RUTHFULLY YOURS

Andrew Sullivan calls himself a conservative, although his politics could more accurately be described as “not socialist.” Despite his lean to the left, though, Sullivan made the same discovery that the New York Times’s Bari Weiss did: Unless you embrace completely the Marxism that is now the norm in media outlets, today’s young fascists will force you out.

On Friday, Sullivan explained why he was leaving New York Magazine. According to him, the magazine’s management had been great to him. The problem was that the magazine’s other employees are so far to the left that they cannot tolerate the slightest deviation from the party line. To the extent that Sullivan periodically deviated, they put pressure on the publisher to jettison him. So it was that, when Vox media, which owns New York Magazine, had to fire 6% of its staff because of a drop in revenue, Sullivan was on the chopping block.

In his farewell article, Sullivan explained that he perpetually offended the leftist writers and editors at the magazine, an offense that they internalized as actual physical violence, that he was no longer considered a viable writer:

A critical mass of the staff and management . . . seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

Sullivan believes strongly (and I agree strongly) that the problem is academia, which gave birth to and nurtured these leftist absolutists:

In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program — and those few left are being purged. The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative. But that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine.

Sullivan points out the irony of this absolutism given that his conservativism is remarkably leftist in quality. He loathes Trump, voted for Democrats in the last four presidential elections and intends to do the same in November, supports same-sex marriage, and believes in anthropogenic climate change, just to name a few issues that see him siding more closely with leftists than with conservatives.

Although the gatekeepers are more extreme than ever before at the old media, Sullivan sees hope in the internet:

We have freedom of association in this country, and if the mainstream media want to cut ties with even moderate anti-Trump conservatives, because they won’t bend the knee to critical theory’s version of reality, that’s their prerogative. It may even win them more readers, at least temporarily. But this is less of a systemic problem than in the past, because the web has massively eroded the power of gatekeepers to suppress and control speech.

And the internet is where Sullivan intends to go now that he’s no longer drawing a paycheck from New York Magazine. In the same farewell castigating the extremism of the new left, Sullivan announced that he will be re-animating his old blog, the Dish.

Expect more media heads to roll as the young Maoists flex their muscles. Over the past couple of months, they’ve successfully removed insufficiently leftist writers and editors from the New York Times, Variety, New York Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Bon Appetit. Once the mob has tasted blood, it doesn’t stop.