gay Ben Appel Beat His Social Justice Activism Habit

Ben Appel was a nontraditional student at Columbia from 2017 to 2020. He watched the wokening of the campus. Ben is a gay man who found himself on the wrong end of the new oppression hierarchy and had to unlearn his prior political assumptions. He appears on the Informed Dissent podcast with Lisa Selin Davis, Eliza Mondegreen, Cori Cohn, and Jamie Reed. Ben is a writer and guest editor for Queer Majority. He also has a new memoir, Cis White Gay, coming out later this year.

We discussed self-acceptance and sobriety, the role of transgenderism in the progressive omnicause, and his review of the film Conclave. We talked about the Trevor Project, GLAAD, and how they violate their own best advice by hyping suicide risk. Ben’s X account is here. His Substack is linked below.