Great analysis describing how and why respected publications like The New Yorker lost their bearings and even moral compass. For years The New Yorker was my favorite magazine. In embracing progressive pieties it became a lot more predictable, less interesting, and I eventually let my subscription lapse.
I keep my subscription for the one great article every two weeks that seems to vindicate the decision. They still remember what they are about now and again.
Spending my first 35 years in communist Poland I can attest to the fact that however brilliant Doreen St. Félix is, she certainly is a fanatical moron.
Two things can be true at once: Ruffo exaggerated some points and so did St. Felix. Except the author goes to pains to skip over the latter’s intersectional contortions and Judith Butler-like gibberish to get at Ruffo. And those tweets still live in St. Felix mind as the quote shows. Weak piece.
Really nice piece. In 2020-21 I was a fan of Rufo's, because his muckraking journalism--see his piece on Sandia National Labs white-male shame-training (https://reason.com/2020/08/13/sandia-laboratory-nuclear-white-male-privilege-training/)--pinpointed and exposed the illiberal madness that was happening on the social justice left. But when he charmed Trump enough to achieve something like real cultural power, he turned out to have notable authoritarian impulses of his own. Anybody closely attending to his cancel-campaign against St. Felix can see that he made no attempt to clarify that these were 10-year-old tweets. He's an astute student of history but also a manipulative one, somebody wholly invested in an instrumental rationality designed to increase his power--the better to counteract bad ideas, he would claim. Yet his attack was on (10 year) old tweets and the bad ideas they contain, not on St. Felix's current writing about Sweeney, and the whole point of his attack is to leverage Then against Now to get St. Felix fired and/or shame The New Yorker precisely by blurring the difference between Then and Now. Daum elegantly unmasks this strategy by filling in the historical context and delineating the actual power dynamics at work on the left side of the dial, then and now. Nice job! The only thing I would add is that those who dislike what Rufo has become would do well to investigate the career of Andrei Zhdanov, the Stalinist cultural commissar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Zhdanov
Great analysis describing how and why respected publications like The New Yorker lost their bearings and even moral compass. For years The New Yorker was my favorite magazine. In embracing progressive pieties it became a lot more predictable, less interesting, and I eventually let my subscription lapse.
I keep my subscription for the one great article every two weeks that seems to vindicate the decision. They still remember what they are about now and again.
Spending my first 35 years in communist Poland I can attest to the fact that however brilliant Doreen St. Félix is, she certainly is a fanatical moron.
Two things can be true at once: Ruffo exaggerated some points and so did St. Felix. Except the author goes to pains to skip over the latter’s intersectional contortions and Judith Butler-like gibberish to get at Ruffo. And those tweets still live in St. Felix mind as the quote shows. Weak piece.
Really nice piece. In 2020-21 I was a fan of Rufo's, because his muckraking journalism--see his piece on Sandia National Labs white-male shame-training (https://reason.com/2020/08/13/sandia-laboratory-nuclear-white-male-privilege-training/)--pinpointed and exposed the illiberal madness that was happening on the social justice left. But when he charmed Trump enough to achieve something like real cultural power, he turned out to have notable authoritarian impulses of his own. Anybody closely attending to his cancel-campaign against St. Felix can see that he made no attempt to clarify that these were 10-year-old tweets. He's an astute student of history but also a manipulative one, somebody wholly invested in an instrumental rationality designed to increase his power--the better to counteract bad ideas, he would claim. Yet his attack was on (10 year) old tweets and the bad ideas they contain, not on St. Felix's current writing about Sweeney, and the whole point of his attack is to leverage Then against Now to get St. Felix fired and/or shame The New Yorker precisely by blurring the difference between Then and Now. Daum elegantly unmasks this strategy by filling in the historical context and delineating the actual power dynamics at work on the left side of the dial, then and now. Nice job! The only thing I would add is that those who dislike what Rufo has become would do well to investigate the career of Andrei Zhdanov, the Stalinist cultural commissar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Zhdanov
Daum is on point, as usual.
I have zero time for either of them. However, Rufo’s power advantage and weaselly attacks makes her point better than she does.