This is fabulous news! A veteran reporter with an entire career at the NYT gets fired for pretty much nothing. Oh, there were lots of accusations of racism and insufficient purity (he might not believe in “White Privilege!”), but the only concrete charge was that he used the magic and powerful N WORDTM with +5 bonus on strength! And that was enough for the mob, and the pitchforks and torches came out from under their desks (in mom’s den) and their ritualistic burning of the witch commenced.
And this is all good! Let these maniacs create purity commissions and speech policing squads and internal reeducation camps and all the other accoutrements of the dedicated Maoist. And when the newsrooms are cleansed of the impure they can turn their gaze upon the past, and create entire departments dedicated to editing the past as reported by the Old Gray Lady…although Old Gray Racist is more accurate. And when they have completed the editing and correction of the past, they could call it something like “Newspeak,” although that may be taken.
It’s Official: Linguistic Intent No Longer Matters at The New York Times
McNeil, 67, went as a representative of the Times on a 2019 trip with American high school students in Peru. There, according to his farewell note to colleagues—which, tellingly, was the first time the context of his career-ending comments had ever been reported during the 8-day life cycle of this journalism-world controversy—McNeil “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.”
So the use of the magic word is now prima facie evidence of racism, and requires the harshest response from the powers that be. What is so pathetic about the mob’s calls for the unbelievers’ heads is that they embrace exactly the orthodoxy and statism that they should be fighting. The unholy alliance of corporations and the state will grind them up and spit them out, but their ignorance of history is such that they believe, truly and unalterably, that their cause is just and pure and they will ride into history as leaders of a new world.
Ernst Röhm thought the same thing.
As for McNeil? I have no sympathy. He is being chewed up because the machine needs victims to function. Does anyone doubt that he was an enthusiastic participant in the purges of the past, or that his recent reporting on Wuhan Flu ignores the reality and simply follows the conventional wisdom as handed down by Anthony Fauci, murderer of homosexuals and facilitator of the AIDS epidemic? Yeah, McNeil did some reporting on AIDS back in the day, so he should know better than most what a craven and awful man Fauci is.
Hopefully his brownstone in Brooklyn is paid for, because he is going to have a tough time finding another gig that pays as well as the NYT.
