Journalist or Heretic? | Bari Weiss | EP 175

[Music] Hello everyone! I'm pleased today to have as my guest Barry Weiss, who I haven't seen since she interviewed me for the Aspen Ideas Fair, and that was, I think, three years ago—a long time. Barry is a journalist and the author of "How to Fight Anti-Semitism," which won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award. From 2017 to 2020, Weiss was an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times. Before that, she was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. She's the winner of the inaugural Paul Mark Award in recognition of her moral courage and the winner of the Reason Foundation's 2018 Bastiat Prize, which honors writing that best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence. That's a lovely combination. In 2019, Vanity Fair called Weiss the Times' star opinion writer. Despite that, Barry now writes on Substack. Follow her work at barryweiss.substack.com.

Thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me today, Barry.

It's a pleasure to have you here.

It's a pleasure to see you, Jordan. I've been exceptionally curious about exactly what happened with you since I was out of sync with the entire world for a good long time, but I did know that you left The New York Times to start on your own, to start as an independent journalist on Substack. That's quite the turn of events, I'd say, especially given that Vanity Fair called you the Times' star opinion writer. That feels like 100 years ago.

Yeah, it's not so long ago, though, is it? But many things have happened in the interim. So should we start with something easy, like just exactly what the hell happened at The New York Times?

Sure, okay, sure. Well, I guess I should start with what drove me to come to The New York Times in the first place. I came to The New York Times following the—well, it was shocking in the context of The New York Times—the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election. There was a brief period of soul-searching that happened after Trump won, I would say, inside The New York Times, but inside the legacy media in general. There was a sense of, "Wow! You know, our job is to hold up a mirror to the country as it is, and we've sort of failed our readers. You know, we haven't exposed them, let's say, to views or to the zeitgeist outside of places like, you know, the Upper West Side and Berkeley." So in a way, I was an intellectual diversity hire, along with Bret Stephens. I had been at The Wall Street Journal editorial page for years—in two different stints. And as viewers may or may not know, the Wall Street Journal editorial page is conservative; its motto is "free people, free markets." And I was always the squish in the context of the Journal's editorial page. I was always like, on the leftmost flank.

So you were a diversity hire at The Wall Street Journal as well?

I've always just been on a fringe in one place or another. I think it’s weird to be fringe and in the center. Well, not weird—I feel like that's increasingly where anyone who's in the center is these days. You're politically homeless, and you're sort of forced to choose between one side or another. It's maybe unique in so far as, you know, the kind of jobs that I had, but I know an increasing number of people who feel that way. They feel politically homeless, who feel like they have to sort of contort themselves to fit into one of these two tribes is growing by the second. In that sense, I don't think my experience was that unique.

So anyway, I get to The New York Times, and I want to be clear: I didn't go into The New York Times naive. You know, I read the paper for years. I saw, you know, what's obviously its liberal bias, but I felt fundamentally like the paper was still trying to adhere to what it claims to be all about in its mission statement. You know, pursuing the truth even when it's hard, you know—the famous ad that The Times has—"the truth is hard." It’s all over tote bags! Striving for that tells you how hard it is.

Right, right, exactly. Striving for objectivity, even though we know none of us are objective. You know, telling people the truth even when it's inconvenient. So, right, still nested inside this idea that journalists, for example, could represent a viewpoint that was actually objectively true rather than expressing—inevitably expressing—their association with an arbitrary power structure. I mean, it was still an enlightenment idea as far as you were concerned that reigned at The Times, right?

And specifically on the editorial page. You know, I was an op-ed editor, so, you know, what the public saw that I did was write columns, but the majority of what my job was was to commission and edit op-eds from people who wouldn't otherwise think of The New York Times as their natural political home. So that meant conservatives, god forbid. It meant libertarians. It meant heterodox thinkers, it meant high schoolers and first-time writers and dissidents, you know, across the Arab world, which is a subject I'm particularly passionate about. So my job was specifically to expose our readers to views that would not otherwise naturally appear on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

Okay, and that was an explicit condition of your hiring. Everyone knew that that was to become my job description.

Okay, so you weren't a fifth column, or if you were, it was something that everybody had agreed upon.

Yeah, the goal was for me to bring in pieces that would otherwise make maybe my even my desk mates uncomfortable.

So why did they pick you, do you think? And why did The Wall Street Journal pick you to begin with? Those are very difficult positions to attain. How old were you when you started with The Wall Street Journal?

So I started at The Wall Street Journal. I had a fellowship there the summer that I graduated from Columbia University. The way that I got to The Wall Street Journal is very serendipitous. I, you know, was very much, I would say, center-left liberal when I was a student in college, but I was very passionate on the subject of Israel and fighting anti-Semitism—which is the book that I ended up writing. I sort of had been writing that book for a very long time, and I would frequently host debates on campus with the socialist group or the sort of anti-Zionist group. And there was an older gentleman that would come to some of my events, and one day, you know, he definitely was not an undergraduate. One day he came up to me and said, "You know, my name is Charles Stevens. You need to meet my son Bret Stevens. He works at The Wall Street Journal, and they have this amazing summer internship." I had never really heard of Bret; I had never heard of The Wall Street Journal, but that was how I ended up getting there. It started with a summer internship called the Bartley Fellowship. That's still in existence today. And like anything, you know, I worked really hard and worked my way up into a job. That internship became my first job.

What did you study at Columbia?

I studied history. I wanted to be a Middle East studies major but found that what was happening in classrooms was not conducive to exploration.

Okay, so I wanted to—I want to do a little divergence here. So I want to tell you a story. I spoke with Yeonmi Park about three weeks ago, and she wrote "In Order to Live." Now she wrote "In Order to Live" well, because she had a horrendous life. That's one reason. Even though one of the things she told me while I interviewed her was that she'd met people whose lives were so much worse than hers that she felt blessed, which was quite the bloody catastrophe of a statement, I'll tell you. And anyways, her book ends in 2015. So I asked her what she had been doing since 2015, and she went to Columbia to take a humanities degree.

I talked to her about this recently too.

Oh, okay. No, but go ahead.

Well, she told me, yeah. Well, she said—I mean, I thought that was quite remarkable. You had this young woman who was raised under the most horrifying totalitarian conditions—well, not the most because that's a deep hellhole—but bad enough. And then was a slave in China along with her mother, and then, you know, managed to get to South Korea and then did all her pre-university education basically in one year, virtually hospitalized herself with effort. And during that time, she read "Animal Farm" by George Orwell, and that sort of motivated her to write. But—and then she went to university in South Korea, which is no joke; it's a very competitive place. And then she went to Columbia to take a humanities degree, which, in her words, was part of her father's wish that she become educated. And so she went to this stellar institution in the center of what's arguably the greatest city on earth to pursue the sort of enlightenment—to pursue the spark that had been lit in her by Orwell, let's say, and by her introduction to freedom. And I said, "Well, how was it at Columbia?" And she said, "It was a complete waste of time and money." And like she's a reasonable person; she's not actually prone to statements like that. It quite surprised me. And I said, "Surely that can't be the case. I mean, you know, that's a damning global statement. You must have had one professor, one course that spoke to you." And she said, "Well, there was a human biology course where I studied evolution, but even it got politically correct by the end, and I felt that I was never able to say anything I actually thought." And I pushed her, and she was adamant. It was a catastrophe going to Columbia and that she felt—I hope I'm not exaggerating this, but I do believe that this is what she was attempting to put forward—she didn't feel any freer in her speech and actions at Columbia than she did in bloody North Korea. And I wasn't dancing with glee hearing that, you know, noting that my prognostications about political correctness and universities had manifested themselves. It's terribly shocking to me and terribly saddening that that's actually the case. And I've interviewed some older people recently—like they'd be my age—who look back on their humanities education with nothing but nostalgia and the fondest of memories for the professors that opened up their lives and started them on their careers—great journalists in Canada and businessmen as well, Jacob Vilenkin as well, who took an English literature degree and was illuminated by it. What was it like for you at Columbia?

You know, Jordan, it was a mix. On the one hand, Columbia has—and who knows how much longer this will be around—but it has what's called the core curriculum. It's basically a study of the classics. Freshman year, you read classical literature; sophomore year, you study classical philosophy. Those classes, for me, were exactly what you described—that spark that you and Yeonmi felt when she read George Orwell. I absolutely…

Why were they that for you?

Well, first of all, I had never read those books before. I knew who Plato was, vaguely knew who Socrates was, you know, knew—go down the line—you know, had heard who Virginia Woolf was. All of these books were soul-expanding. And it happened to be that I got extremely lucky, especially in that second-year course that I described—the philosophy course—to have a teacher who was genuinely committed to, I think, what education is supposed to be about at its best.

And what is it supposed to be about, as far as you're concerned?

What did it do for you?

Teaching me how to think and think critically and read a text and allow it—I mean, at the deepest moments, have it transform me rather than what I encountered, for example, in the Middle East studies department, which was like more like hearing a preacher. I mean, it was more just propaganda.

What do you think the difference is between propaganda and education? I mean, especially I'm asking you this because the claim—one of the claims that is splitting our culture down the middle is that there is nothing but propaganda, essentially. And you just think the propaganda on your side is the truth because it serves your purposes to believe that. So it's very, very important to make a distinction between propaganda and education. Now, you had two different kinds of classes, as far as you're concerned. One of them you describe as opening yourself up and the other you describe as being preached at. Okay, so what—what's the difference there? Why didn't I just describe the difference?

Well, I—not so much on the preaching side. What were you being compelled to think in the Middle East?

Okay, first of all, you're making the case that you were compelled to think in one set of classes. What were you compelled to think?

Well, let me give you an example. The course that I was thinking about in my mind as I just described this was a course called, you know, Topics in Middle East Studies. So it's the entire region of the Middle East for going back thousands of years in a sort of general 101 course. It was part of a requirement if you wanted to continue on in the major. And that course basically—you—here's what you had to accept: that the soul sort of source of maladies in what I think we all can agree is a very complicated and blood-soaked region of the world are all the result of essentially European or American colonialism. That everything goes back to that core idea; and that even things like, let's say, in India, you know, widow burning could be connected to colonialism. Even things like honor killing could be connected to colonialism. Everything had to do with this sort of one lens with which you could understand an extremely complicated thing. And then the second part—and this, again, like I think oftentimes this is the case. If you know something about one particular topic, like let's say a lot about it, and you don't know a lot about Saudi Arabia or Iran or any of the other places you're studying, but you know a lot about this one place, and for me that was Israel, and you hear that what you're being taught about it is so out of line with reality, then you start being skeptical about everything else the person is saying. And that was very much the case with me. That, you know, first of all, Israel is one of, you know, dozens of countries in the Middle East, but it was obsessed on in the course. And the one text we were asked to read about this complicated, very interesting place—the history that goes back thousands of years, which is the cradle of Western civilization—was a book by a guy called Maxime Rodinson, I recommend people look it up, called "Israel: A Zionist Colonial Settler State?" Suffice it to say the question mark was superfluous. And everything was just sort of driving toward, I felt, the political view of the professor that was teaching the course. Whereas, you know, in contrast, the philosophy course that I was describing to you, or even I'm thinking about an intellectual history class that I took, I didn't really know what my professor thought, and we were always obsessed with, like, what did they really think. And that made it—it just felt like they were trying to, as much as possible, remove their own views to teach texts and ideas to us in the most capacious way possible.

Now it turns out with the intellectual history course, you know that professor is now on Twitter, and I see what he thinks. And it's very much, you know—not my view of the world—but I really admire the fact that I didn't know that when I took his class and that I was able to sort of come to my own positions without feeling like if I wasn't parroting what he said that I would somehow be punished, whether it was, you know, in the grade that I received or in the seminar section part of the lecture course. So to me, that's a really important decision.

Okay, so there's a couple of things there that I think might be worth highlighting or that strike me as worth highlighting anyways. I wrote a chapter in my last book, which is "Beyond Order," called "Abandon Ideology," and one of the propositions that makes up the argument in that chapter is that you have to be aware of unifactorial explanations for complex phenomena. Is that if you look at anything—perhaps you might look at the wage gap say between men and women, the purported wage gap—well, the probability that there's one exact reason that that occurs. Well first of all, you have to ask the question to begin with: is the gap real? There's a measurement issue there. And so you can take that apart because you don't have to accept the proposition that the phenomena even exists to begin with. That happens in psychology all the time where people will use a term in common parlance but not necessarily be able to translate that into some, like, objective reality. Like, for example, we experience an emotion—the emotion of shame—but it isn't obvious that there's a shame system neurobiologically. Maybe it's the interaction of a variety of neurobiological systems, whereas for anxiety there looks like there's a neurobiological system and for play there's a neurobiological system. And so there's not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between a word and the objective world. So you can always question that. But then when you look at a complicated phenomena, the probability that there's multiple reasons for its existence—or even if there isn't that there's multiple theories about the single thing that's the cause of its existence—that's a necessary part of sophisticated thinking. And so maybe one thing for people to be aware of is that a totalizing viewpoint that all of this plethora of complexity is a consequence of this one thing. And that's the hallmark—that's one of the hallmarks—perhaps one of the hallmarks of propaganda when it's not utilizing just outright deceit.

And then I think there's something that you pointed to more implicitly which is that maybe it's also necessary to cast an extraordinarily skeptical eye on totalizing theories that identify a convenient enemy. And a convenient enemy would be someone that you're clearly not because it's—and—and so I've become very leery of conversations, for example, where people rely on the word "they." And I don't mean that as a gender-neutral pronoun. I mean when you talk about "they" that are at fault when they're doing the things they're doing, you think, "Well, it's kind of convenient that that doesn't include you," because a lot of the really complex problems that we face are all our problems and all our doing, in some sense—in some broad sense—or at least all our responsibility. So there's the totalizing element. There's the—over, and it's so psychologically rewarding also to do in some sense to develop a totalizing theory that means that you have an explanation for absolutely everything because with minimal cognitive effort, you have a map of the entire world. And it means you have a community. I mean, I don't think we can overstate how comforting it is to feel like you're part of a tribe and that you're aligned against those people over there.

Yeah, well, the first part of that might be beneficial and positive, but the second part, which tends to go along with it, is the danger of that communal drive. You know, there is evidence, for example, that people who are high in empathy are much harsher in their out-group evaluations than people who are low in empathy because, you know, we think of empathy as an untrammeled good. Well, it unites people, and it unites them with love. Essentially, it's biologically speaking, it's a manifestation of the affiliative circuit that bonds mother and child. And that's elaborated up into pair bonding for adult humans, but then it extends out to those who are your kin. That all sounds lovely and positive, but you know, you don't want to get between a mother grizzly and her cubs. So there's that side of it.

So now the prop—the distinction between the propaganda, let's say, and a real exploration, a real class, a real education, I think hinges on something like exploration. So let’s think about these podcasts as an example. I mean, I find a podcast discussion particularly useful when the two people who are involved in the discussion are exploring at the fringes of their knowledge and trying to further what they already know instead of trying to hammer home a point to convince the person they're talking to or themselves or the listener. And in my classes, you know, when they were going well, I stepped through a variety of psychological theories in my personality class. Right? So it started with Freud and Jung and Adler and Rogers and all the great clinicians, and I would put forward their case as strongly as possible and then trying to explore what they meant. But that wasn't my viewpoint. It was an attempt to explore. And then I could pull the students along with it. And that seems to be much different than, "Here's the problem, here's the perpetrators." It's a—soul. And you experienced like there was a phenomenological experience that you had that made you contrast those two approaches.

Yeah, and it was also—I mean, this connects it back to your initial question, which is, "What the hell happened at The New York Times?" In a way, that answer to that begins in college because that was the first time that I started to encounter what has been called critical social justice or critical race theory or wokeness or what Rodriguez called soft totalitarianism or really cultural and moral relativism, to put it more simply. I remember very, very clearly getting into an argument with another friend, also identified as a feminist, and she was justifying female genital mutilation to me because that's other people's culture, and we need to respect it. I'm being crude, but that was the basic argument. And I remember thinking, "What the hell? How can you possibly call yourself a feminist and believe in defending the rights of women and believe that women should be safe and have equality of opportunity to men and also believe that female genital mutilation can be justified in any universe?" And so it was the first time, and it was very uncomfortable, but in a way, I'm grateful for it because the ideas that I started to encounter, both in classes and also socially at school, those are the ideas that have now swallowed the culture and have swallowed the institutions that are meant to uphold the liberal order.

Okay, and now let's talk about that for a minute because why are you so convinced that that's true? Like, I mean, it’s true that they swallowed everything.

Yes, exactly. Exactly right because this is a major question. So our culture is facing this extreme division or that's what it appears, and but the question is— is it as serious as it might appear to be, or is that a consequence of the information sources that you're availing yourself of? And of course, this exactly the same thing applies to me. I mean, I saw this coming as far as I'm concerned, you know, well, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, but more particularly five years ago. And you know, that's got me in all sorts of trouble, but it seems to me to be something real and something dangerous, and I'm trying to put my finger on exactly what it is and to warn people about it. But it's not like I don't have my doubts about, you know, whether this is just my conspiratorial idiosyncrasy making itself known in the world.

And so I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think the question is whether or not the optimists are right, and this thing is a moral panic and it will burn itself out just like, you know, panic around satanic, you know, child molesters burned them that burned out in the 1980s in this country and maybe in Canada too, I'm not sure.

Yes, definitely. Well, we always do things a little less extreme, but we follow along in your wake, right? So the question is like, are those people right? You know, will wokeness—I hate that word, but I don’t know what else to call it—will it recede on its own, like a fever that burns itself out, or will it only sort of, let’s say lose the battle over the culture and over sense-making and over the elite institutions in America and more broadly in the West if it meets another force that pushes against it? I don't see it receding on its own, and the more I look inside, you know, certainly the press— I have the front-row seat to witness that and we can talk about it. Let's talk about it.

But education, science, the big tech, the HR departments of major corporations in this country, like it's touching everything. And well, I got a notification from my university department today. They developed a contract for undergraduates who are going to work in labs, which seems to me to be completely unnecessary anyways because that was something that was always handled by individual professors. But most of it's just, you know, care of data and the sorts of things that you might expect that might be made explicit if you were going to work in a lab. But of course, two-thirds of the way in, there's a huge statement about all the groups that you're not allowed to be prejudiced against in your conduct and so on and so forth. And so it’s just another example of how these ideas—these, let’s call them anti-racist ideas for the time being, are—there's an insistence that they manifest themselves everywhere. And you might say, "Well, you know, who isn't anti-racist?" And so why object to that? And my sense is that, well, they don't come—they're not part—they're not—they don't stand on their own; they're part of an entire system of ideas. That's the thing that has always bothered me is that there's a whole system of ideas here.

And the—and I mean, maybe it's best exemplified in critical race theory. That's sort of its most extreme experience. I also really don't believe in seeding the language, like in saying, "Yeah, just call it anti-racism," because I'm not seeding that language to an ideology that is insisting on re-segregating the culture.

Why not seed the language?

Because it’s a war of language. It's a war of language. I mean, to—if you're going to call what's essentially neo-racism and neo-segregation "anti-racism," like, I'm not going to go along with the lie of that. I'm just not. I am going to insist on a version of anti-racism that is rooted in our common humanity and is actually about eradicating racism, not on obsessing on the social construct of race and reifying it and making us pitted in a kind of like zero-sum war against each other based on our immutable characteristics. I'm sorry, I'm not doing that.

I'm not doing that either.

Yeah, well then the question is right, where do you draw the line? I mean, I didn't want to use identity politics language in reference to personal pronouns in Canada, and that's pretty much done in my career as a researcher and probably as a clinical psychologist as well. So it's not a trivial battle to undertake. And people, of course, asked, "Well, why did you pick that particular hill to die on?" Because weren't protections that were already built into the law for other groups merely extended to another deserving group? But what I saw was a terrible misuse of language at a very fundamental level, so part of it was an issue of compelled speech. I have to use the terminology that you demand, and you claim that it's only about your emotional well-being and your identity, but for me, it's part and parcel of a complete ideology.

And then there's also the smuggling in of a particular view of identity that I don't believe has any credence whatsoever, because your identity is by no means only who you feel that you are. Your identity is a complex game that you negotiate with others, and what it is exactly is very difficult to elucidate because it's central to the nature of human existence what your identity is. But it's certainly not the simplistic group signifier that can be that you conveniently hang your hat on, especially when you want to exercise arbitrary power over other people without them noticing that that's what you're doing. So I don't want to seed the language either.

And part of the discussion we can have today is just about exactly what the language implies. We could talk about systemic racism for a minute or two, if you don't mind, and then we'll get back to the Wall Street Journal story and sort of move biographically.

Yeah, yeah, well, so I've been thinking about the phrase "systemic racism," and it's a very interesting phrase because it's sort of "systemic racism," "systemic racism," and you can't hear "racism." Well, it's important. It's important.

You can't hear racism?

Well, as soon as you hear racism, there's a moral issue—a major moral issue at stake. And the proposition, essentially, is if I come up to you and say, "This is racist," I instantly put you in a position where if you disagree with anything that I'm saying, you have to defend yourself morally to the basis of your soul because it's such a terrible thing. Arbitrary prejudice is such a terrible, devastating thing, and virtually everyone recognizes that. And so there's a club that comes along with the use of the phrase right away, and the club is, "Well, I'm on the right side of history here with my claim about opposing this terrible Satanic, ethnocentric viewpoint." And then I can say systemically. And so I've been thinking about systemic now. "Systemic" means pervasive; it means everywhere; that's what "systemic" means. It has its connotations and its explicit meaning. But it means that it's the central tendency of the system, let's say, and that's just wrong. The central tendency of functional Western social institutions is not racism. The central tendency is something like cooperative endeavor towards productive ends, and the aberration is deception and power and racism, but the central tendency isn't that.

Now, and this is the crucial issue here because "systemic" means central tendency, and if you accept "systemic," not only do you accept that the central tendency is racist, let's say, and exclusionary, and that also means in support of the privilege of certain groups because that's part and parcel of the entire argument. But you also accept the proposition that the motivations that drive people to success in the systemically racist system also have to be power and systemic racism, hence the use of tests like the implicit association test. So not only are the institutions systemically racist, but the psychological motivations of those who are striving to move forward within the systems are all of a sudden now tyrannical power and systemic racism. And all that's packed into that word "systemic," and it's just snuck in there because racism is so loud and so vicious and so horrible that you're not allowed to object to anything that manifests itself within its vicinity. It's unbelievably—what would you call it?

Well, it's propagandistic, is probably the right word, but it just blows people out of the water because they're hit with this racist issue. And that just rattles them up so badly ethically that they can't stand forward and make a reasonable argument.

Well, there's a ton there, Jordan. I guess I would say that I think there is a way to acknowledge that, for example, this country had, you know, in the way that, let's say, Black Americans were deprived of building generational wealth because they were deprived of loans. They weren't allowed to buy homes or, you know, redlining or Jim Crow, or we could go all the way back to 1619 or slavery. I mean, oh, we could go back a lot farther than that, but meaning it is true that there were systems in America that were—I don't know what other word to say it—systemically racist.

Well, you could say there were systems in America that were racist without saying they're systemic.

Well, and that's the point.

There's no doubt whatsoever that arbitrary prejudice is a blight upon mankind and that it manifests itself everywhere. But it's not just arbitrary! Right? If you look just at one discrete example like the drug war, the disparity between the punishment in the 1980s between being caught with crack and being caught with cocaine, I don't know what else to call that, you know, but I call it racist.

Sure, but that's not just—whatever the word adjective you used before was just before.

Well, we should argue about this a lot because it's the core point, so it's a good idea to do this. So there are definitely systematic manifestations of racism. They incalcate themselves, let's say, into the legal system, and some of them are more explicit and some of them are more implicit. But that's not the issue. The issue or that's—yes, that's not the issue when you're talking about systemic racism because the—there's a tangle of claims in that term.

And so please do argue with me.

Okay, so I think that we need to be able to acknowledge, I think, as you just did, what I just said and acknowledge and also see that the way that that phrase is being weaponized right now is basically as an argument to tear down liberalism, America, and the West.

Okay, okay so now, okay so now we're starting to unpack that. So we're so looking at the issue of racism first. Okay, so people are radically ethnocentric, and that's a human universal.

Now, we have a tendency to trade with groups of people who aren't us, and we will investigate them and explore them. But we're also not so much terrified of them because it's not exactly fear, but leery of them. And we're leery of them for all sorts of reasons. One reason we're leery of them—I just talked to a great biologist whose name is going to escape me momentarily. He formulated the parasite stress theory of political belief. And so one of the things he points out is that as isolated groups of human beings came into contact with one another throughout our entire evolutionary history, we were able to trade ideas and goods, and that was greatly to our benefit. But we also traded infectious agents, and that killed us a lot! And so we have this terrible tension at the base of our being between being open to what's new and being killed by what's new. And so that's part of what makes us ethnocentric; it's not by any means the entire thing.

So, but we have this ethnocentrism built in as well as the desire to trade. Slavery is a human universal. It goes back as far back in time as you can possibly manage. And so we can admit that all those things exist, and we can admit that their powerful tendencies without having to take this next step, which is the one that you pointed to by saying, "Well, that's the foundation of our institutions themselves." Right? Because of that, the institutions have to be torn down rather than saying slavery has been with humanity for eons, and the exceptional thing about America is not that we had slavery, but that slavery was abolished.

Okay, and I would say that's the exceptional thing about Britain, not America, because the Brits did it first. And they were—sorry, that's my understanding of the situation. Now, that doesn't take away from the American accomplishment or the Canadian accomplishment, for that matter, right? The central tendency is the eradication of slavery.

I'm simply saying that the thing that is being emphasized that I want to push back against that often comes along with the use of the phrase "systemic racism" is the idea that because the dead white men that created that— that wrote the Constitution or that came up with these Enlightenment values or any number of other things that have allowed us to live in this exceptional, let's say, civilization—it's beyond just America—that because of their moral hypocrisy, that somehow the things that they built are ill-gotten and need to be sort of rooted out, torn down at the core, and I fundamentally reject that view.

Okay, now why should I presume that your fear of—okay, you've just characterized the relationship between the idea of systemic racism with a bunch of other ideas. Okay, so, right, the idea that there's a lot more to the story than the mere emphasis on systemic racism. There's a belief that the institutions themselves, the fundamental institutions of the West, are corrupt right to their core. That is the implication often of the people using the phrase.

But I think one should be able to use the phrase without implying all of that. Unfortunately, right now when you hear it, it tends to be that the things I just described come along with the use of that phrase, a little bit like anti-racism.

Why are you convinced that your belief that the idea of systemic racism is associated with these other ideas is true?

Because I see it!

Tell me about that! I mean, I don't know where to start. I mean, that is—I understand that. So help push me toward what area you're…

Well, I agree with you. I mean, the reason that I took the stance I took five years ago, which I've had plenty of time to think about by the way, is because I saw the linkage between ideas. I didn't believe that this was just what it appeared to be; it was associated with an entire ideology.

And the ideology seems to me to be—I'll lay out some of its features, and you can tell me if you think it is in accord with what you see—that inequality of outcome is evidence of systemic discrimination, for example.

Oh yes, that would be—that inequality of outcome conveniently described for the purposes of justifying the ideology.

Yeah, let me describe how I like some of the features of this ideology, and you tell me if you agree that inequality of outcome is necessarily a result of systemic discrimination or systemic bigotry.

Okay, and that’s part of the equity issue.

Sure, but again, that's another one of these words that's been hijacked!

I know! Well, that's exactly why I brought it up is because I've been talking to a group of people in LA who are liberals and on the left of me, I would say, but we've been stuck on this issue of equity because I've been insisting, for example, that it does mean it's a drive towards equality of outcome defined in exactly the manner that you describe. And their insistence is, "No, that's a view that only a minority of the people who are pushing the idea of equity hold."

Well, the majority of people that go along with— you know, equity just think, "I believe in fairness. They're not thinking deeply about this."

It's like the person that says black lives matter. Well, of course black lives matter, but if you look under the hood of what the organizations that are at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement believe, well, they believe in, you know, abolishing the nuclear family. They believe in abolishing or defunding the police. They believe that capitalism is evil. I mean, they believe in all kinds of things, but the majority of people that are saying—or putting up a sign, "Black Lives Matter," are saying, "Racism is bad."

The majority of people that are saying, "I believe in equity and diversity," are saying, "I believe in the dignity of difference, and I believe in fairness, and I believe in equality of opportunity."

So when the people in these—theoretical people in LA, when they're saying that, is that what they mean or do they mean something else?

No! Well, I think what they mean is that the people who are pushing equity believe in equality of opportunity, and they don't see the—the truth. They're exactly right.

And these are reasonable people, and they're not that—they're not that happy with political correctness, I should also say. So there is reasonable a group as I can communicate. But I have to be honest at this point. If you can't—if one can't see the way that this language has been hijacked and has been used as a kind of Trojan horse, brilliant, I should say, Trojan horse strategy to smuggle in a sort of hardened identity, you know, zero-sum identity politics view of the world, to smuggle in a view of the world in which we either have collective guilt or collective innocence literally based on the circumstances of our birth, to smuggle in a—you know, deeply anti-capitalist position, to smuggle in essentially, you know, a leftist illiberalism, then I'm sorry, you have blinders on. The evidence for this is so overwhelming at this point. I'm really not sure how—like, if you—okay, if you don’t want to believe it, I think it's because the discomfort of believing it outweighs the—let me say that again. I think it's because admitting that that's true and that that's what's happening is extremely psychologically scary, and it's extremely socially scary if you were a liberal because all of a sudden it means that these institutions—and let's just even say, like, the social world and the culture that you took for granted as being a certain thing and having certain qualities is no longer what it appears to be.

And that is the perfect segue to connect it back to The New York Times.

Yes, okay, so let's do that. I agree with you. Let's do that now. So now you're at The Wall Street Journal, and you're starting to write there.

Yeah, and let's just fast forward that I get to The New York Times, and suffice it to say that, you know, I was never popular. I had already published lots of things. I was known as—being a Zionist, I was known for views that put me outside of the, let's say, the cool woke kid's table.

And what do you mean by you were never popular? You glossed over that very rapidly. There's an experience there.

There was a skepticism of me from the beginning, but I mean, it was The New York Times. It's the most important journalistic platform in the world, and so I was more than willing to put up with, you know, getting the cold shoulder from some of my colleagues because you just can't overstate how powerful that distribution system is—much more so than The Wall Street Journal. And it holds a certain position, I would say, just not beyond America. You know, in the West. And so I was loathed to give that up and I'd be willing and was willing to put up with a lot in order to cling to that position.

Well, how do you think people saw you? Because they assumed—they made a variety of assumptions about—what is it that you represented or were in their eyes?

Heresy. Heresy! Someone who lived like them, went to the same restaurants as them, dated like them, you know, by all metrics should have agreed with them on every tenet of this new orthodoxy.

But right, so you're worse because of that!

See, I just talked to Rimazah, a professor at Mount Allison, who's an Arab immigrant to Canada, Lebanese. And she just got hung out to dry by the pathetic cowards at her university for—I don't exactly know, but apparently it was something like incitement to sexual violence and also insistence that Canada isn't a systemically racist country. And she wrote some of this in her blog, which she thought was mostly for distribution to her friends. And anyways, she's a heretic like you are because she's female, and she's an immigrant to Canada. And so it's incumbent upon her to adopt the victimized identity, that people like her should know is good for them. And because she didn't—although in quite a minor way—she really literally doesn't know what her crime was. She doesn't really know who her accusers were. They suspended her without pay. She's a tenured professor. It's a worse case than the case in New York with Paul Rossi. It's much worse! It's quite stunning. I mean, if you met her, you’d think, "Really? This is the—she's the person that all these institutions were hypothetically designed to protect?"

But if you think about it, in a way, it makes sense that it's sort of the—the people at the edges that are more dangerous than the people across the street. Because if what your goal is is to reshape, let's say, what it means to be liberal and progressive, which is what this is about—and if your goal is to sort of remoralize people into that view of the world, then you need to make examples of people and sharpen the boundary of who's in the community of the righteous and the good by making examples of people who don't go along with every part of it. Because right, the point of the ostracisms and the point of what it sounds like happened to this professor is to say, you know, it's not really about the person. It's about sending a message to everyone watching it—that if you don’t fall in line, if you don’t conform, if you don’t obey, this is what’s going to happen to you. And you better believe that that is an extraordinarily effective strategy, unbelievably so.

So I think what I saw at The New York Times was, I guess the only way to describe it is this kind of ideological excuse me, ideological succession. And it's not just a story about The New York Times; it's a story about Nature magazine. It's a story about Bloomberg. It's a story about Harvard. It's a story about—the name the institution—it's probably about that institution. And so what's maddening for someone who's seeing it is that for most people on the outside, they're just saying, "Wait, it's The New York Times. It has this like vested authority. It has the same font. It has the same masthead." And you're telling me that really The New York Times is no longer The New York Times? And that's exactly what I'm telling you. And it’s—

Yeah, and so then the question is what is it?

Well, it's—what it used to be. It basically is, if the old version of The New York Times was supposed to be, you know, telling the truth without fear of favor, now it's something more like MSNBC in print!

Right? If you look at Fox, you look at MSNBC, it's very easy to see what those things are. They're political heroine for their side. That's increasingly what The New York Times is. And you can really point—I mean, you don't have to believe in an ideological conspiracy to understand the push for that to be the new product. Right? Go back to the age before the internet. When the group that The New York Times had to appease were the advertisers—that was who you had to fear pissing off. Well now that advertising's basically a dead letter, who do you have to appeal to? You have to appeal to your subscribers. Those are the people that are paying the bills at the end of the day. And lo and behold, 95%—might be 92%, but it's something along those lines—of New York Times subscribers identify as liberals, progressives, or Democrats. So you better believe that in order to keep your subscribers, your readers, the people paying the bills happy, you have to give them what they want.

And so we just shouldn't be surprised anymore that Fox is doing what it's doing, and that The New York Times is doing what it's doing. It's very good for business. It may not be good for democracy, but it's extremely good for business. And I think that the only reason that it's—

Why did it work before? Like, if this is necessary to appease your consumer base, for example—I mean, you made a bit of a case there that it was the advertisers, and you said that the advertisers, in some sense, now have been replaced by the direct consumer and they're more arbitrary. But it still begs the question, if The New York Times was a reasonable paper of record 20 years ago, or Time magazine for that matter, it's quite shocking to look at a Time magazine from the 1970s—it's about a quarter of an inch thick and it's all text, you know? It’s a real magazine. And that's, of course, gone by the wayside. But why did it work before? Why was there a market for—let's call it objective journalism—five years ago or ten years ago, and there isn't now?

Social media has a tremendous amount to do with it. I mean, because there's no longer what Martin Gury has called secret knowledge. And for those who haven't read his book "The Revolt of the Public," it is the best description of everything that we are talking about. You no longer need Walter Cronkite or The New York Times for that matter to tell you about the anti-Semitic attack that happened in West Hollywood the other night because, by the way, they're probably not going to cover it. All you need to do is follow the right accounts on Twitter.

And so when information becomes democratized, and you don't rely—let's put to the side, for example, the Times' excellent China coverage or its foreign policy coverage where you really do need an enormous budget and people flying to the other side of the world, oftentimes infiltrating closed societies to tell you what is genuinely closed information, but for, by and large, let's say, on domestic issues and a number of—and certainly style and opinion, you can just get that on the Internet. And so what am I subscribing—what is the reason to pay for The New York Times?

So the reason for that has changed. It's no longer so that you can find out what happened in West LA the other night. Increasingly, first of all, it's products like crosswords and cooking and documentaries and all these other things that are more like entertainment. But it's also to rah-rah for your team. That's another enormous reason for it.

And I'll just add one more thing about Twitter. I just—you cannot overstate the effect that social media has on editors and reporters. You know, they are people like anyone else, and you know very well, Jordan, as I do, how bad it feels to get dragged and slandered on social media by often, you know, thousands of people. And you—and if you know that in advance, and you know that writing about a certain topic or writing about a topic that’s ugly or writing about a topic that has a perspective that the majority of your followers or the subscribers to your paper don’t agree with, it’s like you don’t need to be told, “Don’t write about it.” You tuck yourself out of it because you don’t want to experience that punishment.

Why is it worth it? Why should I die on that hill when the cost of sticking your neck out is like extraordinarily high psychologically and practically—which it's certain—even if you stick your neck out accidentally—which...

So because it's never—I guess because I think because there are things that are—and I don't know how to say this without sounding cheesy—but like there are virtues that are so much more important than getting ratioed on Twitter. There just are. There again, without sounding too high-minded, if you can get in touch with things that are— things that you're willing to risk your life for, or let's say risk your reputation for. It's only then will you be able to withstand the pain of the lies and the slander.

Okay, so what are you going to—what do you—what you gave up your job at The New York Times? I want to return to this point: you just—I want to run through the biography again now you're working at The New York Times. You’re not the world's most popular person there.

No, so you're paying a price. Now, you can obviously tolerate that. You're constitutionally built so that you can tolerate that.

I think that I—I'm not an expert in this subject, but I think that I would qualify as highly disagreeable, yes, according to your definition. Although, it's hard for me to say that because I really care what other people think about me.

Yeah, well, you might be lower. You should take my personality test and find out because I suspect you— I suspect you're low in politeness and high in compassion. That splits—that splits agreeableness, say, because then you would care for other people, but you'd still be willing to say what you have to say.

I suspect that’s—and I also suspect you're probably pretty high in conscientiousness and openness, and that makes you a weird political animal because openness tilts you in the liberal direction, but conscientiousness tilts you in a conservative direction. But it'd be worth taking the test to find out.

I'll take it. I've never taken it.

What? Okay, in general, I don't take personality—I don't know what my Myers-Briggs is either, but I will take it, I guess. It's a longer conversation, but the question of how to incentivize—like, I'm obsessed with the idea of courage and what makes people courageous or what makes people willing to be Natan Sharansky or be Andrei Sakharov. Like, what is it?

I think it's fear of God. You know, they say that's the beginning of wisdom. Well, I kind of—I mean that genuinely but also metaphorically. A lot of courage, I think, is being afraid of the right thing. Like, I don't think it was courage that drove me to do what I did five years ago in Canada. I think it was fear of what was coming as an alternative. I could see it. It was like, "Well, there's a little beast here that I could tackle," or there's a great, huge beast that's lumbering forward in the distance.

But why are so many people deluding themselves into thinking that if they just like keep quiet about any number of the issues we're talking about, that it will somehow get easier to speak out later? Like, this is going to be the easiest time right now.

Yeah, well, that's the thing. I don’t know. I don’t know what the conditions are for learning that. You see, that's one thing I kind of—I think I've sort of known that for a long, long time, that the time to have the fight is now, for me. I think being deeply connected to Jewish history and feeling like it's not just history, but it's like a compass in my life and that I am deeply obligated to its lessons and deeply obligated to all of the people who suffered and sacrificed so that I can live in the freedom and the privilege that I have—that's my anchoring thing.

And I'm interested in how do we incentivize more people to see what this is and to sort of come out of the closet? Because the thing that is, like, so fascinating to me about this strange phenomenon is like, by any measure, we're living in the freest societies that human beings have ever known, and they're rapidly improving.

Yes, and that people are acting as if—and for very understandable reasons—like we're living in a totalitarian society to some degree, meaning they are double-thinking. They are living lives in which they have a private persona, and they will tell me in private at dinner, "Totally agree with you," but I could never say it out loud. Like, that phenomenon to me is so unbelievably widespread.

Yeah, well, that's the state—well, that is—that is the indication of the dawning of the totalitarian state because the totalitarian state depends entirely on the dissociation between the public persona and the private viewpoint. And to the degree that each person is willing to swallow that lie, that's their contribution to the totalitarian state.

And so it is a requirement. It's interesting that you pose your moral obligation in terms of your responsibility to Jewish history, one: and the fact that so many times people didn't say what they needed to say and the consequences were absolutely catastrophic. I mean, that's certainly the case in Nazi Germany, to say the least, but it also characterized the style, the Stalinists and the Maoists and all of those totalitarian states. I mean, if people—people need to realize that if they're in a position where they can't say what they think, that that's the evidence that we're sliding in a direction that's not good. There's the evidence. It's right there. And what do you do about that?

Well, you say what you think carefully. And the reason for that is the alternative is worse. That's the—I also think that it was really hard for me to give up the prestige of working—

God, I bet that—I want to hear about it.

It was really hard for me. And, but I think that like putting myself—like I have—the fact that I had already put myself on the hook so publicly for standing up for certain values made it impossible for me not to follow through with doing the right thing. It's a little bit like when I wanted to run the marathon. Like I insanely—because I can't run a half a mile right now—but years ago, I ran the New York City Marathon having never been a runner in my life. And the way that I did that was I told everyone in my life, "I'm running a marathon," before I'd even run a step. And the pressure to sort of follow through with what I had publicly stated was very good because it forced me to do it. And I guess what I would say to—you know, Nietzsche said every great man is the actor of his own ideal.

Well, yeah, I guess what I would say to people listening to this is, like, put yourself on the hook now in front of people that you respect and admire, and maybe even do it in a public way because then, when the testing time comes, it's very embarrassing not to follow through with living by your ideals.

Well, and let's say, "Well, the testing time isn't going to come, and we're just overstating the danger," because that's the rationale, right?

That's the rationale.

Well, do you think we're overstating it?

We could talk about France.

Well, I don't know. I don't know, right? Because who knows, right? I don't know which way history is going to turn. It doesn't look very—I'm certainly not happy with what's happening in the universities. I'm not happy with what's happening in the scientific journals. It doesn't seem to me a great thing that diversity, inclusivity, and equity is popping up absolutely everywhere, that human resources departments have a stranglehold on corporations. All I'm saying is that if we're living in a world in which people cannot say their commonsensical views out loud, okay, I'm not talking about political views, I'm talking about, "Are there differences between men and women?" "Are, you know, is America fundamentally a good place?" "Is Lincoln a hero?" Like these are basic things that have become taboo. If we cannot say those basic things out loud and if those ideas about the fundamental goodness, let's say, of the American project—but really of the Western project—have become really, I would say, more than that. I would say of humanity itself because, okay, this is a fundamental critique: the idea that our social institutions are predicated on exploitative power. That's not—a critique of the human spirit!

Sure!

It goes past even the West!

Yeah!

If you can't say that looting is bad, okay? Think about this summer. If you can't say that segregation is evil and wrong, if you can't say that—I mean we all know what the things are, the things that have become unsayable, and I’m suggesting that that is enough for me to sound the alarm. And if it turns out that I was a little paranoid or hysterical, but I made these things more sayable in sounding the alarm, I’m okay with that. I’d rather be wrong now…

So tell me, tell me why did what happened when you decided to leave the Times?

Well, I mean, how did you come to—I’d like to hear the story. What—how did you come to that decision?

Well, there was a kind of forced ideological conformity that was happening, and it became like a battle to get any piece through that didn't conform to the narrative. And anything that didn't—how would that battle manifest itself?

So you would commission all stories in all kinds of ways.

Yeah! I mean it would be... I'd like to do a column on this and me being tremendously ch—like having to jump through hoops and get ten more sources, whereas other pieces from other writers would just sail through with like obvious embarrassing errors. Not that I haven't had my own share of errors; I have, and they're horrifically embarrassing, and anyone can find them online. But I'm saying if you didn't comport with the orthodoxy, then your character and your work were just unbelievably scrutinized in a way that another person's weren't when it came to...

So the load increased, the effort—

Yeah! I mean when it came to commissioning things. Like, you know, I remember Ion Harkl called me "the smuggler," because early on when I was there, again in this very brief good period of self-reflection, I was able to get an op-ed that she wrote into The New York Times, and she was like, "I can't believe you were able to do that!" So there was this brief period in the beginning where the humiliation of getting Trump wrong, I think, led to an opening of the Overton window. But then, for reasons I can't really figure out, it really, really, really just closed again, and it narrowed much more so—like to a sliver—in a way. It was much narrower than I would say pre-election! And of course Trump had a tremendous amount to do with it.

If you believed that, you know, and I think a lot of my colleagues genuinely believed this, that Trump was a fundamental threat to America, to the republic, to minorities—we can go on and on and on, we know the argument, we could read it anywhere else—then you were morally obligated to defeat that threat. And that meant that anything that flirted with any number of topics where he was on a particular side of it, then the right was—all that like the correct position was always to be on the opposite side of it.

And so you saw this really, really clearly, let's say, in the lab leak theory, right? Which was completely of the—we—of the Wuhan—of coronavirus—which increasingly it seems like the coronavirus was, you know, unintentionally, let's say, leaked from this lab in Wuhan. Well, that became unsayable, and it became unsayable because people in the Trump administration were saying that that was the case. And so everything was seen through the prism of this incredibly singular figure of Trump.

So that sped it all up, and then you had the summer, and you had the killing of George Floyd, and that just brought every thing that was sort of at a low boil, just absolutely bubbling over. And the way that it bubbled over most acutely was in the choice in June to run an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton that said—not that the National Guard should be brought in to quell peaceful protests—but that the National Guard should be brought in to quell violent rioting. It was a controversial piece, by any stretch, in that really sensitive moment. But it was a view, frankly, that was shared by the majority of Americans if you go back and look at polls at that time.

But inside the context, the rarified context of The New York Times, not only was this op-ed seen as controversial, it was seen as literal violence. Literal violence! More than 800 of my colleagues signed a letter saying that this op-ed literally put the lives of black New York Times staffers in danger. And anyone that knows what was—no argument—what kind of argument was made in favor of that position?

That the argument was, first of all, it was a misreading of his op-ed. It was based on a fundamental misreading that insisted that his op-ed was about bringing in the military to put down justified, understandable riots in reaction to George Floyd.

So they never made the distinction. They collapsed the distinction between bringing in the National Guard to put down violent rioting and bringing in the National Guard to put down peaceful protests. And then they said, you know, because police and the military are systemically racist—I’m being crude—and just giving you the overview, that this move would necessarily result in inordinate amounts of black death—the death of black Americans.

So that was the—so just that was the argument, and what happened was not from the top a defense of the op-ed and a defense of all of the various—was this an op-ed you had commissioned?

No, I had nothing to do with it.

Okay, okay, so you're just watching this.

Yeah, I ended up being sort of brought in as a kind of punching bag because I ended up tweeting out some tweets that I think hold up extremely well about that this was a very, very useful litmus test to understand the generational divide inside The New York Times, but I had nothing to do with the op-ed.

But the people that did have something to do with the op-ed, my 25-year-old—I want to ask you something about that generational divide. Sorry, it's okay—well, I'm still trying to think through this—the education of young people to adopt the viewpoint that our social institutions are fundamentally corrupt and driven by power. So then I think, well, how much of that—this calls for speculation—how much of that is a consequence of the breakdown of family structure? I mean, so I see the positive element of our social institutions as something like the positive aspect of the paternal spirit. So it's a father—it’s the positive father who encourages in exactly the way that you encourage the writers that were under your care to express themselves and develop.

Am I the father in that situation?

Well, you would be. Well, you know, you're female, but you're working in the patriarchy. So yes, that's a—I would say, symbolically speaking, that that's a manifestation of—well, the spirit of your Jewish ancestors, let's put it that way.

Well, I mean that, you know? And you're the one who said that that tradition has shaped you to such a degree. It's like while you're in body, you feel you have an obligation to embody that.

Well, is it not a paternal spirit? That's the tradition and it's the—but what if you've never experienced that?

I don't know if I would call it paternal or not. That's not the way I think about things, but I do think— I don’t know if your family's broken if you've never had a positive relationship with someone—and I think it's different than that. I think it's about—should corporations, which is what The New York Times is, in the end of the day, should they be moral actors? That's the big difference. There's a sense among the younger generation that a newspaper or a tech company or whatever the place that you work should somehow also not just be about pursuing the bottom line but should also be a manifestation of what you consider to be good politics and good morals.

And that's why you see, you know, I don't know if you followed this entire story at Coinbase that I think is really, really interesting, where basically the heads of Coinbase said because they felt like rather than pursuing excellence for the company, so much of employees' energy and attention and time was being devoted to using Slack to discuss the politics of the day, and they basically said, "Look, no more politics at work. That's not—we're not going to do that. Work is not a place for politics. Work is a place for making Coinbase excellent. And if you're uncomfortable with that, we're going to give you a really, really nice severance package."

You've seen Basecamp follow suit. You've seen—and I suspect that—when did this happen?

This happened, I would say, Coinbase in the past two months, and then Basecamp another—I don't know—Silicon Valley, much more recently. And this—I'm really watching that trend because if you're running a company and rather than, let’s take the case of The New York Times, you're spending—you're not spending your time reporting and editing and commissioning, but you're spending your time basically being like an offense archaeologist looking through things that other people have published to decide whether or not an adjective was orientalist or not. Like, that's a bad use of your time if you are supposed to be producing the best newspaper in the world. And so that's one thing I'm watching for. I'm curious if what Coinbase did is gonna take off because I think it's extremely—I thought that was just really, really smart strategy to say, "No, that's not gonna be what we do with this company."

But suffice it to say, The New York Times has not followed Coinbase's suit. And what happened after—so the fallout from the Tom Cotton episode was that within 48 hours, my immediate boss was reassigned. My—the boss who had hired me, James Bennet, was pushed out of the paper after he was struggle-sessioned in front of thousands of employees at the company.

Tell us about that.

I will. Well, in Slack channels with thousands of people, guillotines and axe emojis were put next to his name and my name, and no one said a word about that. Remember, this is an ideology that tells us silence is violence, you know, and guillotine emojis aren't exactly—but basically what happened was that, you know, they—it’s the same script that's happened everywhere else. Like, a normal human being who looked out and saw that 800 of his colleagues felt that, he decided to run an op-ed that literally put their lives in danger. Well, the normal human response to that, as you explained before, is, “I'm so sorry.” But unfortunately, in the rubric of this ideology, “I'm so sorry.”

It's a confession!

Yes! Yes! The confession!

Which means don't apologize if you haven't done anything wrong.

Yes, exactly! And so he was pushed out of the paper. And perhaps most disgustingly, my colleague, who is a very dear friend of mine, Adam Rubinstein, who was one of the editors—one of seven editors who worked on the piece—his name was leaked by others of our colleagues to the news side of the paper. And a 25-year-old editor—in the very beginning of his career—was sort of the guy that was thrown under the bus, and he ultimately ended up leaving the paper too. And I found that to be the most disgusting part of the entire episode because as everyone who works in any organization knows, and he didn't make him—there was no mistake that was in that op-ed, but generally what happens in a collegial environment is if someone makes a mistake—so for example, months prior to the Tom Cotton episode, The New York Times ran a flagrantly anti-Semitic cartoon in which Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is shown as a dachshund—a long wiener dog wearing a collar with a Jewish star—and he's shown leading a blind Trump, who's wearing a yamaka on his head. People can look it up!

Now everyone in the editorial staff knew who chose that op-ed, sorry—that cartoon—and no one in the public knows his name, and that's exactly as it should be. It's exactly as it should be. And yet, in this case, a 25-year-old editor was hung out to dry.

So essentially what I gathered from this entire episode was risk-taking can get you fired. Running an op-ed that other people inside the paper considered controversial could get you struggle sessioned in front of the entire company and knowing that that was literally what my job was. Well, that job became impossible. And the thing that happened that—I mean, it's really unbelievable if you're thinking about running a large organization. This will sound as insane as it is. The new rule became kind of editing by consensus. So every single op-ed editor had to say that they were comfortable with every single op-ed.

Well, you can imagine that if 9.9 out of people—9.9 out of 10 people agree with this view of the world, that my job became impossible by the time that I, you know, sort of—the last few weeks of the paper, I was told explicitly, "Don't commission op-eds anymore because there are none of them—" I mean, none of them were able to get through this new gauntlet. And I said to myself, "You know, why did I go into journalism? I did not go into journalism to be rich." You know, I went into journalism because it's a job that lets you—that allows you to pursue your curiosity, which is unbelievably incredible.

And if I can't do that anymore, and if I need to sort of like become a half version of myself and sit on my hands about an increasing number of topics that I think are incredibly urgent, what's the point of doing this? And so I felt like, you know, I could kind of like become a husk or I could leave of my own volition before something similar happened to me. And so I decided to leave and left in a very public way, having no idea sort of what I would do next. And I will be honest, it took me a long time to sort of like get my bearing after I did that.

Have you got your bearing?

In retrospect, I would say to anyone considering leaving an institution, have a good plan in place for what you plan to do next because I wish—that's no easy thing to manage. I mean, it's—you know, you had, well, a dream job fundamentally, right? I mean, that's the pinnacle—to be an op-ed editor at The New York Times—that’s a star position.

Have I thought? Yeah, have I gotten my bearings? I would say very much so, and I feel—good for you!

I feel so much more optimistic now than I did—you know, if I left in July, it was in August and September. I mean, it was very disorienting at first to feel like, wow, I've been in institutions for my entire life. I've never been an entrepreneur! I've never had to figure out all these things for myself! I've always sort of been in these fancy institutions. What would it look like to try and build one myself? And how would I? And this is something I’m struggling with a lot right now or not struggling—in a good way. How do I resist the same forces that I so criticize The New York Times for? And let me give you a specific example.

So I’m writing on Substack now, and it’s incredible.

Tell us about Substack too!

So Substack, for people that don’t know, is this new platform for—well, it’s for any writers. But that allows people to subscribe directly to you, and so I publish about two things a week—often a column that I've written and a column I've commissioned—but ultimately, I want to build this into a much bigger media company. But this is the start of it, and it's going extremely, extremely well. And I'm in the top 10 of, you know, politics!

So I just have to go a little bit further to beat, you know, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald.

So it's going really well, but the thing that is corrupting about it, it's the same force that's corrupting at The New York Times or any media right now, which is to say, I know that if I run certain kinds of stories, that that’s going to be like a heroin hit for my readers. And I see—you see right away. Yes! And we all know about the temptation of providing heroin hits for our readers! Yes! And it’s very—I mean, and at least at The New York Times, you have some insulation. Okay, you write one column that is a viral hit? Great! You write one the next month that's only a couple hundred thousand? But there is some level of insulation!

With Substack, there's none. I see every single night how many people are converting to paid subscriptions, and I see extremely clearly what kinds of stories make that happen. And I don't want to give in to the same—I don't want to radicalize my readers in a certain direction. And so you have to be, as an editor and as a writer, disciplined. You know, I'm going to commission this story. You have to be pursuing something else.

Eh, that’s the thing. I mean, I’ve struggled with the same thing with this podcast. I mean, and what I’m trying to do—maybe this is insulation, I don’t know as I’m trying to learn things I don’t know. And so I’m talking to people that I think are interesting, and I’m hoping they’ll teach me things so that I’m not quite so stupid.

And if people are happy with that—I mean, I read the comments. I’m responsive to my audience. I respect my audience. But the respect is that I’m going to take them along for the journey. That—and so I’m not tailoring it to an audience at all. And that's it.

But what's so nice about that is it really seems to work! Like, when I'm not tailoring to my audience, when I'm engaging in a genuine conversation, that's when the responses are the best. And so that's so heartening that that’s the case! I mean, what are you seeing with regards to responses? What’s the temptation exactly?

Yeah, so I think that, you know, when I resigned from The New York Times, that letter I think was probably the most widely read thing that I've ever written. And I'm really, really proud of it. But I think in a way I became like symbolic of, let's just say, like the anti-woke position. And on the one hand, I think it’s extremely important for me to report on that, and I'm really proud of the reporting that I've done exposing the way that this ideology, for example, is taking over K-12 education.

And one of the reasons I think it's so important that I do it is that the mainstream media is not going to touch it, because it's the same ideological succession that they’re implicated in.

So on the one hand, I think I have a particular burden to write