Bari Weiss writes, in her resignation letter to the New York Times:
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
One Comment for “‘Illiberal’ Liberals Embrace the Woke Left”
posted by Tom Scharbach on
I think both have a point, but I’ve seen cultural excesses come and go any number of times over my lifetime, so I expect the pendulum to swing back over time, as it always seems to do.
I don’t know much about Bari Weiss. Most of my knowledge of her comes from reviews in the Jewish media — mixed reviews, I might add — of her book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism”. I’ve read a few of her commentaries in Jewish media (Andrew Sullivan once described her as an “unhinged Zionist”, and Weiss shot back that she “happily plead[s] guilty as charged.”) Otherwise I don’t think I’ve read anything she’s written.
Andrew Sullivan has been around for a long time, selling his personal brand of irascible, Brit-borncontrarian “conservatism” (Sullivan disagrees with any number of the foundational tenents of modern conservatism and was named by Forbes as one of “The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media”) to the liberal press. He’s become the darling of some in the conservative chattering class, but I don’t recall that he has published in the mainstream conservative media at all during his career, and his views don’t seem to have gained a foothold in modern conservatism. I’ve always wondered a bit why Sullivan elected to write only for the left-side media, which conservatives complain about more than they read.
In any event, I suspect — despite the fact that both have a point — that this is a tempest in a teapot, for the most part confined to the New York/Washington media bubble. Most of these people take themselves much more seriously than they should, Sullivan and Wiess included.