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Aug 06, 2018

Clusterfuck Nation
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Surely last week this foundering nation finally reached Peak Social Justice Warrior Bullshit with The New York Times hiring of genocide-for-white-people advocate Sarah Jeong, 30, as an op-ed writer on tech matters. Apparently, one angle of the tech world Sarah Jeong overlooked was the mile-wide Twitter trail of messages she left over the past ten years declaring that white people should be “canceled out,” “made to live underground like groveling goblins,” or this pungent one from the Reinhard Heydrich playbook: “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”

When this big glob of shit hit the Internet fan, The Times’s HR department cranked out the pathetically lame explanation that Ms. Jeong was merely “mirroring” or “counter-trolling” malicious tweets she had received over the years, “imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.” That left the old newspaper and its readers gratified for a day or too… until a whole new bale of Sarah Jeong tweets was discovered dissing The New York Times and virtually all of its other op-ed writers in the most opprobrious terms.

She wrote: “After a bad day, some people come home and kick the furniture. I get on the Internet and make fun of The New York Times.” “I don’t feel safe in a country that is led by someone who takes Thomas Friedman seriously.” “Hannah Rosin shatters ceiling by proving women writers can be as hackish as Tom Friedman, too.” “[David] Brooks is an absolute nitwit tho.” “Notajoke: I’m being forced to read Nicholas Kristof. This is the worst.” “if I had a bajillion dollars, I’d buy the New York Times, just for the pleasure of firing Tom Friedman….”

So far, The Times hasn’t even deigned to respond to this sticky discovery. Good luck with your new colleagues, Sarah! And enjoy your new desk next to the furnace in the second sub-basement of 620 Eighth Avenue! Also notajoke: my own assessment of The New York Times op-ed writers is probably more unfavorable than Ms. Jeong’s, but I haven’t been applying for any jobs there.

This is what comes of sending a young person to Berkeley and Harvard these days, where they are given super-extra brownie points for dumping on white people, and men especially. The insane diktats of the faculty get funneled from the ivory tower straight into the “Newspaper of Record,” and so it is on the record now that nobody can trust The New York Times to analyze world and national affairs in good faith, in particular on matters of race and gender. The paper’s old motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” has changed to “Anything Goes and Nothing Matters.”

President Trump was in error when he stated recently that “the media is [are] the enemy of the people.” Not quite so. They are the enemy of the truth, and their handling of the Sarah Jeong fiasco proves it. In the spirit of the day, the story will probably disappear from the American hive-mind after this week, because that’s how we roll now in a country where the Grand Inquisitors are not held responsible for their turpitudes.

But if the Jeong affair does represent Peak SJW BS, the hubris of The Times in this embarrassing decision may presage its extinction. It will be interesting to see what the company’s next move will be. For the moment, it looks like they have no next move, except to pretend that the Sarah Jeong episode doesn’t matter.

The news situation in the USA is pretty dire. The Internet has killed off the old print media, sure enough, but it has also killed off the principles of institutional authority in reporting the events of our time — which is to say, the grounds to believe what you read and see. It’s especially bad at the local level where every small-town newspaper has been driven into the ground and we learn almost nothing about what is going on in the places where we live, where daily doings actually affect our lives most.

Correction: In the initial publication, I misspelled Ms. Jeong’s name as Leong. Corrected.

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