Actually, I’m cutting the Times, and the screamin’ wokies who make up its staff, an enormous amount of slack because it’s fairer to say that thinking is forbidden at the Times, rather than my kinder, gentler take.
Latest victim of the “no think” movement at the Times is Donald McNeil Jr., booted for daring to engage in reasoned discourse. As McNeil himself explained, he
was asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur. To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself."
That slur itself being, of course, “nigger”, an epithet used by the average black American about 20 times a day in the formula “Watch it, nigger,” according to the famous episode of Blackish, titled simply The Word, and, of course, used endlessly in rap music as well.
Reason’s Matt Welch gives us the full, gory story of political correctness gone wild at the Times, for the ten-thousandth time, and it’s bloody indeed. If you care about free thought, you’ll find it vey1 depressing, so, you know, read at your own risk.
Afterwords
In a previous post, discussing a similarly repulsive defenestration at the Times, this time involving the “controversial” Bari Weiss (not my favorite free speech martyr, but still deserving of the title), I quoted from a movie review I had done years ago for the Bright Lights Film Journal, The Gentleman from Shanghai, describing the enormous suffering meted out to the Chinese violinist Tan Shuzhen by enraged “Red Guard” students. In all these cases, much of the “rage” is generated by envy of the victim’s “privileged” position. In other words, “I want your job!” I’m so glad I’m retired.
1. Should be “very” but Word will accept “vey” as a word even when not preceded by “oy”. Oy vey, n’est-ce pas? (According to M-W, both “oy” and “vey” are interjections meaning “woe”. And, in fact, “vey” and “woe” are related.)
