HARPER’S VS. VOX – AND THE BONFIRE OF THE LIBERAL VALUES:
The Vox writer Matthew Yglesias got it worst of all. He was rash enough to sign the letter and promptly faced a volley of angry replies from his junior colleagues on the very discrete and private medium of, yes, Twitter. The amusingly named Emily VanderDerWerff, a trans woman ‘critic’ at Vox, went furthest fastest. She penned a hilariously obnoxious letter to her editors, which she then generously excerpted on social media.
‘I don’t want Matt to be reprimanded or fired or even asked to submit an apology,’ she wrote. ‘Doing any of the above would only solidify, in his own mind, the idea that he is being martyred for his beliefs.’
As someone who is sometimes a woman*, Cockburn would like to take their hat off to VanderDerWerff for her absolute masterclass in passive aggression. She should be promoted, perhaps given Yglesias’s job, if only to solidfy, in her own mind, what Vox stands for. VanderDerWerff continued to insist that she really didn’t want Matt to be punished. ‘Some acts require retribution; this is not one of them.’ Such compassion for the man she just threw under the social media outrage bus!
Other Vox staffers piled in against Yglesias. Cockburn can’t help but wonder if Vox shouldn’t rename itself Censura, or Restrictio, since censorship is what most of its staff seem most interested in doing. Where would you rather work – Harper’s, which published the letter, or Vox, which abhors it?
Related: “A signatory of the Harper’s open letter repudiated it. Both of that signatory’s sisters then claimed on Twitter that her name had been added without her consent. Harper’s provides email from signatory: ‘Yes, I will add my signature. It reads well.’”
More: “Which leads to the last reason why this letter is so messed up: It’s signatories don’t seem to have a clue what time it is. They don’t understand that the terrain has shifted beneath their feet. The Left has just scored dozens of wins, including taking down James Bennet at the Times and taking out Woodrow Wilson at Princeton. There’s blood in the water and no one on the Left is stupid enough to give in to these little liberal bribes now. Liberals only have two choices: Either they’ll submit to the neo-Marxists or they’ll try to put together a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives.”