It’s not fair

I’m still laughing over Bari Weiss’s resignation letter, which is a veritable masterpiece of whiny gaslighting (Did you know the New York Times is not a welcoming place for centrist and conservative voices? Just ask David Brooks, Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Nick Kristof, and everybody else there who has written endlessly for decades now about how PC Culture is Out of Control).

Weiss did everything she possibly could to get fired, including things like “reporting” someone to their employer for refusing to meet her for coffee:

But they wouldn’t give this no-talent dishonest hack the martyrdom she craved. So she had to quit. It’s so unfair!

Everything is unfair these days if you’re a right winger, sorry classical liberal. For instance the Democrats nominated Joe Biden. This is just extremely unfair. Do you know how hard it is to turn Joe Biden into a “Marxist?” Check it out:

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden raised eyebrows on Monday when he echoed rhetoric that was famously used by Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong, according to reports.

Biden held a digital fundraiser featuring former President Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. According to The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere, the former vice president “cited an old Chinese proverb” while discussing economic relief for women during a Q&A session.

“We’ve got to get real economic relief into women’s hands now,” Biden reportedly said, later saying that “women hold up half the sky.”

The saying “women hold up half the sky,” however, is not a proverb but a famous proclamation made by Mao roughly 70 years ago, when he proclaimed gender equality at the beginning of his rule.

Prediction: As soon as Biden names his VP, the entire scream machine will basically stop paying attention to him, and turn its attention 24/7 to the The Real Democrat President in Waiting, who will really be pulling the strings behind the scenes to pass a constitutional amendment requiring all Americans to enter into a Satanic lesbian marriage while denouncing the Confederacy, Elvis Presley, Clint Eastwood and the Oxford comma.

Moving right along, LGM commenter JEC posted this at Brad Delong’s place:

The core of the problem is that conservatives have decisively lost a lot of empirical debates. There was a time when conservative ideas about gender, race, genetics, and geology might have been true — they were open questions. But for the last hundred and fifty years or so, the evidence has been piling up on the other side, and, in more and more areas, the questions are basically closed. (Nothing’s ever “closed forever,” of course, but re-opening these questions is going to require extraordinary evidence, not “just asking questions.”)

Consequently, liberal tolerance for conservative views, which was historically grounded in empirical uncertainty, is genuinely narrowing. We’re frankly relieved to have been right (we care about that sort of thing), but the debate is over.

The conservative dilemma is that, in many important respects, the world actually works as liberals wished and hoped that it did, and not as conservatives believed that it must. The actual functioning of the world strikes the conservative mind as deeply immoral. It is fundamentally wrong that reality has sided with the libs.

At the same time, organizations are becoming more sensitive to the actual damage wrought by incorrect conservative opinions. And so, for example, tech company Google finds it impossible to employ an individual who publicly advocates the false view that women — a recruiting target because they are a historically underutilized talent pool — aren’t well suited to programming computers. (And yes, this isn’t “just an opinion,” it’s a flatly false fact-claim. I’m old enough to remember when computer programming was considered uncool drudgery — and was a majority female occupation.)

Similarly, the statistical distribution of values has shifted, so that brand-sensitive businesses who might once have fired prominent employees for too-public advocacy of civil rights or organized labor now avoid homophobia, racism, and sexism. A defense-heavy firm like Boeing might once have been proud to be represented by a man who publicly argued that misogyny was foundational to the profession of arms. But that’s no longer consistent with Boeings preferred corporate image.

It’s a tough time to be a conservative: rejected by the physical and biological worlds, they are increasingly rejected by the social consensus as well. But there is good news: you don’t have to believe wrong things. Conservatives are free to, you know, face facts. (Of course, that, technically, might make them liberals; a tough time indeed.)

Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan et. al. are criticized constantly because they are wrong about everything all the time. That’s the conclusion the free and open exchange of ideas that these people supposedly long for with the unrequited passion of a 15-year-old boy staring at that poster of Farrah Fawcett during the long hot summer of 1977 (sorry heteronormative metaphor there kids) will actually produce, usually sooner rather than later, which is why they don’t actually want that at all. They just want their critics to shut up.

But they won’t, because life is extremely unfair, especially to high profile writers whose entire careers have devolved into complaining constantly in high profile places about being silenced.