A firm grasp
Bari Weiss has written a pompous self-admiring letter to the New York Times explaining why she is awesome and the Times is pathetic so she quits so there.
I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home.
Wait a second. Why would the Times want to bring in first-time writers? Why would it be a bad thing that first-time writers would not otherwise appear in the paper? Why isn’t it just obvious that first-time writers don’t just get to appear in the Times as a matter of right, or quotas, or filling a gap? The Times is top of the ladder, and beginners don’t usually get to the top of the ladder just by asking. You kind of have to climb it.
The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.
Did it? Did it really mean that? Let’s not forget that Trump only just squeaked through, and that he lost the popular vote by 3 million, and that Comey had more to do with the squeaking through than anything about “the country” – i.e. the populist rage BW wants us to think of when she talks of “a firm grasp.”
The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.
Listen, Thomas Friedman has been there for decades. What more do you want?
The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.
On that one I genuinely don’t understand her point. She appears to be saying the US has not ever had or been one of “the worst caste systems in human history”…but why? The caste system we had was appalling. It didn’t include Auschwitz, that’s certainly true, but on the other hand it lasted a lot longer than 12 years.
So anyway, she’s left the Times, and bets are being placed on what her new gig is.
Ok, reasonable minds can argue over whether or not “conservatives” do not regularly appear in the Times pages, but “centrists”? Are you fucking kidding me?
It’s not a matter of Weiss writing stuff I disagree with. She’s just a lousy writer. A cheap, one-note hack, whose arguments are not “challenging” or “thought-provoking.”
Of course she will now make a gazillion dollars doing the Intellectual Dark Podcast or some such shit.
I’m either not familiar with Bari Weiss or just don’t recognize the name, but I read the letter and, aside from these quibbles, thought she made a fair case. She complains about “ unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge,” and gives specific examples. Her more general point — that the liberal media is becoming increasingly “righteous,” one-sided, and eager to condemn — is one the gender-critical can relate to.
She may indeed be a hack with lousy arguments and shallow insight, but I don’t think this resignation letter, just on its own, makes that case.
No, by itself it probably doesn’t, but if you’ve been following her career path you know that the thing about her is the same as the thing about Bret Stephens: they’re just not very good. Lazy is the word that’s featuring heavily in Twitter commentary right now. It’s simply not clear why they get columnist slots when they’re so meh.
I think the letter fits that pattern. It’s not that it’s a mess, it’s that it’s predictable, familiar, dull. I’m sure there’s plenty of truth in it but on the other hand Orwell she ain’t.
Here’s a couple of points, off the top of my head:
1) She first became famous as an undergraduate for trying to get her professor(s) fired for their views on Palestine. Without ever apologizing for or backing down on that position or even acknowledging the hypocrisy, she has proceeded to become a loud critic of “cancel culture.”
2) During the recent arguments at the NYT over the publication of the Tom Cotton op-ed piece, she (a) publicly criticized her colleagues, many of whom work on the news side of the news/opinion divide and are forbidden by NYT rules from criticizing other staffers — in other words, she took public shots at co-workers who she knew couldn’t fight back; and (b) she constantly reported on the content of internal Times discussions in a way that others disputed as inaccurate, without ever producing the Slack transcripts that would resolve the dispute.
Basically, she’s a hypocrite and a phony who cries about cancel culture but accuses any critic of being anti-Semitic.
While there may be some truth in her claim that the Times is so distant from where real people live, I would say that the people she defends, the people she promotes, are the same. The people in my midwestern town do not have a single f–king clue about how cab drivers live, how all the mass of humanity in big city centers of poverty live, how people who are not them live. And they don’t give a flying f–k about how these people live, because they dismiss them as relevant. They are not “real people” to many of my neighbors (or to Bari Weiss, I imagine). There are a lot of ways that “real people” live, and a lot of ways to view how “real people” live, and this agrarian dream of white male supremacy is in conflict with the vast bulk of the country.
She doesn’t care how “real people” live. Republicans use “real people” as an excuse for cutting their own taxes and slashing services…all of the services going to “real people” I might add.
So, yeah, I imagine the NYT writers don’t really “get” the ordinary daily lives of the average person. But they are probably closer than the people who think the only “real people” are the nationalists that populate the center of the nation (and make up a minority of the population, which got to elect a president against the will of the majority).
I have a colleague who went on at length about not wanting to live under the people the coastal elite would vote into power (thus justifying the snatching of the election by the stupid system we put in place). It never occurred to him that there is literally not one reason why the majority of the country should have to live under the people he personally would like in power. White male entitlement writ large (and I feel very entitled to describe it as such; I have had a number of conversations with this colleague, and he is equally dismissive of BLM and MeToo, and has made it clear he believes women’s brains to be less rational than men’s. He hasn’t touched on the black brain yet, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time)..
I hope you don’t feel you have to exercise caution around the word “fucking” as an intensfier. It’s not as if I do, after all.
I occasionally like to use the Roman “fvck”, myself.
But, since this is a Bari Weiss pile-on … Here’s her getting flustered on Joe Rogan’s podcast because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s a writer who writes professionally as a profession—who isn’t really sure what “toady” means, despite saying that someone is a toady. Not the sharpest tool in the shed, that one.
(Choose your own adventure: The raw clip. Tim Black breaking it down. Jimmy Dore mocking her.)
No, I don’t really feel that way; it’s just…sort of a joke with myself because of the way they censor plays at my school (a college) where we aren’t even allowed the little minor words. (They did let me use Darn).
David Brooks, Bill Kristol,Thomas Friedman, Ross Douthat – just off the top of my head.
To a large extent the New York Times’ editorial page has long been a who’s who of “very serious people”, AKA the same centrist “very serious people” whose propagandising helped land America in Iraq. To say that centrist writers wouldn’t see the New York Times as their home, would imply that they’d never heard of it.
But the big thing that struck me here was this:
This is one of those things that pisses me off with centrist pundits. In one breath they will proclaim that we should be able to deal with nuance. Defending somebody’s right to say something, for example, is not defending what they’re saying.
A big part of this is what the whole “Intellectual dark web” schtick is trying to claim its about: The ability to have nuanced discussions which are supposedly verboten under “cancel culture” because the people having the discussion aren’t allowed to broach uncomfortable territory.
Apart from the awful name, I could get behind that if it wasn’t a lie.
So look at Weiss’ first example – the Soviet space program is lauded for its diversity. The Soviet space program achieved a lot of firsts in the space race, America was first to the moon in part because on just about every other milestone the Soviets got there first.
Now I don’t know how diverse the Soviet program really was, but her issue isn’t one of fact, it is one of praising the Soviets for something.
When did it become a bad thing to recognise that bad governments are in fact capable of doing some things right? Isn’t that part of the same nuance that the centrists claim to stand for?
You know what else the Soviets did? Opposed Apartheid. Are we supposed to pretend that’s a bad thing because the Soviets did it? Long before America did?
Isn’t this the precise sort of uncomfortable territory that Weiss’ “Intellectual dark web” is supposed to be able to explore? Isn’t this the exact sort of thing she’s made a brand out of championing? Or at least, wants us to think she’s made a brand out of championing?
And then you look at the rest of it, and I can’t help but think the first example demonstrates the problem that gives rise to the others. If you cannot acknowledge the Soviets getting something right, then can you see the humanity in a pack of teenagers wearing MAGA hats?
If you can’t see the nuance in communist history, are you going to be able to see the nuance in American history?
And much as I would disagree that America’s caste system is up there with Nazi Germany’s, how does what she’s saying gel with an opposition to “cancel culture” and “safe spaces”?
Maybe I’m looking at this weird, but I can’t help but think there is something very snaky going on with a centrism that finds race realism more acceptable than discussing the successes of the Soviet space program.
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