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Cancelled New York Times journalist's anti-woke manifesto

The author of this article, Bari Weiss, is a former journalist and editor at the New York Times and a self-described centrist who resigned after being subjected to a relentless campaign of vilification and harassment for not toing the line favored by young activists at the journal who see journalism as a species of activism and the ideal of objectivity is deprecated. This is her anti-woke manifesto. (Bari Weiss, Commentary, November 2021)

Weiss' resignation letter is devastating. She describes a culture marked by bullying and harassment of anyone guilty of Wrongthink. She was called a Nazi and a racist, her work and character openly demeaned on company websites, other journalists perceived as friendly to her were badgered by co-workers.

The once esteemed newspaper, she alleges, has become a "performance space", with Twitter as its "ultimate editor", increasingly oblivious to the concerns of ordinary people, the famed "paper of record" now the record of those living in a distant galaxy.

This article elaborates on her concerns about the prevailing culture and ideology. It is her manifesto—and a very good one it is too, well worth reading in full.

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A lot of people want to convince you that you need a Ph.D. or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory to understand the woke movement and its worldview. You do not. You simply need to believe your own eyes and ears.

Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.

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