Hey, kids, remember that time back in 2020 when the New York Times got a lot of grief for publishing an op-ed by US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Land of Cotton), in which he called on then-“President” Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and send US troops to American cities to Do What Must Be Done against all the “rioters” who kept burning down every city in the country? (Portland, Oregon, you’ll recall, is still being burned to the ground by Antifa every night and rebuilt during the day, like that bridge near the Cambodian border in Apocalypse Now.) After understandable uproar over the Paper of Record publishing a piece that seemed to endorse Trump’s vile tweet saying that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Times editorial page editor James Bennet was quitfired, and later in 2020 was followed by Adam Rubenstein, who had edited the misbegotten Cotton op-ed.
This week, Rubenstein has written for The Atlantic (gift link) a shocking, terrifying, disturbing, unexpurgated, and very bitchy insider’s look at how the Leftist Woke Cult at the Times done him wrong. Not surprisingly, the piece has the usual rightwingers pointing and screaming unearthly howls of rage like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, progressives disputing the details, and Yr Doktor Zoom getting close to his daily quota of very dated movie references.
We won’t get into all the gory details, mostly because this is yet another genre piece in the very familiar “conservatives just can’t get a fair shake in media” category, and even if you don’t read this particular example, you’ve seen plenty like it.
For starters, let’s look at Rubenstein’s lead anecdote, which just proves how the Times was already a leftwing hive mind his first week on the job — even as Bennett was expanding its stable of editorial page rightwing writers. For some reason, a lot of people on the internets think this story just might be embellished:
On one of my first days at The New York Times, I went to an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires. We had to do an icebreaker: Pick a Starburst out of a jar and then answer a question. My Starburst was pink, I believe, and so I had to answer the pink prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich. Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken.
The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed.
That drew lots and lots of ridicule from people doubting that a new-staff orientation would have involved people snapping their fingers like beatniks, or that anyone in HR would icily condemn someone for mentioning the preferred fried food of rightwing America, especially since the foofaraw over the CEO’s condemnation of marriage equality was an artifact of 2012, not 2019 when Rubenstein came to the Times. Also some fun nitpicks like posts noting, with menu screenshots, that the very popular deli’s sandwich was $10.45 back in pre-pandemic days.
Among the skeptics was Times reporter and editor Nikole Hannah Jones, who flatly rejected the idea that the story was plausible, simply saying “Never happened”:
The article also contains at least one serious misrepresentation of what a Times colleague said about Cotton in an email, as well as the laughable claim that Cotton was proven right about protests being full of scary, very real Antifas.
On the other hand, some very credible rightwing friends of Rubenstein like The New York Post’s Jon Levine and anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss said they recalled being told the story by Rubenstein in 2019, so at the very least it seems like he’s related the anecdote to pals previously. It may have even happened, although we’ll note that the HR person is not among the many people Rubenstein fingers (or snaps at) in the piece, and no other current or former Times staffers have confirmed that meetings regularly sounded like poetry readings at the Hungry I. Probably because they’re afraid to speak up!
In any case, the meat of the article is Rubenstein’s account of how the Cotton op-ed came to be published, and how the Woke Mob at the Times came after him like a bunch of zombies intent on devouring his brains, and other resentments and score-settling, which lends a certain something to a paragraph in which he avers that personal resentments and score-settling have no place on the op-ed page.
Rubenstein explains how he helped shape Cotton’s op-ed, which evolved from a June 1 tweet in which Cotton sure sounded like he wanted the Army to start shooting at all the nonexistent Antifa Super Soldiers responsible for rioting:
Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.
If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let's see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they're facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.
We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.
There was also a follow-up in which Cotton doubled down and called for many other units to show rioters “no quarter,” which usually means “kill ‘em all and take no prisoners.” (For the sake of accuracy we’ll note the Double Down is a disgusting chicken “sandwich” from KFC, not Chik-fil-A):
And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.
Cotton later “clarified” that he was only using the term metaphorically, don’t you get it? Just like every time a rightwinger calls for “Second Amendment solutions,” you sillies.
Rubenstein notes that he had carefully considered Cotton’s draft, deleting a few “objectionable sentences” and inserting “a line making clear the distinction between peaceful protesters and law-breaking looters,” so it would be clear that only the really bad people would be shot to restore order.
Early in the piece, Rubenstein acknowledges that to avoid op-eds by conservative writers being nixed by the Woke Mob, such writers received special exemptions from the usual vetting processes:
Standard practice held that when a writer submitted an essay to an editor, the editor would share that draft with colleagues via an email distribution list. Then we would all discuss it. […] After senior leaders in the Opinion section realized that these articles were not getting a fair shake, the process evolved. Articles that were potentially “controversial” (read: conservative) were sent directly to the most senior editors on the page, to be scrutinized by the leadership rather than the whole department.
Look, they had to give rightwing op-eds a kind of editorial affirmative action, to save them from the Woke Mob.
Rubenstein is nonetheless still sore that the Times added a “Wow, We Fucked Up” editorial note to the Cotton op-ed because it said
the editorial process had been “rushed,” that “senior editors were not sufficiently involved,” and that facts in the article weren’t quite right. Never mind, of course, that it wasn’t rushed, that senior editors were deeply involved, and that there were no correctable errors.
For instance, the note said Cotton’s claim of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches” weren’t “substantiated.” Not substantiated?! Why, the claim was linked to a statement from no less an authority than the always-truthy William Barr, Attorney General of the United States, who knows antifa when he feels it.
Oh, there’s just so much nonsense in the piece, like Rubenstein’s belief that his coworkers believed crazy conspiracy theories like “voter suppression” in red states, which he says sounded to him just like “charges of ‘voter fraud’ on the right,” because there’s just no evidence for either. Or his suggestion that skepticism about the Hunter Biden laptop story had to be unfounded, because it “had been substantiated, however unusually, by Rudy Giuliani.”
On the whole, though, it’s just another “I was canceled for being conservative” tale, and Rubenstein is getting all the praise you’d expect from the confirmation-bias crowd.
As more than a few people on social media have said, we kind of hate having to sound like we’re defending the New York Times. Say, do you suppose all the wokesters at the Times start “snapping their fingers in acclamation” every time the paper publishes yet another story accusing LGBTQ+ people of coming for your children, or piles another story on the mountain of pieces about how old and feeble Joe Biden is? We’re just asking.
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[Atlantic (gift link)]
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And then I saw the baby beatnik and baby beatnik looked at me.
It's one deli sandwich, Michael. How much could it cost, 19 dollars?