My son mentioned to me the other day an Ashkenazi-supremacist column in the NYT. Thank you AKALib for writing a substantial diary about it, which also saves me the need to actually click on NYT links. I will not click their links until they truly change their ways. Needless to say, I am not their subscriber and have no plans to become one.
I just emailed this to the following addresses. Took me 15 minutes tops, and I feel it is well worth it. Please feel free to give them an eyeful of your thoughts as well.
<help@nytimes.com>, <nytnews@nytimes.com>, <letters@nytimes.com>, <edu@nytimes.com>, <editorial@nytimes.com>, <corrections@nytimes.com>, <books@nytimes.com>, <metro@nytimes.com>, <magazine@nytimes.com>, <inytletters@nytimes.com>, oped@nytimes.com
Hi,
As a human being, and doubly so as an Ashkenazi Jew, I have a deep aversion to any attempt at ranking people and identity groups, particularly ones you are born into, as "better" or "worse" than others. As a scientist, I have particular aversion to pseudo-science designed to justify people's prejudices and fears. Until recently, I've felt fortunate to live during a time in history when these attitudes of mine are part of an enlightened global consensus. Now, as we know sadly, this consensus is under assault on multiple fronts. Bret Stephens' latest column is like a personal blow below the belt, on all these counts and more. Beyond Stephens himself, any sane editor of a local high school paper, should respond when receiving such a text, with the reply "Thank you Bret, I think we won't need your services anymore, please don't bother sending us anything else". Let alone the NYT. Are you really that short of opinion writers? Sadly, during the 21st Century you have repeatedly transgressed your own stated principles, first around the Iraq war campaign of lies, and more recently around the Trump phenomenon to whose rise you have assisted, and continue to assist by normalizing white supremacy and Republican insanity every once in a while. But this column goes way beyond anything you've done thus far, at least since the 1960s. I won't bother to slice and dice into specific content. You've done wrong, and have hurt millions of people. Worse, you may have helped put many millions more in danger, by normalizing and lending false legitimacy to racist pseudo-science. Simply, it should not be part of any civilized conversation. I think it's time for Bret Stephens to go. And I think it's well past time for the New York Times to do some serious reckoning, before it is too late for journalism and for society at large.
update 2:45 PM PST:
The NYT has started backtracking, removing paragraphs and sentences that claimed we are genetically more intelligent because some fake neo-eugenicists wrote a debunked evidence-free article about it.
As they write in their no-pology, that article was from 2005, and “after publication Mr. Stephens has learned” yada yada or something like that.
As I imply in my email to them, being a regular NYT columnist is a pretty F big privilege. A pretty minimal expectation from writers, even when writing a high-school essay, is to figure out what claims they make might be, um, a tad controversial, and check out the sources these claims are based on. You need to do that for any claim, but be particularly diligent on controversial ones.
A debunked 2005 article. As they say, using it as the cornerstone for a 2019 op-ed is not even wrong.
And all the cultural and moral superiority crap is still right in there. As well as the completely unrelated, incendiary blaming something on liberals (not even sure what, this POS is not worth splicing and dicing).
But the quick backtracking, done very sloppily and hastily as AKALib mentions in comments below, is a sign NYT is feeling the heat. This shabby attempt at damage control will fail if we keep pushing.
Keep pressing them. This might be when we finally teach them their lesson.
Thank you.