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Discordant editorialist
Recruited three years ago by the New York Times to bring “Intellectual diversity” In the Opinions pages after Donald Trump’s election, journalist Bari Weiss, 36, slammed the newspaper’s door on July 14. In her resignation letter, she denounces the evolution of daily life, according to her too permeable to criticism on social networks and unable to feed the debates of opinion. “Intellectual curiosity has become a defect in Times. “ She also claims to have been harassed by colleagues who disagree with her positions. Her departure follows that of James Bennett, who had hired her. The head of the Opinions pages had to resign after the controversy sparked by a column of Republican Senator Tom Cotton, calling for the intervention of the army to stem the violence of demonstrations in reaction to the death of George Floyd.
Criticism of the “far left”
Self-proclaimed “Centrist leaning to the left “,Slayer of the extreme left, Bari Weiss is accused of conservatism by his detractors. She drew the wrath of the left by criticizing the organizers of the Women’s March, the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, or by highlighting censored “iconoclasts”, she argues, by the media ” well-meaning ”. Not without irony, the essayist, known to have implicated some of her teachers when she was a student, denounced the attacks of “The extreme left” against freedom of speech on campus. Sometimes rightly, she was alarmed by the excesses of the #metoo movement or defended a right to cultural appropriation, castigated by anti-racist movements.
Watch of “cancel culture”
Part of a movement of American intellectuals worried about censorship, even self-censorship, which is said to be at work in certain left-wing media, on social networks or in universities, Bari Weiss is on the way to becoming a figurehead of the denunciation of the cancel culture, a practice of dismissing or denouncing those who hold dissenting opinions. She co-signed an open letter published on July 7 by Harper’s Magazine, in which 153 personalities deplore “Intolerance of opposing opinions, fashion (…) of public denunciation and the tendency to dissolve the complexity of political subjects in blind moral certainties ”.
Committed against anti-Semitism
Author of a recent book on the fight against anti-Semitism, a resurgent phenomenon in the United States, the journalist was appointed “Seventh most influential Jewish figure in the world” speak Jerusalem Post, Conservative Israeli daily, in 2019. An assumed Zionist, she is regularly quoted in the Israeli press. After the Pittsburgh synagogue slaughter in 2018, which left eleven dead, Bari Weiss had hoped that this drama ” wake up “ American Jews voters of Donald Trump, guilty, she said, “To have bargained for their Jewish values” in exchange for the pro-Israel policy of the US president.
The quarrel over “cancel culture” opposes many intellectuals in the United States
In the United States, the new left, born of the #metoo and Black Lives Matter movements, is believed to be at the origin of a phenomenon that worries many American intellectuals, the “Cancel culture”, in other words a tendency to want to do silence voices deemed dissonant, dangerous or hateful. Born on social networks, this phenomenon is reflected in mobilizations that have ended up causing resignations, dismissals, conference cancellations, etc. Five of the column’s authors we publish (Mark Lilla, Thomas Chatterton Williams, George Packer, David Greenberg and Robert Worth) are intellectuals committed to the defense of free speech. With the 150 personalities who joined their call, they believe that a fringe of the American radical left would thus practice a form of censorship. Published on the website of the American monthly Harper’s, this text should also be used in Germany, Spain and Japan.
Several recent events bear witness to these new tensions. At the beginning of June, the director of the “Opinion” pages of New York Times, James Bennet, was fired after a column signed by a Republican senator appeared calling for the army to be sent against violent protests. Both within the editorial staff of the New York daily and on social networks, this text aroused great emotion, some believing that it could undermine the security of black people. Without supporting the content of this article, other personalities felt that James Bennet had been sacked with dubious eagerness, as if it was necessary to satisfy angry Internet users as quickly as possible. Among the signatories of this forum are also several major signatures of the New York Times.
Another dismissal that sparked outrage was that of David Shor, a data analyst who was fired in early June by his employer, Civis Analytics, a political consulting firm close to the Democrats. Mr. Shor was accused of having retweeted the study of a researcher, from Princeton University (New Jersey), which tended to show that violent demonstrations, as there may have been recently in the United States – United in denouncing police violence, have a positive impact on the Republican vote. This attention to the harmful consequences of violent demonstrations had been considered by certain activists as a way of silencing the anger of black populations in the United States.
Other intellectuals do not share this vision of the debate on “Cancel culture”. On the contrary, they believe that it will make it possible to give more voice to minorities generally less or little heard. Still others believe that whistleblowers “Cancel culture” are on the wrong track: according to them, threats to freedom of expression come much more from the far right than from the radical left. They add that the use of intimidation and violence to silence its opponents would be first and foremost, in the United States, the act of white supremacists. They also recall that Donald Trump also harshly attacked the “Cancel culture” The 4th of July.
