Bari Weiss was an editor and staff writer for the New York Times until she resigned last year after she said she was victimized by an “illiberal environment” at the Times that “made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.”
Everything she described in the “illiberal environment” can be summarized in three words: white people problems.
Weiss could easily have done what literally every other well-off person does when a job isn’t the right fit for them and just quit and go to work somewhere else without pretending the world is against them—but she has way too much Karen energy in her for that. So, Bari W-is-for-white-AF-but-please-call-me-Weiss decided on Tuesday to publish the longest, whiniest, white-tears-iest op-ed piece about how the largely fictitious thing crybabies call “cancel culture” has caused the majority of Americans to “self silence” for fear of falling victim to the mob mentality of what she seems to admit is an astonishingly small “fringe” group of people on social media who are somehow powerful enough to turn the world on its end.
In her ode to white fragility tiled “The Self-Silencing Majority,” Weiss pretended to be some kind of Martin Luther Karen revolutionary speaking on the behalf of socially oppressed “centrists, libertarians, liberals and progressives who do not ascribe to every single aspect of the new far-left orthodoxy.”
From her long-ass “people were super mean to me” diary entry:
After I resigned from The New York Times over the summer for their hostility to free speech and open inquiry, I began to hear almost daily from such people. Their notes to me sound like missives smuggled out of a totalitarian society.
I realize that may sound hysterical. So I’d ask you to consider a few recent examples from my inbox:
“I never thought I’d practice the kind of self-censorship I now do when pitching editors, but these days I have almost no power to do otherwise,” a young journalist writes. “For woke-skeptical young writers, banishment and rejection awaits if you attempt to depart, even in minor ways, from the sacred ideology of wokeness.”
One day I’ll write about how conservative and moderate white people have taken the word “woke”—a word born out of Black vernacular—colonized the fuck out of it and have now flipped it into a narrative that positions themselves as victims of marginalization and cultural bias...but not today.
Instead, I’m just going to talk about how white people complain like they have no real problems and couldn’t handle being non-white for even a day.
Self-censorship is a new thing?
Somebody please tell Rosa Park-your-white-ass-down-somewhere that Black people have been code-switching out of our natural speech patterns and pretending we don’t have opinions for fucking ever in order to keep our jobs, and that THINGS DON’T SUDDENLY BECOME THINGS JUST BECAUSE WHITE PEOPLE LIKE YOUR KAREN COLUMBUS-ASS IS JUST DISCOVERING THEM!
Weiss went on to compare the “far-left” to QAnon conspiracy theorists like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene because she sees no real difference between people dragging drag-worthy people on Twitter and the bigoted and ridiculous ramblings of a lawmaker who actually has power over shit.
More from Great Value Joan of Arc’s “contrarians are the new n-word” book report:
On the left, liberalism is under siege by a new, illiberal orthodoxy that has taken root all around, including in the very institutions meant to uphold the liberal order. And cancellation is this ideology’s most effective weapon. It uses cancellation the way ancient societies used witch burnings: to strike fear into the hearts of everyone watching. The point is the assertion of power. By showing the rest of us that we could be next, it compels us to conform and obey, either by remaining silent, or, perhaps, offering up our own kindling.
Maybe you are among this self-silencing majority. There is a good chance that you are if the biologist Bret Weinstein is right when he observes that the population is composed of four groups: the few who actually hunt witches, a large group that goes along and a larger group that remains silent. There’s also a tiny group that opposes the hunt. And that “final group — as if by magic — become witches.”
And y’all thought I was being hyperbolic with the “Great Value Joan of Arc” bit.
Basically, Weiss spent upwards of 2,000 words pretending there was a time when journalists were unbiased and when free thought was unrestricted. She cited numerous instances where educators and others were fired or suspended over what were perceived as racially insensitive remarks while oversimplifying literally every anecdote she wrote down.
Listen, her whiney-ass-shit was long as hell and I don’t have the bandwidth to go over every whiny-and-wrong point she hit, but I’ll leave you with an example of just how white this woman is:
Most importantly, this worldview insisted that what bound us together was not blood or soil, but a commitment to a shared set of ideas. Even with all of its failings, the thing that makes America exceptional is that it is a departure from the notion, still prevalent in so many other places, that biology, birthplace, class, rank, gender, race are destiny. Our second founding fathers, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, were living testimonies to that truth.
Only white people view Frederick Douglass’ story as one of American exceptionalism instead of a story of American oppression where someone who escaped slavery had to fight in order to remain free.
Maybe some people really just need to self-silence.