Undeservedly ousted conservative NYT editor Adam Rubenstein is deservedly getting plenty of ink n’ pixels with his tale of undeserved trauma, I Was a Heretic at The New York Times, over at the Atlantic, recounting, among other things, how he received, well, a “woke up” call on his very first day, in the course of the sort of “ice breaker” I’m glad I never had to endure, when he dared to claim a “spicy chicken sandwich” from the apparently anti-gay folks at Chick-Fil-A as his favorite, prompting an orgy of condemnatory finger-popping (something else I’ve never had to go through) in rebuke of such arrant homophobia. So, yeah, dude, I feel ya.
Unfortunately, things began to go south for me as Adam continued his tale of woe:
Being a conservative—or at least being considered one—at the Times was a strange experience. I often found myself asking questions like “Doesn’t all of this talk of ‘voter suppression’ on the left sound similar to charges of ‘voter fraud’ on the right?” only to realize how unwelcome such questions were.
The thing is, the two don’t sound similar at all, and only someone being a deliberate asshole would say that they were. It’s a bit like saying “Yeah, John Kerry was captain of a Swift boat during the Vietnam War. Well, George Bush was captain of an airplane at the same time, so what’s the big deal?” Adam dropped his dubious bon mot circa 2019, several years after Trump had claimed that he had actually won the popular vote in 2016 by a uuuge margin, an outcome only disguised by rampant voter fraud on the part of the Democrats—even though there was no evidence whatsoever that any voter fraud had occurred.
Democratic claims of voter suppression by Republicans, on the other hand, are well founded. In July of 2020, Richard North Patterson wrote a long article in the Bulwark describing the many ways Republicans at both the state and national level have labored to reduce the size of the Democratic electorate. In September 2020, Patterson wrote again in the Bulwark to document massive gerrymandering by Republicans to reduce Democratic representation in Congress and state legislatures. Aren’t conservatives supposed to be interested in, you know, “facts”?
Adam is on (much) firmer ground regarding Hunter Biden and his magic laptop, which the woke folks all across the liberal media landscape desperately pretended not to have heard of, at the same time giving endless play to orotund “warnings” from Very Important People that this was exactly the kind of mis/disinformation stunt the masters of the Kremlin would pull, even though the orotunders had not even the slightest shred of, you know, evidence to show that this had occurred, justly outraging (for once) the easily outragable Glenn Greenwald. This grotesque attempt to erase the painfully unlikeable Hunter Biden from the public consciousness continued even after slow-talkin’ Joe was safely back in the White House, by the New York Times’s fucking media critic Ben Smith, no less (much to my dismay).
What really counts, of course, was L’affaire Cotton, in which Adam’s abysmal misbehavior, of choosing to run a piece of right-wing bloodlust from Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, now heartily compounded by his “explanation” of why he didn’t do anything wrong in his post for the Atlantic, was one-upped ten times over by the endless lies and cowardice from the top brass at the New York Times, claiming that the Cotton piece had somehow slipped past them, when it hadn’t, and that they didn’t even know what was in it, when they did, and that it contained “errors”, which was undoubtedly true, but the “errors” weren’t the ones the Times complained about, topped, finally, by the Times forcing both editorial page editor James Bennett’s and Adam’s resignation for, basically, doing the job they hired them for (pretty much), thanks to absurd hysteria from the woke Times staff, who shrieked like a girl in a Steven Spielberg movie when confronted by the sight of a mouse (or a dinosaur).
The drama commenced, more or less, on June 1, 2020, when Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a former army officer, Xed an X during the protests/riots touched off by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis policemen, stating, among other things,
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.
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.
Gee, a former army officer calling for US Army divisions to show “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” Why, what could that mean?
Well, that’s easy, because Tom “clarified” (Adam’s word) the matter by citing a dictionary definition in another X:
Definition of ‘no quarter’: If you say that someone was given no quarter, you mean that they were not treated kindly by someone who had power or control over them.
“Not everyone was convinced” by this argument, Adam says, as though this somehow gets him off the hook for offering to accept a post from a U.S. senator who called for the dispatch of U.S. troops to U.S. cities with the authority—nay, the duty—to shoot down every American citizen wearing a new pair of running shoes. And if Adam thinks I’m so stupid as to believe that there’s the remotest chance that Cotton did mean that he wanted the troops to be ordered to not treat the “insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters” kindly, well, he’s a goddamn idiot.
But the fact remains that Adam’s boss, Times editorial page editor James Bennett, agreed to the idea of an op-ed from Cotton, and Cotton did submit a post that, after a certain amount of massaging, was accepted and the piece ran. So Adam proposed something awful, and his bosses said yes. Then staff howled that management was making them feel unsafe, when it was instead their duty not to publish anything that would upset them. “How can they [management] be sending us emails telling us they’re keeping us safe and care about our physical and mental well-being and then publish this,” complained Timesgal Rachel Adams.
At first, according to Bennett’s own “looking back” account of the fracas, When the New York Times lost its way, published Dec. 23, 2023 in the Economist, both Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger and executive editor Dean Baquet told Jim they supported his decision to run the piece, but then the wind shifted.
Less than three days later, on Saturday morning, Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation.
Adding a little confusion, as if any were needed, in a “real time” article the Times published on the fracas, we find the following:
In a video meeting of the opinion department on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Bennet and James Dao, the deputy editorial page editor, acknowledged that there had been a breakdown in the process of preparing the essay for publication, according to four people who attended it. The editors said that the article had been fact-checked, but added that they would fact-check it again. Mr. Dao did not reply to a request for comment.
Which kind of sounds like Mr. Bennett and Mr. Dao are stabbing poor Adam in the back, something that both Adam and Jim leave out of their accounts, and it also contrasts strangely with Jim’s own “real time” account, published the same day as the article quoted above, in which he both asserts that the Times was right to publish Cotton’s op-ed (no “breakdowns” here!) even though he, James Bennett, disagreed strongly with Cotton’s argument—because it’s, you know, important to hear from both sides.
In the end, one has to sympathize (a little) with both Rubenstein and Bennett, publicly humiliated and raked over the coals for no greater offence than publishing a tedious op-ed from a right-wing windbag that could and should have been forgotten in a week, both of them bullied into quitting thanks to the hysterical whining of their pampered juniors who think it’s their employers’ job to protect them from anything unpleasant—and also maybe to fire anyone whose job they wish they had—particularly, you know, if they’re old white guys, which was probably a significant part of their offence.
But there was also no reason to give editorial space to a man who had explicitly called for the dispatch of regular army troops to American cities to shoot down rioters in their tracks, and then pretend, in Rubenstein’s case, that maybe that wasn’t what Cotton meant, maybe he just meant send in regular army troops to treat rioters in some sort of discourteous manner, like, I guess, yelling at them or calling them names. Neither mentions that, on the same day that Cotton’s op-ed ran, June 3, 2020, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper publicly disagreed with President Trump’s (and Cotton’s) call for invoking the Insurrection Act (thus authorizing the use of regular troops):
I say this not only as secretary of defense, but also as a former soldier, and a former member of the National Guard: The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.
Further furthermore, Adam really gets my goat, and my displeasure, in recounting the aftermath of the NYT/Cotton self-destruct by remarking, after January 6th
On January 6, 2021, few people at The New York Times remarked on the fact that liberals were cheering on the deployment of National Guardsmen to stop rioting at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., the very thing Tom Cotton had advocated.
Well, that’s kind of “funny”, for several reasons. In the first place, Cotton had not advocated the use of the National Guard by individual states in his op-ed. This had already happened in June 2020—in California, for example, where Adam was living at the time—and this was what happened in DC on January 6 as well. Rather, Cotton was calling for the use of the federal Insurrection Act, allowing the president to dispatch U.S. troops against American citizens wherever he deemed it necessary—in particular, naturally, wherever “delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what’s necessary to uphold the rule of law” (Cotton’s language in his Times op-ed).1 Trump, of course, did not invoke the Insurrection Act and did nothing to end the violence, despite being urged passionately to do so by many people, because he welcomed the violence, seeing it as a tool that would allow him to overthrow American democracy and illegally maintain himself in power. All of which kind of suggests to me that Adam Rubenstein often doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, and that he’s ignorant and a liar, as well as a dick, none of which I regard as admirable qualities. I can’t really say for sure if he’s an insurrectionist—that he wishes Trump had maintained himself in power—but I also can’t say for sure that he isn’t.
The estimable Daniel Larison, for one, though not considered by many as a wokie, had a few “real time” negative thoughts on Cotton’s piece:
[Cotton] doesn’t use the “no quarter” language in the op-ed, but we know this is his position and it is implicit in his statement that an “overwhelming show of force” is required. He repeatedly refers to rioters as “insurrectionists.” This misrepresents the nature and extent of the disorder, and Cotton conflates riot with insurrection to provide an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act. Cotton makes no effort to demonstrate that deploying the military to American cities is actually necessary. He asserts that local law enforcement needs backup in some places, but he offers no proof that the situation demands such an extreme response. He says that many cities are “in anarchy,” but he cannot back up that claim anywhere because it isn’t true.
Using the military domestically is an extraordinary measure that should be considered only in catastrophic conditions. It is dangerous and outrageous to call for such extreme action when it is not absolutely necessary. The governors in the states that have been most affected by unrest don’t want military intervention, and as recently as this week the Secretary of Defense said that invoking the Insurrection Act was not warranted. Cotton’s eagerness to use the military in this way reflects both his own horrible judgment and his knee-jerk, hard-line approach to every security problem. The same fanaticism and militarism that warp his foreign policy views are on display here. Cotton’s argument is particularly obnoxious under the circumstances. The unrest across the country has been sparked by the excessive use of force by police, and over the last week we have seen many more examples of gratuitous police brutality against peaceful protesters. Putting soldiers on the streets risks inciting more violence and inviting more abuse.
1. It’s also “interesting” that this massively incorrect misstatement of “facts” got past the Atlantic’s fact-checking department, if in fact such a thing exists.
