New York Times writer and opinion editor Bari Weiss offered insight about the internal battle among her colleagues following the publishing of an op-ed written by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark that sparked a major backlash from its own staff.
Hours before the Times offered a mea culpa for running Cotton's piece that called for the troops to be sent in to quell the George Floyd riots, Weiss claimed that a "civil war" was brewing within the paper
"The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same," Weiss began a thread on Twitter. "The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption."
She continued, "The New Guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by @JonHaidt and @glukianoff. They call it 'safetyism,' in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech."
Weiss pointed to the controversial 2018 decision made by The New Yorker to disinvite Steve Bannon from its Ideas Festival as an "example" of the ideological battle among the left, stressing "there are dozens and dozens of examples."
"I've been mocked by many people over the past few years for writing about the campus culture wars. They told me it was a sideshow. But this was always why it mattered: The people who graduated from those campuses would rise to power inside key institutions and transform them," Weiss continued. "I'm in no way surprised by what has now exploded into public view. In a way, it's oddly comforting: I feel less alone and les... (Read more)
Tweets mentioned:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1268628682521878529
Submitted 1392 days ago
Latest News