CANCEL CULTURE CLAIMS ANOTHER SCALP: Bari Weiss Is Leaving the New York Times.
A controversial figure inside and outside the paper, Weiss leaves in the wake of what she recently described as a civil war at the Times between “(mostly young) wokes” and “(mostly 40+) liberals.” That war reached its apex when Opinion head James Bennet, who had been widely tipped as a potential replacement for top Times editor Dean Baquet, left the paper after publishing an op-ed in which Senator Tom Cotton called for the use of the military force against protestors.
In a 2018, review of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind, Quillette contributor Matthew Lesh asked, “Is Safetyism Destroying a Generation?”
Yes, and they’re now collecting plenty of scalps along the way, including those who aren’t true believers. This is what Weiss observed during the Times’ meltdown over Cotton’s op-ed:
Flash-forward to today; here’s her resignation letter. Exit quote: “But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else. Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”
As former newspaper man Rod Dreher writes, “Every now and then, a young person will ask me what advice I have for someone who is thinking about becoming a journalist. My advice: don’t do it. If you are an honest person — whether you’re liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between — you are going to live in constant fear of inadvertently causing a job-ending offense. You will end up a nervous wreck, or you will end up as a conformist drone, or you will end up jobless.”
Or all three.
All is happening in accordance with the prophecy:
