ANDREW SULLIVAN: See You Next Friday: A Farewell Letter.
Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program — and those few left are being purged. The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative. But that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine. And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.
It seems to me that if this conservatism is so foul that many of my peers are embarrassed to be working at the same magazine, then I have no idea what version of conservatism could ever be tolerated. And that’s fine. We have freedom of association in this country, and if the mainstream media want to cut ties with even moderate anti-Trump conservatives, because they won’t bend the knee to critical theory’s version of reality, that’s their prerogative. It may even win them more readers, at least temporarily. But this is less of a systemic problem than in the past, because the web has massively eroded the power of gatekeepers to suppress and control speech. I was among the first to recognize this potential for individual freedom of speech, and helped pioneer individual online media, specifically blogging, 20 years ago.
And this is where I’m now headed.
Apparently even faux-conservatives like Andrew (who endorsed John Kerry in 2004 as “the right man – and the conservative choice – for a difficult and perilous time,” in addition to the aforementioned Obama and Biden) are no longer welcome in the monolithic DNC-MSM. Sullivan goes on to write that “the Weekly Dish, which launches now, is where I’ve landed. The Weekly Dish will be hosted by Substack, a fantastic company that hosts an increasingly impressive number of individual free thinkers, like Jesse Singal and Matt Taibbi. There is a growing federation of independent thinkers and writers not subject to mainstream media’s increasingly narrow range of acceptable thought.” Sullivan also notes that he’s “long tried to figure out a way to have this kind of lively community without endangering my health and sanity.”
Sincere good luck on both efforts. As Jim Treacher tweeted last month:
Sullivan’s 2008 stint at the Atlantic caused serious damage to that magazine’s reputation, cemented by the hiring and then immediate shameful firing of Kevin Williamson by editor Jeffrey Goldberg in 2018. The cause of which was a sneak preview of the New York Times’ meltdown last month caused by its crybully young staffers, culminating in the ouster of Bari Weiss. The purges of the MSM have been a clarifying moment for all to see, as ideological purity and “safetyism” have driven out the last vestiges of political diversity.