Are liberals not irritated by Ross Douthat?

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I'm reading this New Yorker profile and thinking I'm from another planet. He frequently drives me nuts. Maybe even more so than Brooks, as we know what we're getting from Brooks.

Maybe as a Catholic I react so strongly to his ultra-conservative views on Catholism to the detriment of everything else he has to say?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/18/ross-douthats-theories-of-persuasion

This summer, Ross Douthat, liberal America’s favorite conservative commentator, wrote a piece about liberal America’s least favorite Democrat, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 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. “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. “Right now the main alternative theory seems to be to enforce an intellectual quarantine, policed by media fact-checking and authoritative expert statements. And I’m sorry, but that’s just a total flop.”