AMERICA'S NEW PURITANS
“These Digital Age Puritans speak a new language but operate in an old mold. The liturgy is different but the preaching is the same.”
Photo Credit: Classic film comedians Laurel and Hardy do Thanksgiving.
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EDITORIAL
The Puritans are at it again. They're waving flags and demanding America's institutions and people conform to the strict orthodoxy they preach. I'm not talking about the Puritans who escaped religious persecution in Europe and migrated to America. I'm not even talking about the book-burning Comstocks of the Victorian Age. I'm talking about a new kind of Puritan.
These Digital Age Puritans speak a new language but operate in an old mold. The liturgy is different but the preaching is the same. They presume to tell you how to think. They demand you use words they themselves use, according to their own self-righteous judgment. And, like previous generations of Puritans, these Puritans cast you out of the community if you fail to comply-leaving you to wander alone in the wilderness of social media exile, without a job, or friends.
Sometimes the woke Puritans even burn their enemies at the stake. Not literally, of course (too much real work), but by the public pillory of Tweet, Gram and Post. They usually get the fire going by accusing victims off being "racist" or some kind of fill-in-the-blank "-phobe." Other times victims are accused of being "inappropriate" or some other kind of formless, baseless, slippery accusation Torquemada would have loved.
Still, truth be told, it's not like everything is all peachy in the Republic. There's a lot of work to be done to create a more equal and just America. I've been doing it for a big part of my life, at great personal cost. But the vision of the future I'm fighting for doesn't include coercing other people to see the world only like I see it. It doesn't include Puritanism of any kind. My vision is all about freedom, and liberation.
Woke Puritanism in all its cartoonish excess was on full-display in its attack on the New York Times over its coverage of trans issues.
The attack came in the form of an open letter written by a group of journalists, advocates and writers to Philip Corbett on Feb. 15. Corbett's the associate managing editor for standards at the Times. I've read the list. They're colleagues. Some of them are friends. They're largely, if not exactly, the same people who would cheer another Times' investigation of Donald Trump. But, when real, critical journalism doesn't serve their interests, agendas or dogmas, suddenly it's not legitimate anymore.
They challenged it the same way Trump did. Basically they called it Fake News. The Times' trans reporting, their open letter charged, was "an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources."
Sounds serious, right? But when you look it, closely, you see that the Wokesters' biggest beef was with a reporter's use of a two-word phrase to dramatically visualize for readers an isolated moment in time, a turning point: "patient zero."
No Times editorial called for new laws outlawing being trans. It was those two words.
A Digital Age mob formed on the Internet. Overheated rhetoric filled the electronic Town Square. The debate over what rights, if any, trans juveniles should have under the law wasn't a legitimate debate at all. If 11-year-olds wanted to chemically or even literally slice off their genitals they had every right to do it, whenever they felt like doing it, in every situation, all the time, regardless of what whoever was legally responsible for ensuring the kid's wellbeing and safety thought.
Merely questioning this orthodoxy was, for example, the equivalent of "attacks on trans young people," Esther Wang hyperventilated in Hellgate. "The Times is laundering anti-trans narratives," et cetera, et cetera, so-on and so-forth.
While New York's "woke" press was busy cannibalizing and canceling itself over adverbs and pronouns, The Free Lance was doing real journalism.
I exposed the ugly truth that a man who made millions from sex-trafficking, sometimes including minors, was funding news reporting and funneling millions of dollars into the institutions of journalism-including paying the salaries of some of the people and publications attacking the Times.
The Pimp in the Newsroom revealed Craig Newmark of Craigslist's ugly indifference to victims of sex-trafficking. Teenagers were sold to men to rape on the Internet website that bears his name, Craigslist, and Newmark's response was to defend his Cyberspace empire by falsely alleging journalists reporting it committed ethics violations.
Now he’s reshaping journalism with millions of dollars in donations to news organizations, colleges and institutions-and no one’s saying shit. Zero. Not a peep. Quiet as church mice. Even after Pimp in the Newsroom was published, still nothing. No one dared even re-Tweet it. What happened to Me Too?
One of the journalists who called out the Times for its trans coverage on Twitter made her career covering sex-worker issues. After I Tweeted Pimp in the Newsroom to her, The New Republic's Melissa Gira Grant checked out. She suddenly went on book leave from Twitter: "Logging off for a month to work on A WOMAN IS AGAINST THE LAW only, a huge gift."
Must be nice. To enjoy so much privilege.
Just a reminder, the Craig Newmark watch is 8 days old and counting.
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