NOW THEY TELL US: Wemple: James Bennet was right and his leftist critics inside and outside the NY Times were wrong. “In retrospect, the claim that black Times staffers were endangered by the op-ed seems particularly indefensible. Wemple reports he spoke to about 30 staffers and asked if any of them still believed that. None were willing to defend it on the record. Personally, I’m not invested in James Bennet’s career but I think this was a pretty clear case of arguably the most powerful newspaper in the US buckling under pressure from a woke mob using woke mob tactics to get their way. The fact that the mob won is definitely bad news.”

This was obvious all along, of course. But we’re seeing a lot of this sort or writing lately. Perhaps they’re preparing the Democrats for a post-shellacking rethinking. Or maybe a post-shellacking purge.

And I don’t really know Bennet — I met him over a decade ago when The Atlantic was trying to recruit my blog to join Andrew Sullivan, Megan McArdle, etc., and he seemed like a nice guy, but that’s all. As The Atlantic staff and I got to know each other, it seemed like a bad fit, and nothing has made me wish it had worked out otherwise. And yet, even in its current diminished state The Atlantic seems more open to different ideas than the NYT, which is very faint praise indeed.