[NYPO] Bari Weiss resigns from New York Times, slams Twitter as being their ‘ultimate editor’

don't know whether to put this here or in the hot dog eating thread

https://althouse.blogspot.com/2020/07/because-of-his-incontinent-use-of-it.html

July 16, 2020
"Because of his incontinent use of it, the rhetorical mustard that the president slathers on every subject has lost its tang."

Writes George Will, slathering his own rhetorical mustard in his new WaPo piece, "The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come."

Yeesh. That title. It's like a parody of the columns Bari Weiss was referring to when she wrote about the NYT "publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world."

Posted by Ann Althouse at 7:11 AM ​

 

can't believe this thread slipped to the second page

https://theweek.com/articles/925427/cancel-culture-class-issue

Cancel culture is a class issue
Bonnie Kristian
July 15, 2020
Opinion writer and editor Bari Weiss is out at The New York Times. The details of her departure are unclear, but in a resignation letter addressed to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger posted on her website Tuesday, Weiss describes an untenable work environment in which coworkers complain of her "writing about the Jews again" and editors discourage heterodox opinions.

I can't say whether Weiss depicts the Times newsroom fairly. Yet one broader point I know she gets right: Cancel culture is about the professional class. Cancellation is a class behavior that, by targeting employment and career aspirations, ultimately threatens ouster from what an older generation would call "polite society."

The class dynamic appears in Tuesday's column from Weiss's now-former colleague, Ross Douthat, an incisive "10 theses about cancel culture." As he notes in the first thesis, cancellation proper "refers to an attack on someone's employment and reputation," particularly if it comes "from within your professional community." The threat here is that you will no longer be able to work in your field of choice.

The language here is revealing: "career," "professional community," "field of choice." We're talking about the professional-managerial class (PMC). This isn't the same as the middle class, which is a designation about income, wealth, and quality of life. The professional and middle classes overlap, but the PMC is more strictly white collar, consisting specifically of "college-educated professionals — especially lawyers, professors, journalists, and artists" as well as more prestigious medical workers, engineers, architects, teachers, mid- and upper-level managers, and the like. PMC members can have incomes below (e.g. a freelance writer) or above (e.g. a doctor) the middle class. Though not politically uniform — Weiss, Douthat, and I all fit the description — as a group the PMC leans progressive but not far-left; Hillary Clinton has strong PMC energy.

Psychologist John Ehrenreich and Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich, who coined the term, estimate the professional-managerial class to be about one third of the country. It is unusual among classes, observes Amber A'Lee Frost at American Affairs, in that members must "earn [their] status through educational credentialing, qualifying employment, and professional achievement."

And if class membership is earned, it can be taken away. That is why, as Douthat writes in his seventh thesis, the threat of cancel culture "is most effective against people who are still rising in their fields." It is also why, as he says in the sixth thesis, with a certain degree of wealth, professional establishment, and/or fame, "the bar for actual cancellation is quite high." Author J.K. Rowling is presently the subject of intense and sustained criticism because of her views on transgenderism. But Rowling will not be canceled for what she's said so far. She'll have no trouble getting her next book contract. She has, crudely put, "'f--k you' money" and fans to spare. For people in her elite sphere, such resilience isn't infinite. Cancellation is possible, but it requires a graver offense, perhaps even criminal allegations.

The threat of cancellation recedes at the other end of the wealth spectrum, too, among the working and lower classes. Again, cancellation is not impossible here, but you are comparatively unlikely to lose a working-class or minimum wage job via cancellation. I don't expect many McDonald's managers do social media deep dives on applicants to run the grill. Does anyone really care about their plumber's politics?

But those in the professional-managerial class can expect their name to be googled in every job application. As Douthat muses, "under the rule of the internet there's no leaving the village: Everywhere is the same place, and so is every time." Once PMC members have been canceled, it sticks. Will the woman in the Washington Post Halloween party story, a graphic designer, ever work in her chosen field again? After the video of Amy Cooper, dubbed the "Central Park Karen," went viral, Forbes published an analysis of "three things [she] did to damage her reputation and career." Will she ever find another investment job? Or what about this museum curator who resigned after being accused of "toxic white supremacist beliefs" for saying his museum would not categorically exclude white artists? Will another museum take a chance on him? These are truly open questions. Who would risk hiring these people if they can instead select an equally qualified candidate without national or industry infamy?

Justine Sacco, whose "AIDs" tweet occasioned a prototypical cancellation, was eventually hired back at the firm that fired her — but she also spent multiple years on reputation rehabilitation, including sympathetic features in a book and a TED Talk on public shaming.

Others, who are not PR executives like Sacco, may not be able to do the same. Their careers won't make a comeback. Unless they have family to support them or enough wealth to coast to the grave, they'll be pushed out of the professional class and into the type of work where the manager doesn't google you. "I don't want people like that to keep getting jobs" that let them achieve PMC membership, a teenager told the Times in defense of call-out accounts which seek to end allegedly racist peers' careers before they begin.

This is why cancel culture is so effective. This is why it frightens people in what is self-evidently not a "classless society." The threat of cancellation isn't merely intense public shame, though that too is significant. The threat is class expulsion couched within and magnified by our national mythos of self-advancement — that is, the American dream. It is a threat of being stripped, for the choice of a day or moment, of the class status you've ordered so much of your life to attain.

Cancellation is a white-collar phenomenon, and its threat is tearing away your white collar for good.

​

 

I’m not making Bari Weiss anything. I’m also not looking for your advice, but thanks for thinking of me.

 

"For left-wing purists, moderates — not conservatives — are the true enemy":

https://nypost.com/2020/07/18/for-left-wing-purists-moderates-are-the-true-enemy/

For left-wing purists, moderates — not conservatives — are the true enemy
By Kevin D. Williamson

July 18, 2020 | 9:49am

Opinion writer Bari Weiss got chased out of The New York Times for her political views — not because she’s an uncompromising conservative, but because she is a moderate.

In our team-sports era of politics as tribal warfare, we’re expected to be all-in for one side or the other. Figures such as Weiss or slightly nonconforming public figures such as author J. K. Rowling (a liberal feminist who expresses some reservations about transgender orthodoxy) or Goya CEO Robert Unanue (whose firm is being boycotted because he said something nice about Donald Trump) are a problem for the cheap moralists and fanatics because they complicate the narrative, forcing partisans to face up to the fact that not every critic of transgender ideology is a right-wing evangelical bigot from Oklahoma and that some Trump supporters are Spanish-American businessmen with deep ties to the Latino community.

We say that we cherish moderates and independents and prefer them to mindless partisans, but, in reality, we punish them. Why? When it comes to our own preferences, we prefer vehemence to moderation and loyalty to independence. We are all Barry Goldwater now, insisting that moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Weiss was employed at the Times as a politically independent and curious editor, not as a conservative commentator. You can be a pretty happy conservative in the Times’ splendid conservative ghetto — a conservative under quarantine, gently offering the conservative take of the day, wearing a sandwich board reading “Danger: conservative.”

What made Weiss indigestible to the Times wasn’t vicious right-wingery but the fact that she was not there as a member of the Times’ stable of house conservatives. Nobody is shocked to see animals at the zoo, as long as they stay in their cages.

Weiss is critical of the Right on some issues, for instance in defending the value of immigration against an increasingly xenophobic Republican Party. On matters of free speech and the hysteria of “cancel culture,” she made common cause with some conservatives. She spoke of — and to — the unspeakable: podcast host Joe Rogan, social science journalist Jesse Singal, economist Glenn Loury, and other heterodox figures. That is a problem for an institution increasingly run by fanatics who define excellence in journalism not by what is in the newspaper but by what is studiously kept out of it.

Weiss’ Times colleagues called her a Nazi, but, in their minds, she was something far worse: a collaborator. She was not the barbarian at the gate but the enemy within. The fanatic does not hate the infidel abroad nearly so much as he loathes the heretic inside the temple. East Germans in the Honecker era were not hunting far-off fascists — they were informing on their neighbors for any deviation, however slight, from the party line.

In that way, the Times reflects the social-justice warriors who now run it and other old-line institutions. Hachette, the publishing giant, has very little trouble being the publisher of conservative columnist George Will, but its junior staffers are up in arms over Rowling. (So far, Hachette is standing by Rowling, possibly because her Harry Potter books have grossed nearly $8 billion worldwide.) Bill Maher is a standard-issue Hollywood progressive, but he has all sorts of people on his HBO show (including Bari Weiss and this columnist) and is denounced by his friends for his efforts. The Left hates Bill Maher more than it hates Sean Hannity because he is a liberal on HBO rather than a right-winger at Fox News. From the fanatics’ point of view, his failure is not a failure of ideology but a failure to stay in his lane.

Maher’s deviations are, at heart, a lot like Bari Weiss’ and J. K. Rowling’s: acting in the belief that people with views slightly different from our own are not necessarily monsters, that we should say what we think irrespective of whether it comports with tribal preferences, that genuine diversity is not a simple matter of choosing one from Column R and one from Column D.

“Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery,” Weiss wrote in her resignation letter. Indeed, she would have been better off learning to do some kind of right-wing song-and-dance number. If you join a team and stick with it, then the Times and institutions like it know what to do with you.

Thinking for yourself? That’s not independence, but blasphemy.

Kevin D. Williamson is the author of the upcoming “Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the ‘Real America’” (Regnery Publishing).
​