Resignation Letter

They are getting low level employees fired from their jobs, though. They have a lot of power in educational institutes, media organizations and HR departments.

I'm really disappointed to read this. I am a long time subscriber and supporter of the New York Times but have noticed that their brand of news has really changed, particularly since Trump's election. It is frequently - not always, but enough to notice - ideologically biased, and more recently, we're seeing internal details leak out that confirm that the news room has indeed changed to carry a heavy cultural bias internally.

The first big example of an ideological bias that caught my eye was the NYT "1619 project", which recasts American history as being based on racism rather than principles of freedom. On the face of it, this sounds like an extremist perspective, and indeed the person behind the 1619 project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has had a history of extreme views. For instance she called white people "barbaric devils" (see https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1... for example), and amplified a conspiracy theory that fireworks were a government plan to attack black and brown communities (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/author-of-new-york-t...).

Leaving aside the dubious views of this staff writer, the 1619 project ultimately ignored its own fact checkers (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...), and despite widespread critique of its factual errors (see https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians... or https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-tells-a-false-... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project#Criticism), the NY Times editor in chief brushed off what historians have claimed are severe inaccuracies (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...).

More recently, The Tom Cotton fiasco, documented news room revolts at the Times, and this letter confirm that they are indeed no longer operating as a neutral and trustworthy source of news.

This trend of an ideological takeover by progressives/far left is happening in all major news rooms. Even the Wall Street Journal has its own activism from journalists (https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-newsrooms-face-a-recko...). Gerry Baker, the former top editor at WSJ, was forced to step down to a journalist role, and then just recently, at the behest of his peers and their union, he was forced to move from the news section to the opinion section (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/business/wall-street-jour...). Can you imagine a workplace where your peers openly denigrate your work, attack your character, and alter your career? This is discrimination, even if it is legal.

Unfortunately the far left cohort has turned into an enemy of the freedom of thought and inquiry. We saw it happen at tech companies with the James Damore incident, with repeated walkouts/protests since then, with censorship on Twitter, with demonetization on YouTube, and so on. We have seen it in college campuses over the last decade, with the most recent example being the absolutely unjust forced resignation of Steven Hsu (https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the-campai...). And we're seeing it in the ongoing campaign to pressure Facebook to censor certain views or lines of inquiry.

All of this is bad for society. The fundamental principles of free speech (going beyond legal requirements) must be defended, neutrality must be upheld in the workplace, and institutions that fail to uphold these values should be outed and abandoned by customers. This includes the NY Times.

I'm not actually a listener, I might watch a clip from a guest I'm interested in once in a great while. But I've never listened to an entire episode. I don't like the lack of structure in his interviews, and I don't have 2-4 hours to listen to unstructured rambling, with the occasional useful tangent.

I think you mistook my comment as saying "Joe Rogan podcast is great and everyone should listen." I was only saying that it is a source of "opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere," and that he has obtained a remarkable amount of working class listeners.

There is a bit of signals and signifiers conundrum here. That said, her points are still valid even though she is not the perfect victim of mob mentality group think orthodoxy.

> Fourth, when I hear people complain about "going against the progressive party line" or whatever, I generally hear people wanting to be some flavor of racist, sexist, transphobic, or just asshole-ish without consequence.

I hear this all the time, but it seems so disingenuous. There are so many national examples that no reasonable person could consider to be any of the above:

* A hispanic man was fired for accidentally making the "ok" symbol

* A data scientist was canned for citing a prominent black academic's research about the efficacy of nonviolent protest

* A journalist was forced to issue an apology for interviewing a black man who was happy about BLM but wished there was more attention on issues of violence in his community

Frothing racists indeed.

In light of cases like this, I don't know how anyone can think that cancel culture is just "punching up" or "criticizing people" or "going for people who want to use hate speech".