On the whole, I simply love the NYT and have been an online subscriber for many years. My only beef has been the inability to comment promptly on a high percentage of NYT opinion pieces. Maybe that will change soon with more resources devoted to evenhanded staff moderation.
With that accolade sincerely said, I'm very displeased with the hiring of Ms Jeong. Big mistake that ought to be fixed pronto !
8
I would argue that the sheer volume and content of Sarah Jeong’s racist tweets very much reveal her true character since they span several (very recent) years. What they also reveal is a complete lack of maturity, an astounding lack of judgement, and the apparent inability to know the difference. These are hardly traits that should garner anyone a place on the editorial board of a major global news publication, much less one that wishes to maintain any shred of integrity.
Why the NYT is so willing to destroy any remaining credibility in defending her is puzzling. There had to have been better candidates for the position who weren’t tweeting their every sophomoric musing to the tune of over 100,000 tweets. Perhaps the NYT wanted a provocateur on board, but by lowering standards so much with this terrible decision, you’ve played right into Trumps hands. She is certainly not editorial board material and never should’ve been hired in the first place. The hypocrisy in defending that decision is astounding, regardless of how you try to spin it.
76
Bret Stephens white-man-splains why it's unacceptable to take offence at Jeong's hundreds of racist tweets, and welcomes her to the like-minded NYT editorial team.
Surely he gets some intersectional cred for this but it's unclear to me why we should now take seriously what some white male has to say about this subject. Seems to me this is insufficiently deferential, not rising to the level of Liz Williamson's graciously self-accusatory deletion of her own tweet on the matter.
9
There is something something fundamentally, eternally wrong with saying you get joy out of being cruel to people.
54
The real problem is white people haven't been given enough of a say in this country and, especially, the old, white man. They've been silenced for so long we forget that they have so much to offer. Thank you, Mr. Stephens for remembering the little guy and the downtrodden and lifting them back up after being held down by this Asian woman. Rise up, white guys!
2
The title of the famous Harry Frankfurter essay is an apt depiction of this column by Bret Stephens.
4
Compare the treatment of Sarah Jeong to that of Kevin Williamson at The Atlantic, from which he was preemptively fired in response to unearthed Tweets that look positively mild-mannered in comparison to these.
In this latest kerfuffle, the Times seems to have suddenly rediscovered the lost arts of hyberbole, irony, and other tools of intelligent discourse. Its official response read, in part:
"Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers."
I hope to see this sort of nuanced and contextual understanding of potentially inflammatory language the next time pitchforks are out for someone on the right.
24
I hope she devotes her first piece for the NYT to some Korean-American Womansplaining that the rest of us are clearly in need of. She should, because what she has tweeted is racist (and bigoted, and ageist, and who knows what else: I don't tweet or search them out; yours and Mr. Sullivan's pieces were more than enough).
And I commend you, Mr. Stephens, for writing this opinion. You are a better (white) man than I (a dyed-in-the-wool liberal). I seriously do not think I would have the stomach for it.
12
Mr. Stephens is being disingenuous.
He has hi-jacked a column ostensibly about Ms. Jeong's racist tweets to slyly make a case against her (and the "left") while issuing a mea culpa that blames the "furies" of social media for both instigator and victim of on-line nastiness.
It's like an opiate, he says. No one should be held accountable for their tweets because they're in an altered state with diminished capacity. Or at least judge and jury should exonerate her (and him) because online they are effectively children who can't help themselves.
He notes 103,000 tweets by Ms. Jeong over 9 years, or an average of 31 tweets a day, 20 more than Trump. The tweets he cites as prime examples barely register on the racism index. They're actually dull and unremarkable. They smack of teen snark. Not quite in the burning cross on a lawn hate category.
I personally wouldn't hire Ms. Leong. Not for tweets lacking tact or imagination. But for the sheer number -- 100,000 over 9 years. She clearly needs to signify herself by tweeting. That's a red flag for a journalist. Her job is to draw attention to what's newsworthy not to herself.
In an era of fake news, anyone who sees only the "Me" in Media is a liability. And 31 tweets a day on average over 9 years isn't recreational, it's an addiction.
I'm sure Ms. Leong is a good writer. She just doesn't belong on The Times editorial board.
51
There is a First Amendment right to say whatever you want, within certain (pretty wide) limits. There is no First Amendment right - or any other right - to be a New York Times columnist. I love political diversity on the NYT op ed page (I still remember fondly the great Safire - even if he was almost always wrong). But there are enough highly qualified journalists on both the right and the left to be able to pick one who went through life without racist public statements.
Some words open doors for you. And some words (should) close some doors for you as well.
53
"But you’ll struggle to find her articles on an internet search, because her serious work is overwhelmed by the controversy her tweets have generated." Bret Stephens NYT 8/9/2018
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."
Matthew 7:15-20 KJV
10
White people are surely thick-skinned enough to deal with some mean words thrown their way. My gripe with the Times is that they present her as a representative of the Millenial generation -- the generation to which I belong. If we are all truly as petty, mean-spirited and, this is the worst of all, witless as Ms. Jeong's tweets suggest, then we're in for some serious trouble when my compatriots takeover. It's one thing to write an insult -- she writes insults with such bad style that I can't see how anyone could be offended. What's the point of venom that can be neutralized by taking half a second to control the reflex to be outraged? She ain't no Lizzy Bennet, that's for sure.
17
The New York Times can hire any writer it chooses. I applaud the Times for hiring columnists from across the range of American political views. I hope that in its hiring process it will continue to value critical thinkers who do not view the world as a series of binary choices. People who think critically are typically not dualistic thinkers. Perhaps chronic tweeters, whether the President or Ms. Jeong, spend too much time in binary thought.
2
As a non-white non-christian male immigrant, I find the tweets by Sarah Jeong abhorrent.
There is no humor, satire or context-dependency in these tweets. This is racist vitriol. Plain & simple.
And this doesn't appear to be an isolated incident.
Racism isn't an exclusive characteristic of white christian supremacists only.
Many groups, defined by race, ethnicity, language or culture, all over the world have a world-view & belief-system grounded in their own superiority to the exclusion of others. Especially, more homogenous countries like (South) Korea or Japan.
And this notion has been used to justify horrific atrocities.
Again, not limited to white-on-black or christian-on-jew.
In today's multicultural world, there needs to be a zero-tolerance policy towards this sort of public behavior regardless which color or stripe it came from.
Being a good journalist, even a genius which I doubt she is, is not an excuse.
Given, the volume & time-span, it is safe to conclude that this is who she is.
She has the right to exercise her free-speech, just not the right to subject us to it via NYT.
NYT should reverse it's decision to hire her just like other companies in public sphere have done in similar cases.
52
I think many readers are missing the point. Stephen's column is ironic from start to finish. The solecism in the subtitle is the tip-off.
4
Fire her: It’s the decent thing to do.
58
"I’ve seen some acrobatic efforts to explain why Jeong’s tweets should be treated as “quasi-satirical,”
You need look no farther than The Times statement for that...
33
"Is it ultimately her fault for writing those ugly tweets? Yes. Does it represent the core truth of who she is? I doubt it. Anyone who has been the victim of the social-media furies knows just how distorting and dishonest those furies can be."
A few tweets. OK. This was a whole library of tweets, Bret.
And you work for the New York Times, a publication that comes down on the Tweeter-in-Chief like a ton of bricks, no matter that the tweets probably do not "represent the core truth of who he is."
Your effort here, sir, can be labeled graciously as "acrobatic."
50
I notice The Times moderates comments for civility. Does that only apply to readers, or do employees also have to demonstrate civility? If so, why aren't Ms Jeong's racist tweets disqualifying? How can The Times call out Donald Trump's all too obvious racism if it finds excuses to ignore the racism of its own employees? Ms Jeong is presumably an adult and aware that what she writes on social media does not evaporate into the ether but remains virtually forever. Therefore, wouldn't it have been more prudent, not to mention more appropriate, to make reasoned arguments rather than impulsive, nasty, racist tweets? Moreover, why would The Times want to hire someone who has repeatedly behaved with such poor judgment?
58
Brett, why refer to Sarah Jeong as a "Korean-American" and Max Book as "American." Yes, they were born in other countries, as were my children, but they are and forever will be Americans. I am no snowflake, and have long admired your writing, but personally, I am insulted.
9
This is all a little loose with the racism label. Racism is about power and she has little.
3
If all of the "old white men" who Ms. Jeong admits that "it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to" were to give up their subscriptions (like my 80 year old father - a customer for 60 years), the NYTimes would be out of business in a day. Why does the NYTimes not care to defend or stick up for them? And many of her tweets were just that - tweets - unprovoked, non-reactionary, not a response to trolling= just her random thoughts, feelings, and values.
50
I worked for 30+ years in industry, wrote tens of thousands of emails, and never once wrote anything overtly racist or sexist. If I had, I would have lost my job. It's not that hard to show empathy toward other races and the opposite sex. So when a writer specifically writes things that are meant to be hateful, doesn't that sort of mean that they aren't qualified to be a writer for a publication that wants to be taken seriously? The hiring of Sarah Jeong by the NYT only gives cover to right-wing haters being hired by another publication. Is this really the best we can do?
34
So the gods in the executive offices at this newspaper will determine when words matter and when they don't.
The words that the new hire used in her Twitter rants against an entire race of people don't matter.
But the words she's going to write here in the editorial section do matter, to the extent that we should actually want to read them and believe them.
This is difficult to accept.
31
What makes you think that her tweets are not exactly the reason the New York Times hired her? (Is there a nationwide shortage of smart and interesting people?) You can’t actually believe your employer is that oblivious. They hand-picked you to be an anti-Trump Republican. If you change your mind about the President, you’re gone. You know their business model.
21
“Don’t judge a book by its cover” in 2018 seems to translate to “don’t judge people by its past Internet posts”
Before Bret joined the NYT I haven’t read him much. I felt “terrified” that a climate change denialist would join the fact-based newspaper of record. I envisioned a Krugman-Stephens Big Brawl.
But Bret has turned out to be one of my favorite columnists. Not only did both of us study elementary school in Mexico City, but he has an interesting approach to subjects. I may not agree to half of his columns, but I respect his writings.
I expect Ms. Jeong to be a great hire as well.
It is very easy to get one’s internet history out of context and destroy character. It is a lot of work to look past the surface and reveal the real personality of people. I trust the NYT on the vetting process
2
I highly recommend this article on the problem with Twitter and "context collapse." It's the most perceptive thing I've read so far on why this format has got us all hell-bent on misunderstanding each other. Long, but worth reading in full.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/8/8/17661368/sarah-jeong-twitter-new...
2
There are two important caveats that have to be considered here. First, Jeong is not being hired merely as a contributor or someone who merely writes. Instead she is being hired as a member of the editorial team - a position from which she will have the ability to greatly influence the overall coverage and writing of a much wider sphere of NYT articles.
Second, Jeong frankly never disavowed or apologized for her comments. Her mealy-mouthed statement on it essentially tries to excuse it by painting her as the victim who was simply reverse trolling, and while she says she, "can understand how hurtful these posts are out of context, and would not do it again," there is no actual apology.
The NYT should be ashamed of itself for this hire. If Ms Jeong wants to be judged on something other than these tweets than a good place to start would be to actual disavow the comments entirely instead of essentially saying, "well these people deserved to be racially insulted because they were being mean to me."
46
I've been a subscriber to the NYT since the subscription service started, and read the opinion page daily. I also happen to be white and middle aged. Why are my subscription dollars now providing a platform for a racist that in particular hates me?
No doubt that if I had ever made similar comments about young Korean American women Sarah Jeong would be completely unforgiving to me.
45
Actually, I’m out of touch I guess because I noticed on Twitter this week that a lot of people had strong feelings about her. I have to admit one of her Tweets seemed funny in a sarcastic way. I really haven’t been on social media that much since the Election. I can’t handle the outrage & the lies. Mr. Williamson should have genuinely apologized, dropped “hanging women” & got to keep his job. I’ve read him before in the past, but it didn’t involve hanging. It will be interesting having a new columnist &
I wish her luck.
3
C’mon NYT: Do the right thing. Fire Sarah Jeong. Show some respect for your readers, most of whom, judging from these comments, are horrified by your questionable decision.
40
I just ended my subscription. I am very much disappointed on how the indefendable is defended. And for what reason?
37
Just more rationalization.
Jeong is a problem and you know it.
45
7-day Subscriber (almost 30 years). First time writer. Actually, second time. The first was Monday when I wrote a letter to the Editor registering my dismay at the hiring of Sarah Jeong. Stephens is wrong if he thinks this is a left and right issue. Many lefties, such as myself, are seriously ticked off at the NYT for hiring Ms. Jeong. Nothing she has to say on technology is worth the paper's sacrifice of the moral high ground. Her tweets were racist and indefensible. Is the Gray Lady now agreeing with Trump that there are very fine people on both sides? As I said in my letter, I am having a crisis of conscience. I have not decided whether to cancel my subscription, but I have lost so much respect for NYT.
46
Did I miss something here? There's a big difference between somebody whose tweets are racist and somebody who calls for killing a large chunk of the population, at least for now.
I don't get the Times hire. I guess NYT doesn't need my subscription. Why should I pay to read unsigned editorials by somebody who apparently hates me because of my skin color?
42
If a white man or woman had tweeted the sordid type of comments that Ms. Sarah Jeong has, the Times wouldn’t have given a thought to hiring them. Instead, the “Paper of Record” has given Ms. Jeong a bully pulpit. The Times does, indeed, use a double standard when it suits the editors.
38
Swap anyone else for "white" in her tweets and she'd be unemployable anywhere but Fox News.
Her views are abhorrent. Shame on the Times.
29
Laughable if it weren't so depressing to watch writers turn themselves inside out trying to defend/explain away racists comments spewed forth from the mind of Sarah Jeong - not once but over a period of years. Based on her own words, she loathes white people - you, your mothers, your sisters, your daughters, your wives. She particularly hates your fathers, your brothers, yours sons, your husbands. NYT has given this woman a platform from which to express her divisive views. God luck, NYT; you have to work with her, but I don't have to read her. Subscription Cancelled.
39
There are many reasons why Ms. Jeong's hiring is troublesome. 1) The Times has never hesitated to be critical of this awful President, nor any right-wing lunatic who has crossed the line regarding offensive speech. Is offensive, hateful speech merely to be judged by who has spoken it? 2) Ms. Joeng is not a long-standing Times employee, but a new hire. Readers can now only assume that Ms. Jeong was hired, in part, due to this speech, not despite it. 3) Ms. Jeong was not hired to write about technology, but will sit on the Times editorial board and her voice will be anonymous. Readers must now question how someone who can spew such hate, not once but repeatedly, will skew the Times' editorial voice. Moreso, it becomes that much easier for readers to dismiss that voice out of hand. Isn't it bad enough to have a President calling the Times' credibility into question without the Times itself doing the job for him? 4) Some claim Ms. Joeng's tweets cannot be racist by saying that she, as an Asian in America, has traditionally been without power. She spoke of her enjoyment of 'being cruel to old white men'. How can one be cruel to another without having any power over them? Did the Times ask her in what ways she enjoyed being cruel, or was it regarded as simply a tasteless joke? I assume it's the latter, and so readers must now question why the Times would choose to hire someone with such a lack of self-control or self-censorship to speak for the entirety of the NYT staff. Pity them.
28
Finally cancelled my NYT subscription. I love a bit of hypocrisy... up to a point.
32
Sarah Jeong should be fired. The fact that she is a good technology writer, a woman, Korean is irrelevant. She made racist comments repeatedly (even once is too many). The New York Times cannot condone racism let alone accept the racism of its staff. We cannot allow double standards. Her vitriol is indicative of a horrible character. A person cannot be allowed to be a racist because he is a superb cook, a wonderful tennis player, a Latinist who really understands what the Virgil really meant, a philatelist and opera lover. I am borrowing from Sartre's inimitable "Anti-Semite and Jew," of course but words of wisdom are applicable over time as we all know.
31
By her tweets so shall Ms Jeong be known. She owns what she said same as Frank Gunn owns his, and the reason why he was fired by Disney. To believe, as she states, that the only reason why she issued forth her brazen and disgusting anti-white racist tweets was to attack her her detractors on their turf -- namely the gutter. Straight, white Christian men are an easy target, since they don't protest with traffic-stopping marches. For the editorial board of the Times, including Dean Baquet, to sanction the hiring of Ms. Jeong, despite all that she stands for and all that she has voiced, is to reveal a disgusting double standard. Shame on everybody involved in this misbegotten enterprise. What would Mr. Baquet say if Ms Jeong tweeted "Cancel blacks"? I wonder.
27
i am old and white and i do not deserve such bad words from a spoiled degenerate person who thinks she is all that and then some... geez.. what has the world become...
27
The Times should be able to attract fascinating minds to write for it without having to settle for a bomb thrower. How is this the best hiring decision the Times could make?
26
All the people who think saying racist and hateful things about white people is okay helped elect President Trump and will help reelect him or someone even worse as his successor. Telling white people especially ones who aren't rich and powerful that they are oppressors and should just suck it up when people like Jeong say these things has helped lead us to a horrible place and it will only get worse. Then of course the left can just blame it on more white racism and privilege.
29
Sarah Jeong may be an intelligent woman, but that's not what matters the most to the Times. What matters the most is that she's an Asian woman, and that's the #1 reason she was hired. Of course she's not going to be fired for writing a bunch of anti-white tweets, because anti-whiteness is "woke" right now. Of course it's a different set of standards and, yes, it's 100% attributable to the fact that she's a POC. Welcome to the reason D. Trump is president, and thank the NYT for his re-election in 2020. Double standards aren't an attractive look for anyone.
37
I am relieved to see this column. My faith in the NYT is always teetering when they make decisions that seem horribly slanted. I continue to be a subscriber because if you stay off the op ed pages, this is one magnificent source of well written and well resourced news information. Please Keep reminding yourselves that there is a higher calling than sarcastic mean rejoinders.
4
The Times has cast its die for Jeong, and turning back now would make it look weak and indecisive, so that probably won't happen. But the question remains, were there really no other eminently qualified candidates for this editorial position who didn't post a series of racist tweets over an extended time period?
19
There is a common thread to her thinking -- also a pattern. Sadly -- the hire reflects as much on the NYT.
The paper has been the discussion among friends -- it's slipping .. seems to pander (being kind). Short term profits at the expense of reputation ... never works. The NYT should challenge, not tell people what they want to hear. This hire and defense of same is a mistake.
18
Just how talented is this person? She's a technology writer - not Dostoyevsky. Is she worth all this trouble??
As other commenters point out - her writing is now permanantly tainted by this controversy and from here on out, every word she pens will examined for what racist overtones it may imply.
But admittedly the Times is in a really tough spot. They can fire her and let her story be yet another case of overreaction to some irrelevant jokes someone made at some point in the past or they can keep her and waste valuable space on their pages with work that will be forever received as suspect.
10
Well done, Bret. The comparison to drugs as "social media as narcotic" is interesting, but unless everyone on social media is on drugs, one can't excuse those undigested thoughts and mental burps. Pause before Tweeting or hitting send and ask if you would say that in person.
Perhaps the answer is to think before you post anything on social media
4
The hiring of this woman says a lot more about the NYT than about her. Unbelievable. Who is in charge over there?
28
i dunno, man. these tweets are not isolated, unfortunate mistakes. those i am happy to overlook. they are consistent and many. if they are sarcasm- thats also fine with me. but if not sarcasm, but just a string of despicable, racist tweets, over and over, then i think bret is giving her too much of a pass. substitute the word "white" for "dirty jew", or the "n" word, over and over, and that should clarify things.
21
I really don't get it. Are you saying that we should welcome her to the editorial page although she is a racist because she can write some thoughtful articles? That it's okay for minorities in our country to express racist viewpoints? She speaks in generalities about specific groups like our racist President. This liberal is unhappy that she is given a place at the Times. Actually, as someone said, in wine there is truth.
20
Sarah Jeong published her piece condemning frat brothers at the University of Virginia as the rapists of “Jackie Coakley” well AFTER the Rolling Stone retracted the story.
She has denied, in print, that the Duke Lacrosse team was falsely accused of rape. Even though the DA was disbarred for their wrongful prosecution years ago.
She has published other long-form articles condemning due process of law. Even though she is a 2014 graduate of Harvard Law School.
She is the criminal justice and civil liberties equivalent of a climate change denier.
By hiring her the Times Editorial Board is clearly endorsing her very extreme positions.
41
The NYTs hiring Sarah has been a gift to the Alt Right.
Consider this: if Sarah was a white man and in her tweets replaced the word "White" with "Black", would have the NYTs hired her? That is a legitimate question.
28
Folks, it’s really pretty simple. Substitute “black” for “white” in Ms. Jeong’s tweets and try to convince me there is a snowball’s chance in Hades that the NY Times would hire her.
17
To me it is simple, discrimination and or hatred based on skin color, religion, ethnicity or culture is bigotry, regardless of which groups are involved. Bigotry against non-Jewish whites is still appalling and unacceptable. Jeong’s defense was insincere and showed a complete lack of self-reflection and maturity. She simply selected two tweets racist against her and claimed they justified her years of persistent racism and bigotry.
The Times defense of her was even worse, claiming they had condemned these tweets when she was hired despite the fact she continued these tweets after joining the times. Furthermore, the claim from NYT that racism against whites is acceptable is baffling and reprehensible. It seems to me that NYT must have recognized the persistent pattern of racial hatred in her tweets, and because they hired her they have now endorsed it.
I cannot support bigotry and racial hatred in any form, and thus I sadly had to cancel my NYT subscription after over 10 years. The paper has let its professional and moral standards erode in an attempt to to appeal to the far-left. It’s deplorable and I have taken my money to WSJ instead, who does not employ racists and encourage racial hatred.
25
As we see more and more clearly tweeking is for twits and therefore only twits tweet.
6
I wonder if Bret feels he has to defend Jeong only because he defended Williamson and now he has to be fair. Or because she's coming and he knows he will have to work with her. Because the statement that you can't even find her serious work because of all the tweets and their impact isn't the best argument for why we should ignore them.
6
I'm sorry. The comments are horrific and incocnsistent with the expressed values of the the NYT. They would never hire any white male who tweeted anything similar about anyone else. There is no ideology there just childish spewing.
37
The Times will never admit it might have erred in hiring a particular writer.
15
Let’s do a thought experiment. Take some of Ms. Jeong’s tweets and substitute the words Blacks or Jews where the word white was used.
Would the Times be hiring her or defending her?
22
This reminds me of the advice often given to college students not to post photos of themselves drunk at the frat party on Facebook, because prospective employers will google them and they may lose job offers. I don't see why that advice should apply any less to either Jeong or Williamson.
12
Is the NYT going to respond to all these comments and do something? Or is it another exercise in futility just for people to vent their outrage and the editors do absolutely nothing. This lady should be fired. Racism is not acceptable in no shape and form.
40
Look at all these comments, NYTimes. Your own readers overwhelmingly want a race-blind definition of racism, and consistent treatment of offenders. You are failing them. Wake up.
58
NY Times: two wrongs make a right
15
Poor Stephens. He needs to take a course in Basic Satire, so he can recognize satire for what it is. As things are, he probably thinks Swift, the author of “A Modest Proposal,” is a rapacious member of England’s kleptocracy. Ms. Jeong was simply borrowing the language of white racists and turning it against them. Her only sin puts her in Swift’s company; both authors assume their readers know how to read. She perhaps did not assume that second-rate and corrupt stooges like Fox’s Tucker Carlson would respond with faux-outraged demagoguery. She no doubt now sees that subtlety and literacy are not recognized in Facebook. I have no doubt that the NYT will enrich and enliven its editorial pages by giving her a forum.
1
Well the swiftian scholarship tells us that no one reader or centuries readers can say what swift intended. That’s why the swifties love him... he’s a slippery satirist... not quite sure who or what is really being satirized
Sometimes it helps to replace "white" with "black". Ask yourself, would she get fired if she had said that she "enjoys being cruel to old black men"? There's your answer. You can't fight hate with hate.
21
She can write, but she shouldn't be on the NY Times editorial board.
12
#cancelwhitepeople??? How about #cancelracism, #cacelbigotry and #cancelhate? Has Ms. Jeong apologized for these racist comments? Has she taken responsibility? If so, great—we can all grow and change. If not, she should not be working at the Times.
14
White people don't need protection.
1
The NYT is moving down a slippery slope.
What if a Chinese woman tweets: « i hate Blacks »
Is that ok? Why not?
28
Thanks for the common sense Bret. More is needed everywhere
1
I’m an old white guy, so I guess I get lumped into a group that Sarah Jeong doesn’t much care for, at least when she’s on Twitter. But I think a lot of commenters might want to temper their outrage with a little humility. After all that our race has done to Blacks, Asians, Native Americans and Latinos, I can understand a little bitterness on the part of people who don’t share the privilege of being white.
I’ve been pulled over by cops, but never thought it had to do with my race so much as my driving (speeder), and I’ve never thought the interaction might possibly result in my death. I’ve never seen photos of someone of my race hanging from a tree surrounded by laughing, smiling people of another race. My family doesn’t have memories of losing everything during World War II and being imprisoned in camps because of their race.
So, yeah, she’s got a thing about white people. And she apparently has a thing about social media. My favorite line in the column is this: “[It’s] a reason to treat social media approximately the way we do opioids: with utmost caution.” By now it should be apparent to all just how poisonous social media can be. And how long-lasting are its effects.
Apparently, the people who interviewed Ms. Jeong found a person who’s a good writer capable of balancing different points of view and coming at issues with a set of insights the Times finds valuable. I think I’ll go with their judgement on the subject.
1
If she tweets 30+ times a day, as the article say, in Tweeter one can find pretty good representation of the way her brain operates. And yes, her calculated, measured articles would be "smart and interesting". Of course, but... and here we go. A huge, unavoidable BUT. The rule "you are not allowed to hate on the other people" should be valid to all. Or throw it out of the window completely.
15
Her tweets were nasty, you made me give her a chance
2
Yes, even Homer nods. And stoned behavior must be closely examined before treating it metonymically.
But it is finally a question of limits to the number of faux pas and to just how far beyond the pale they extend. It is not smarts, not enviable articulation, not impressive - or even unique insights - in the unexceptionable material.
And finally it's a matter of quot homines, tot sententiae.
2
Racism is about power. It is a social construct created by whites/Anglos/caucasians to solidify and maintain dominance. So miss me with this silliness of people of color being "racist." Irish were once classified as "Indian" until their assimilation and whiteness got them the pass. Asians, blacks, etc. cant do that. The right's distorted views on race and convenient false equivalencies would be comical if they weren't so self-serving and poisonous. I'm a white man. How has her tweet othered or hurt me, really? Is it as scary as the real threat of lynching? Twitter is a trap and has burned many. Yeah she tweeted some stupid things. If she goes she goes. But let's be real here. Faux outrage on the right to excuse or downplay their repugnant behavior. Again.
1
Say what you like on Twitter, but know your words live on. Should those who write professionally be held to a higher standard? Of course. As a pro, does your Twitter account reflect upon your employers, current and future? Of course. Should journalists be especially wary about making themselves the story, and their output in that context? Heck, yeah. For instance, the Bari Weiss ‘Immigrants get it done’ Tweet made me wince. I’d call it unskillful, and stop there. If not for the later ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’ appearance griping about Twitter coming down on her like...Twitter. Enough said?
4
As a left-leaning democrat from NYC who grew up with the NYT at the family breakfast table in the 70s, and a sociology degree from CUNY where I worked with Democratic Socialists like Stanley Aronowitz, I'm very upset to see this nonsense playing out at the Times. Let's get real, shall we? Defending Sarah Jeong is absolutely bonkers. She has made her views well known in many serious tweets, in video-taped lectures including one archived at Harvard U's website where she stated that " Everything is implicitly organized around how men see the world; and not just men but White men. And this is a problem. This is why so many things suck." She also attacked the very liberal NPR on Twitter, labeling it, "“National/ Pretty g#%ddam white/ Radio,”[edited expletive]. Another gem reads thus: “I figured it out. Powerful white women automatically receive officer status in Club Feminism. Unless they disavow." Why attack "white feminists?"
I'm less upset about Jeong herself than the NYT decision to allow this to drag out, in effect giving a huge gift to the GOP less than 100 days before the most significant midterms in several years. Do you really think that moderate swing voters in middle-America who seecoverage of this on CNN or Fox News will be as forgiving as Bret Stephens? And when clips of Ms. Jeong hating on "white men" from behind a Harvard Lectern is used in GOP advertisements, will they see it as innocuous? I doubt it.
46
As an old white man, perhaps it isn't up to me to judge Ms Jeong's tweets. Having said that, I'm a bit disappointed that she would seem to want to judge me as something because of the color of my skin and my age.
I'm certainly willing to acknowledge that had twitter or something similar existed 40 or 50 years ago I might have said something that would today offend someone.
I'd like to think I've grown over the years and become more aware of the advantages I've had and understand how my advantages were often someone else's disadvantages.
The only way someone like me, an old white man, can begin to understand how Ms Jeong, or anyone else, feels is to hear what they have to say and recognize how, if they are truthful, it defines how they see the world.
Just as I am the sum or my experiences, so is everyone else.
So Ms Jeong should continue to tweet or write about how she sees the world.
But I'm just an old white man - what do I know.
2
Mr. Stephens notes the harmful effects of tweeting on public discourse in this country, but fails to draw the obvious conclusion that serious people should limit their use of such a medium. I find it astonishing that someone like Ms. Jeong could find the time to tweet so often and still get anything useful done, although she obviously does.
The very shallowness of much of what apparently appears on twitter strongly suggests that many people who feel the urge to share their every thought with the world really do not have that much to say. And if Jeong was using the medium to constantly vent her anger and annoyance, she was engaging in behavior we usually associate with juveniles.
11
Excellent column! I completely agree. (But even if I didn’t agree, it’s still a well-formed and we’ll-written argument.)
Whether tweets, facebook postings or any other new media channel, what is published there should be seen as no less (& no more) meaningful than any traditional print channel comment or article. When we start dancing around complicated arguments (or excuses) why we should ignore repeated past comments as unrepresentative of someone's viewpoints, something is wrong.
I assume The Times staff knows what they are doing on the hiring front, so I always welcome a new journalist to The Times as an opportunity to consider a new or different viewpoint. However, I won't waste my time with pre-baked or unexamined viewpoints especially if they become a pattern.
If she repeats mistakes from the past we'll know it. There isn't much tolerance from Times readers for soft or attrius filled arguments.
2
Twitter appears to be like a sewage filtration plant for the online worlds' collective private thoughts, except that its effluent is the most fetid and foul of the ordure input into it.
To me, the most disqualifying thing about Sarah Jeong is that she is a technology writer, who apparently does not understand that publicly tweeting her worst impulses will inevitably come back to haunt her.
18
Before social media, one could flippantly or unwisely say something that didn't reflect your core values and few would be the wiser, and even fewer, if any, could prove that you had said it. Humans have grown up to that world over thousands of years. Not to mention that we aren't as evolved past our ape forebears as we like to think. Our snarkiness rarely went beyond our physically immediate social circle, who knew whether or not that was who we really were, and would forgive us for it even if it was because other parts of us were worth being friends with anyway.
We just aren't yet used to wielding social media as wisely as we should, so it's effects are wildly out of proportion to the fullness behind any post - especially for Twitter, which demands that one be dangerously brief by its very nature. I find Jeong's problem tweets to be foolishly parodical; foolishly, because too many won't get it or there is not a lot of room for such parody in the world these days.
That being said; when one uses a tool that may be beyond one's ability to use wisely, it pays to be extra careful. And expect to have to pay when one screws up. Hopefully, though, the payment will be proportionate to the actual crime.
1
When the NYT publishes an editorial denouncing behavior of Donald Trump, it can do so because it speaks from a position of moral authority. With the addition to the editorial board of someone who engages in the same type of media behavior as the president (or worse), they have surrendered that authority. The thought that the other members of the editorial board saw fit to invite such a person into their number suggests that, perhaps they too have equally egregious skeletons in their closets, of which the public is ignorant. So is the public confidence in the NYT editorial board eroded.
48
@David K.I could not agree more. The type of behavior she exhibits is identical to Trump - albeit with different targets. Should this be the voice of the editorial board? Really?
15
The kids nowadays, (and that contains some pretty old people) have been raised on the habit of airing all their dirty laundry on the internet. Who among us that's past, say, 40 would have EVER thought of posting nude photos for all the world to gape at until the end of eternity? Typing 'self-examining prose' all by yourself in a room of your own, is like thinking, only instead of just dismissing it when a new thought pops into your head, you hit 'send . . .' Deed done - to the end of eternity.
1
How amazingly sad that this still needs to be explained.
Her Tweets cannot be called racist, because, in America, racism is exclusive to white people. There is no such thing as a Korean-American woman being racist against white people, because racism is institutional. It's about one group of humans attempting to establish supremacy over another. This cannot be applied to anyone except white people, because there has never been a time when Asian-Americans controlled everything and denied white people their rights based on the color of their skin. Only white people have done this in America. And thus they are the only ones who can be accused of racism.
Could you call her Tweets bigoted or crass or offensive? Sure, I guess. (I'm a white male, and they are certainly not offensive to me. I recognize that they are jokes. Maybe to some thinner-skinned white men who are uncomfortable at the suggestion of their supremacy being challenged they are offensive. But not to me.)
It is exhausting that this still needs to be said. The author should know what the word racism means by now.
3
Read the comments. Your stipulated definition of racism is not the accepted meaning of the term. It is an invention of radical academics. The definition of racism is prejudice or discrimination based on race or ethnicity.
Nor does "power plus prejudice" even make sense -- "power" in this country or abroad is not held exclusively by white people to the exclusive detriment of non-white people in all contexts. Don't liberals tout intersectionality?
Can a black person be racist against a Korean person? Vice versa? Or course. And these different flavors of racism can have a negative effect of our communities. Remember the L.A. riots?
Racism exists in many countries among many different ethnicities and is frequently "reversed" in different contexts.
We can argue about the relative harm or frequency of racism in different contexts but liberals asserting that anti-white racism can't exist is a conclusion without justification.
29
@Patrick Only whites can be racist? One hopes this comment is meant as satire.
17
Why has there been so little reporting on what Sarah Jeong's tweets were responding to?
Roseanne Barr did not post a racist tweet in a response to bullying. She posted it because she wanted to bully someone.
Jeong's tweets didn't happen out of the blue. They were RESPONSES to ugly and nasty attacks on her. She was fighting back.
The white racist alt-right tweeters got a taste of their own medicine and like all bullies they want their victim to suffer for fighting back.
Most of us understand that hitting is wrong. We also understand that if someone is getting punched over and over again by bullies, for her to finally throw a punch BACK is understandable. The bullies can't stand having their actions turned back at them, which is what Jeong did. Jeong gave the bullies back what they gave her. More democrats should fight back when the right bullies them. When they don't, you get Trump.
Fighting back against bullies is not bullying. More people should do it.
3
@RJ.
Because there's nothing to report, Jeong wasn't responding to anything. She herself quoted just two examples, one of which is not even racial. Of course we all would love to see more specifics.
22
@areader
Wait, you think the two tweets she mentioned -- which are too offensive to post here -- are perfectly fine and the people who tweeted them should be able to keep their jobs but Jeong - in replying to them - should not?
1
@RJ
Her hundreds tweets were not responses to those two tweets.
Those tweets are not fine but I don't care about those tweets, their authors, their jobs??!! - as I didn't care care about Jeong's tweets and about her until it became a story about NYT.
It's Twitter, there exists ANYTHING. Who pays attention to piles and piles of idiotic garbage spewed there by unknown to you people?
2
I totally agree. I wish that twitter was never created because I see no real value in it except that it lets people vent without context or nuance. Increasingly -- perhaps because our president uses it to bully or malign -- it is simply a tool of hate or bigotry. Useless.
"But the criteria for racism is either objective or it’s meaningless"
It's either contextual or it's meaningless.
One person is tired of the same group running the show for 5,000 years and uses the word "cancel" to express that. A 2nd person applies the same word to one of the many groups that members of the first group have tried to wipe out over the centuries. In the first case it's like wishing a tired old sitcom would be cancelled. In the second case, it's a call to genocide. If you can't see the objective difference, you're not capable of giving a perspective that adds value to the NYT.
Now if she advocated hanging 10s of millions of white men, then I'd see the equivalence with Williamson's tweet and podcast, and I'd say cancel 'em both. But so far I don't see it. Dig if you must, and by all means report back to us if she literally advocated executing millions, as Williamson did (as did Trump, btw).
1
Good Lord! I finally became suspicious enough of every commenter here to actually read Jeong and Williamson.
Neither of them meant to be taken literally. Context really does matter. Jonathan Swift would never stand a chance in today's media environment.
2
If you want to be taken seriously, seriously control your use of social media, especially broadcasting random thoughts on twitter. It's going to be hard for Sarah to gain any traction if everything she does is seen through the lens of her twitter history.
2
103000 tweets?! My. my. I can see one or three tweets being an 'undigested thought' or something the writer would soon regret having said in the spur of that quite particular moment. Such is the immediacy of social media. But thousands of utterances (for that is what they are) of rather dubious content? She may call it satirical - but I may correct her by saying its satirical racism, thrown out there so many times she might actually mean it.
5
After being turned down for a teaching position, the director of the department said, "I'd hire you in a minute if you weren't a white male."
How could I respond to such a racist, sexist comment? Without words was my answer. I left San Francisco for a more tolerant place: Munich, Germany.
33
Comments from leftist extremists in this opinion piece easily demonstrate Stephens' point. That "we" live off-line and throw bricks at one another there is deeply disturbing to me. I'm an old dude and it bothers me that too many cannot see beyond the tweets, and don't have the attention span to read anything more than three sentences. It's in the longer texts that one more clearly perceives a person's character, and/or understands complicated issues. When dealing with people, almost everything is a complicated issue. By the way, "othering" is not a verb.
2
Look, as soon as she found out she might get a job with the Times, she said she was sorry she'd done it and she wouldn't do it any more. What more can we ask?
Sincerely,
Old White Man
9
Great column!
The most popular Times picks were mostly against the hiring of Sarah Jeong. I'm a dyed in the wool liberal, but I, too, don't think that anyone should receive a pass for offensive tweets.
However, this column took a broader view by providing an original and thought-provoking alternative to my own opinion.
What I expect from New York Times columnists is exactly what I got. Thanks, Mr. Stephens!
4
Nazis are marching in the streets, but, yeah, let's cry about how mean Ms. Jeong is. Unbelievable.
1
Exactly. Also, we should not be outraged over arson and robbery because murders are still taking place. Also, we should not be outraged about murder because war is taking place. Also, we should should not be outraged about war because it’s not as bad as genocide.
31
Should not the paid columnists for the NYT be held to the same standards as the gratis commentators are?
46
The most I can hope is that the NY Times leadership is putting some time and thought into whether they truly want to continue down this path.
I'm a huge fan of Sarah Jeong's twitter coverage of the Oracle trial. It's amazing performance journalism.
The series of tweets she wrote are not acceptable *regardless of context*. They're just divisive. They're indistinguishable from true racists. I have read many arguments giving context to her tweets (for example, virulent anti-asian and anti-woman invectives were hurled her way, her replies were meant in jest/satire, and even 'racism only occurs when a powerful class mistreats a powerless one'), but frankly, these are situations where Jeong simply could have not replied, through self-control, or made replies that, when dredged up later, made her appear as a mature adult.
The problem is that by doubling down after these tweets were uncovered, the Times puts itself in a very poor position of acting as a polarizer. It sends a message that the Times- the editorial board as well as the article philosophy supports a number of progressive opinions that, I feel, affects the Times' credibility as a news source. I feel like the Times is taking sides, and it's taking sides with a person who chooses to exacerbate racism by participating in it.
I implore the Times to un-hire Jeong and admit this was a very divisive and questionable decision, while also deploring the nature of discourse in social media.
33
It's not surprising that there is a proportional relationship between the quality of one's utterances and the degree of difficulty that it takes to inscribe them. In the history of publishing Twitter is probably the easiest and cheapest way to memorialize one's thoughts, and in the case of Twitter I use the word thoughts hesitantly. More often than not they are just a string of phonemes. I suppose there is value in capturing every mental fart that wafts it's way from most Twitter aficionados but given how little time or energy is required to inscribe them, I hard pressed to figure out what value they have.
4
Go rationize Jeong’s pattern of behavior to Justine Sacco and the many like her who have been shamed, lost their jobs and have essentially been exiled for one bad, or taken out of context tweet.
16
Social media brings to life the biblical adage about she who is without sin cast the first stone. I wonder if the Times would have been as forgiving of a potential employee who disparaged people of color 130,000 times during the past 10 years. Perhaps there is something to be said abut youthful indiscretions and the lack of young people's realization that footprints in social media are indelible. So long as the policy is equally exercised, we should take Ms. Jeong at her word and judge her on her future actions
2
Maybe those who have given it out for centuries should have to take it for a few decades, in order to get to a point where we can enjoy ethnic jokes without ascribing truth to them, and hear racist comments as disparaging the makers and not the subjects. Huck Finn used the n-word but knowingly revolted against his society's norms.
I’m a boomer and I’d wager that the things we said and did 20 or 30 years ago - if meticulously cataloged and available for all to see/hear/read - would result in our ostracism for one thing or another. I’m glad they weren’t. Perhaps that’s why I don’t do any social media, even Facebook....I feel like I’ve already gotten away with enough and, you know...the law of averages.
3
I admire these very sensible words. I don't happen to agree but it is so refreshing to read a thoughtful comment these days. For my money, the sourness of Sarah's words make me wonder how she might fit it among people of greater emotional stability, but still: Brett's defense shows compassion and a refined sense of fair play.
1
Franco. Mussolini and a myriad of Dictators were 'lively' souls by necessity and the millions of their followers obviously believed they had integrity, maturity, and talent.
When ideology becomes the litmus test, we’re on the road to Pravda, be assured you are not on the road to Pravda even if some people accuse you of liking arms with that organ from time to partisan time, most unfair in my view. Then you drop in 'ideology' with heavy import on that word as the litmus test. The term 'ideology' requires a little more exposition than a one word depth charge. For ideology designates a system of representations that offers the subject an imaginary, compelling, sense of reality in which crucial contradictions of self and social order appear resolved. On that account there is ideology aplenty in your argument. Further, Ideology is imaginary not because it is in any sense unreal, but because it gives the subject an image that satisfies an unconscious need for coherence.
So your reader reads your stout defence (aux barricades citoyens of the left) of your new colleague. your reader ponders on this prickly affair, 'it was testing my leftist credentials. But now I have coherence', ergo your ideology has worked. This is a well written piece, however
under the fine words it conveys a saloon bar finality that
asks one to believe that those tweets were no more than a mirage.
2
The first stone should be cast at Bret Stephens.
Is he aware that according to NY Times recent decree Ms. Jeong can no longer tweet?
Or use Facebook.
Or Instagram.
Or Facebook?
Within three weeks of blasting those who believe NFL players have no First Amendment right to use the football field to make political statements, executive editor, Dean Baquet, issued a memo about social media warning NY Times reporters not to use their “vibrant presence” on these platforms to express their own, uh, deeply felt fears and grievances.
Mr. Baquet says “the key points” are as follows:
• “In social media posts, our journalists must not express partisan opinions, promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation.
• “Our journalists should be especially mindful of appearing to take sides on issues that The Times is seeking to cover objectively.
• “These guidelines apply to everyone in every department of the newsroom, including those not involved in coverage of government and politics.”
What say Mr. Stephens?
13
Did she delete the tweets? And if so, when? People DO grow up...
1
@John Huie
No, the literally thousands of anti white, anti Male, and anti police tweets were primarily made over a 5 year stretch from 2012 to 2017.
13
Overall an interesting piece, worth reading.
Like many journalists and commentators, however, Mr. Stephens uses the word "racist" without any effort to define what the terms means.
Most credible efforts to define the term point out that racism isn't simply prejudice. The best definition I've seen is that racism is "a system of advantage based on race." In this country, at least, that system advantages white people, so it's incorrect to call a person of color "racist." People of color may be prejudiced, or hold prejudicial views against other people, but by definition they cannot be racist. Only whites in this country can be, and in fact most of us are simply because we've benefited from the advantage of being white. Most of us haven't given this systemic advantage much thought, and many are completely unaware of the advantage they hold.
4
@Piet van Lier
That is a non-sensical definition that will hopefully never be accepted by anyone outside of academia.
6
@Piet van Lier
A: In this country, the system advantages wealth far more than any other characteristic.
B: Racism has long meant prejudice based on race. The nonsensical idea that only whites can be racist is exactly how we wound up with President Trump.
C: The real question is is someone punching up or punching down. The assertion that only whites are capable of punching down strikes me as racist
7
An acclaimed and gifted young journalist establishes a pattern of saying ignorant and bigoted things about members of a particular ethnic demographic, she gets a prestigious job, and when said pattern is exposed, she gets to keep the job, all the while backed vigorously by a legion of affluent, well educated defenders.
There are many things one could call this.
I call it privilege.
I am saying this as a lefty, not as a conservative.
Yes, we are all aware of historical context, and I think most of us who comment on here take care to avoid drawing false equivalencies. But does that really give well off POC (a somewhat reductive and overly broad category in itself) carte blanche to indulge proclivities under cover of historical extenuation? To in effect appropriate the suffering of other people in what amounts to an extraction of faux moral authority?
34
Like mosts articles about feigned political outrage, this one errs by pretending that the people who rage-tweeted to Williamson are the same ones who defend Jeong. Unless the author can point to specific instances where this is the case, he's creating a straw man.
"The Left" is not a monolithic entity; it's a group of individuals. The same is true (to a far lesser extent) of "The Right."
Mr. Stephens would be correct to call out those individual hypocritical leftists with a "do as I say" history. He is incorrect -- and frankly, dishonest -- to pretend (and to pretend to believe) that his examples apply across the board without more information.
2
Social medium will be the cause of downfall of our civilization. People seem to think being "authentic" means being completely unfiltered. I guess manners are for fuddy duddy nerds like me.
6
In the past snarky comments were said in a room with others present , known generally as a twisted sense of humor simply because we were able to see the person's face , able to catch the nuance and therefore judge . With social media all of that is missing ; also people tend to rein in what they say in person and even then what was meant is sometimes misinterpreted . Social media has given rise to bullies and the ability to say whatever you want without having to hang your head in shame while at the same time ostracizing those who don't agree with you. It's a mob mentality and they gang up on you . Social media does not promote wellness of the mind .
3
Stevens is correct that playing with social media is playing with fire.
Perhaps the best way to look at it is that if you're on social media, or if you're on the Internet at all, you should act as if you're standing on a soap box in your home town with all your neighbors watching you.
As you were writing this defense of Sarah Jeong's tweets which show a pervasive pattern, rather than an isolated instance, of hateful rhetoric, Robert Mueller is examining Donald Trump's tweets which show both a pervasive pattern of hateful rhetoric, and a pervasive pattern of ignoring, flaunting, and violating the law. We are all responsible for the things we say, or write, and the fact that hateful statements or admissions of criminality are contained in tweets is no defense. I can imagine how judges and juries would have reacted if the defense of my indigent minority clients, who had only a court-appointed attorney to help them, was to hector everyone and insist that they could not pass judgment on my clients unless they were saints. I'm familiar with how inequitable our society can be. It is outrageous that wealthy and powerful journalists from the editorial staff choose to disparage any who dare criticize another wealthy and powerful journalist who has been promoted to the editorial board. Take just one moment to examine what Stephens is actually saying and you’ll realize that it is indefensible. None of us have be selected to serve on the New York Times Editorial Board. If we were disqualified because we wrote the things that Jeong wrote, we would have no right to complain. So tell us, what is the outrage really about other than trying to mask Jeong's culpability by making all who seek accountability feel guilty about having morals? It sounds positively Trumpian to me.
14
Sarah Jeong hates white people, and says white people have no culture. Obviously, she is a very base, ignorant person with no knowledge of history. Western (white) civilization is the only one among major world civilizations that has promoted human rights and the equality of human beings. The abolitionist movement was not the fruit of East Asian Confucian, Islamic or Hindu civilization. It grew out of Christianity and the sometimes contrary spirit of the Enlightenment. No emperor of China, Ottoman sultan or King of Korea liberated his slaves or serfs en masse. This was the work of English parliamentarians and French revolutionaries. Indeed, the concept of human rights could be said to have reached back to 16th century Spain, hardly a human rights paradigm, in the writings of Bishop Bartolomeo de las Casas of the University of Salamanca. Indeed, it reached back even further to the slave-holding Greek and Roman world with the ideas of the Stoics.
While De las Casas preached that American Indians had souls, just like Europeans, slaves in Yi Dynasty Korea got a little help from the brutal invading Japanese, who burned lots of the official records of which Koreans were owned by their fellow countrymen.
Many of the men and women who led the Korean struggle for liberation against the Japanese empire were converts to Christianity, brought to Korea by western missionaries. Their sons and daughters have continued the struggle for democracy in South Korea right up until the present.
57
I don't know any of Ms. Jeong's writings, nor anything about the apparent controversy surrounding her appointment. But someone who sends on average 31 tweets a day obviously has serious impulse control issues. And someone with serious impulse control issues should probably not be serving on a board that requires careful consideration and debate of the issues of the day.
60
"Fake News" CNN and "Crooked Hillary Clinton", meet the "Racist New York Times". You know, our president has quite a way with words.
29
It took twitter sleuths to uncover Jeong’s five year long record of juvenile, hateful tweets as well as a tape of a talk at Harvard Law in which she blamed white men for why everything “sucks”. (Such eloquence!)
They also disproved her assertion, parroted by the NYT in its only statement on the matter, that she was responding for a limited period to the hateful rhetoric directed at her.
The NYT didn’t vet her properly before hiring her or verify her “explanation” after the controversy broke.
The NYT looks worse than she does.
119
@Jersey Girl
Or else they vetted her but thought that the 'lefties' like me would have her back. And alot of my friends do say, "oh, she's okay. She's rightly upset about 'white privilege'" But judging from the many critical comments here, I'm heartened to discover not everybody has become so cynical and perhaps hypocritical as that.
12
@Jersey Girl, and Harvard Law does not come out of this smelling like a rose either.
5
So now it's OK to be a racist as long as one is a racist in "context". And NYT defends it ??? I won't be reading Jeong's tripe because I'll never be able to put it in the correct "context".
73
Thanks in advance for allowing me to provide a second comment on this issue. The real problem is not the double-standard concerning her tweets. The real problem is that this hire signals a disturbing trend at your newspaper, Bret. NYT readers are about to get more of five dominating themes:
1. Identity politics
2. Income inequality
3. Global Warming
4. Foreign Affairs (sub-title: "Bush 43 screwed everything up, Obama tried to make it better, now Trump is screwing it up again."
5. Trump is unacceptable under any conditions and circumstances.
The paper reminds, more than anything else, of those underground papers published in Ann Arbor basements in the 1960's and distributed by sad looking people on street corners. It's going to get much, much, worse, with a couple of freak show elections coming up.
32
@Tony Pastor
Your post indicates that these 5 "dominating" themes are issues.
1 and 5 could be but on the back burner, sure. But if you deny that 2 and 3 are relevant issues, to quote 45 "Sad". As for 4, it does have a lot of explanatory power for 2 and 5.
As to these freak show elections, enjoy your facade of freedom while it lasts.
In school today, children are taught to THINK before they act online.
Is it:
Thoughtful?
Helpful?
Inspiring?
Necessary?
Kind?
It's ok to rise up and defend those who you feel are being targeted unfairly. It's not ok to create new victims. It's ok to speak out against hate, no matter who says it. It's not ok to take away from from the human dignity of another person.
I think we can all benefit from a little more compassion.
7
I agree with the commenter who said 'did [Jeong] ever think of something and not say it?' Who among us beyond the age of one has not in a thoughtless moment blurted out something we wish we could take back? Hopefully those gaffs give us pause to ask ourselves what is really going on in our minds when things we regret what comes out of our mouths. What if every stupid, thoughtless utterance of ours was posted on twitter for numerous 'followers' to see?Leaving aside the whole debate of Jeong's sentiments and what it means to give her a press flatform, why in any case do we need 'followers' to hang on our every tweeted word? I guess we shouldn't be surprised, given the behavior of our narcissist-in-chief.
1
sure, fine, everything you said, but is this writer really so great that we have to accept her hate speech? There isn't ANYBODY else in the ENTIRE WORLD who could grace the pages of the NYTimes Opinion pages?
38
Good thing it is so easy to see this doesn't fit the right's false narrative that the Times is prejudiced against whites.
:P
27
As long as she's only writing on technology I suppose here antipathy to white people will be out of sight. And being based in Portland she won't have to deal with the mass of whites working at the NYT in the city.
14
I find her tweets to be deplorable I am going to cancel my subscription to the New York Times.
84
She'd not white so it's all good.
33
Let HIM who is... Surely a columnist for the NYTimes knows the difference between the subjective and objective cases.
13
"When ideology becomes the litmus test, we’re on the road to Pravda."
Then Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Apple, Spotify, IHeartRadio, LinkedIn, Stitcher, Disqus, Google Podcast and all the other outlets that have banned conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, online radio host and antiwar activist Scott Horton, State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren and Ron Paul Institute For Peace And Prosperity Director Daniel McAdams are ALL Pravda already.
7
I am suspicious of anyone, right or left, who spends so much time tweeting. Nobody has that much that is worth saying - or my time reading. Ditto Facebook.
Shut up and get a life.That goes for Trump especially. Shut up and resign!
21
Now, every time I read a NYT editorial, I am going to think, "This was either written by Sarah Jeong or, worse, by someone who thinks she's swell..."
Yuck, just yuck.
73
Gawd, Mr. Stephens – it’s come to this...
My shadow is feeling very unwelcome at your pub – wants me to let you know that it’s regularly disgusted, distressed, and distraught at the moronic utterances of its lighter half...
It tries so hard to be PC – and hip and with-it – while its wellspring just types the first thing that comes into its head and puts it out there...
It stopped counting fauxes-pas at 103,000...
Wants to make it up to you and your publisher – muchly...
In the current context of discordant diversity – it offers some valuable tips...You and the NYT can be the first to know...
> Go 2016 seconds into “Caddyshack” and start playing it backwards...There it is...Trump’s inaugural speech – a the original Russian...
> Trump is a clone of Rodney Dangerfield – the DNA was sampled during Rodney’s stint in Kew Gardens, where both he and Trump attended several grades of school...Though not at the same school – or together...If not totally conclusive – certainly enough for a FISA warrant
> Russians actually created dozens of clones of louder-than-life Americans – in fact, the Brighton Beach enclave was actually a KGB station, going back to WW II...
Only a matter of time before Bezos and WaPo catch on – hear Brighton Beach secretly at the top of his list for HQ2...
(NYC cheated on the application, though – included all the new coasters as subway lines)
PS
How about that Green Party guy in the 12th...
Put a goatee on Tommy Lee Jones – could be twin cousins...
1
Her judgement is faulty and skewed and on the editorial board, really ?
23
Grammar correction:
Let HIM who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone
4
C’mon, man.
The issue is not a few racist squeaks from a privileged non-white.
Try writing your column replacing some of Jeong’s “white” with your choice of non-white ethnic or racial adjectives.
Despite your “body of work” you’d be sitting on a Manhattan curb reading the Grey Lady instead of writing a column for it.
The hypocrisy stinks, and so does your apology for it.
57
It would appear the fabric of society is fraying in this country and rather than promote civil discourse the NYT has decided to add one more bomb-thrower to its editorial staff. What a shame. The NYT should be a promoter of problem solving dialogue and instead has chosen to go further down the path of sowing discord.
This hire was a mistake.
67
First off I would like to give you a gold medal in mental gymnastics... Your defense of Sara is worthy. Or your just falling in line with corporate and just defending their mistake.. Once again you mentioned her racist statements but inore her attack on Naomi Would @RealSexyCyborg .... Why is that? Is it just because she is unworthy as a woc who isn't a US citizen? Please explain this to me? Why so quiet?
23
Sarah Jeong's hiring is an affront to the Times readership. Justify it any way you want, but her Tweets were racist and she has no business writing for the Times, much less any publication.
77
Anyone who tweets, posts or emails, in whatever type of media; racist, sexist, antisemitic, or xenophobic thoughts even once should not be treated with respect let alone put on the editorial board of the NYT.
Simple example of why the “whole” body of work attributed to a “writer” is not the right criteria for Hugo v their ethics is Martin Heidegger.
Who knows, perhaps if Joseph Goebbels’ complete oeuvre came to light including the lyric poetry he wrote as a young man, or Adolph Hitler’s impeccable watercolors are found in the basement of some Munich hotel, Mr Stephens the liberal pundit, will see them in a positive new light.
37
Her tweets have, because of their sheer number, become her body of work to a large extent. Bret seems to minimize the enormous number, which signal to me at least, that this is Sarah's worldview unfiltered. Thus, reject.
18
Perfect example of how woman and minorities are allowed to be virulent sexists and racists themselves, while playing the sacred victim and being given by our media the 'privilege' license to kill anyone else's reputation via accusations of racism, misogamy, xenophobia, anti Semitism ... for daring to disagree with an opinion held someone in the now dozens of invented "minority" identity groups.
29
I'm glad I am not evaluated by every unreflective or impulsive utterance I have made. Most of the "myths" in my head that needed busting were corrected by counter-experiences, general observation over time, and one-on-one discussions.
It does seem that social media can draw the worst out of us in a bad moment. With 130000 quotes, I think Bret is right that it takes some acrobatics to claim that these were merely satire -- though I have little time to verify the context. I wonder how much sympathy Rosanna Barr would get for her singular obnoxious tweet -- not that I ever watched that show even once or that I ever found her remotely funny.
It is remarkable that moderate conservatives like Bret or writers on National Review have generally come out with a better respect for free speech than the last few years has shown of the social justice left.
Public shaming may be the fair punishment for impertinent, impudent or impulsive speech. It is better that there are consequences for unwise utterances. However, the more important measure of a person is whether the person is teachable and reforms his/her way of thinking.
7
Among other things, that was very, very far from Ms. Barr's only revolting comment, and this "social justice left," claptrap is, well, claptrap.
Trump traces back through Rush, through Joe Pyne...oh, never mind.
The Brilliance of Twitter is that it can quickly get to the heart of the matter. In the case of Ms. Jeong's tweets - it quickly demonstrates that she lacks civility, restraint, and sound judgement - particularly if you fashion yourself as a journalist. The Veracity of what Ms. Jeong writes will forever be in question, because - honestly - how can someone write what she wrote, on so many different occasions - and expect her work to viewed as unbiased (or at least the myth of being unbiased).
49
Jessica Valentini supports Jeong. The only equality is the one of everyone wanting the most and best for one’s own.
3
Whether Sarah Jeong provides the Times editorial page a breath of breath of fresh air or the smell of rotten eggs time will tell. This reader, however very much appreciates Mr Stephens' effort to help his new colleague and his employer to get out in front of the coming excrement storm. If only Al Franken, the erstwhile rising star among democrats and the hope of many for providing a dynamic balance to Trump but was drummed out of the senate largely at the instigation of Times columnist Michelle Goldberg who argued that even the appearance of bad behaviour, could also have benefitted from some downfield blocking on the part of a fellow Time's columnist, but never got any. Good luck Sarah!
6
Roseann tweeted too. They cancelled her show. Help me to understand the difference between her overtly racist tweet and that of Jeong’s. Moreover, had you substituted the word “white” for “black” in each of Jeong’s tweets...does the conversation remain the same?? Does she still get a job at The Times?? Do your conclusions about not being judged on just a few tweets remain unchanged? Bottom line for me: Jeong’s tweets have given me an inside view of her psychology. She hates certain types of people. It seems to be mostly white folks. You don’t write things like that otherwise. So if The Times staff is trying to gauge her future success, I am one subscriber who will make it a point not to click on her articles and perhaps reconsider my subscription renewal.
33
You are promoting the absurd idea of “whataboutism”, a result of doublespeak borne of privilege. Not every theme is directly interchangeable. Dominicans saying they want their neighborhood to remain predominantly Dominican IS NOT the same as Caucasians resisting diversity in white areas. An adult teacher of either sex having sex with a male student IS NOT the same as when an adult male teacher does the same with a female student. Women applying to college do not have to answer a question about their having registered with the Selective Service while men do. There are many other examples in life.
1
As a straight white male, all I can say about this controversy is WOW. It has been very, very eye-opening about the hypocrisy and racism at the New York Times and its double-standards. Prior to the 2016 election I was a big fan of the Times and of mainstream journalism, now - not so much. Bret's justification of allowing an overt racist on the Times is the most artful, best argued yet. But it's still just baloney. If these comments were made for ANY other group she would not be on the Times. But we're in the Leftist Orwellian paradise called the New York Times. Racism is wrong against any group: period, no exceptions. And any person like Ms. Jeong with not just one, but many, many hateful and racist comments does not deserve to sit on the Editorial Board of our newspaper of record. It's shameful but worse than shameful it reveals how bankrupt the Times is as a paper. The failing New York Times isn't failing in terms of its business. It's failing in terms of its ethics.
56
I'm not cancelling my NYT subscription. I believe that that Ms. Jeong stands for what the Times stands for, and I knew that when I most recently re-subscribed to the NYT. The attempt to obfuscate the unmistakably racist messages of Ms. Jeong reveals that the Times has a double-standard of what constitutes racism. The same comments made by substituting blacks for whites, Jewish for white, and old women for old men, will get you banned in a flash, as Candace Owens proved. How could Mr. Stephens write this piece without addressing the Owens ban? https://www.redstate.com/brandon_morse/2018/08/06/twitter-suspended-cand...
26
Apparently, you are only a racist if the left deems you as such. There are some stark contrasts between Ms Jeong and the recent firing of Rosanne Barr.
As we all know, Rosanne, a white woman, sent a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett, a black woman, and was quickly denounced and fired.
Ms. Jeong, an Asian woman, sent a series of racist tweet on white men, in general. She has not been fired and is, in fact, being defended by NYT and more than a few liberal pundits.
The double standard is glaring and obvious. The only acceptable form of racism is that directed at white men (preferably older white men) with bonus points if they are conservatives.
This is liberal hypocrisy at it's finest.
Liberals say: Be tolerant!
Liberals mean: Agree with liberal policies or get screaming mobs running you out of restaurants and banned on social media.
Liberals say: Diversity is our strength!
Liberals mean: No white men allowed and no opinions tolerated that might question liberal dogma.
Now that NYT has hired, quite openly and proudly, an actual, card-carrying racist, the façade of equality, diversity and tolerance can now be dispensed with and the liberal world view can now be promoted without pretense.
Bravo NYT for finally owning up to your true colors.
81
"I look forward to reading you with interest irrespective of agreement."
I may be mistaken, but as a member of the editorial board, won't Jeong's writing be unsigned? Will she have a byline?
9
Ms Jeong shouldn't have been generalizing about "white people" in her tweets when she could have more accurately specified "white Americans."
I doubt there's a day in her life where she hasn't felt singled out by white Americans -- the dominant race of people here who up until recently have controlled every sphere of power in the country (political, legislative, economic, cultural, social, etc.) -- because of what she looks like.*
The problem with Sarah's tweets is not that they paint her as a racist -- they don't -- but that we expect a Times writer to be more accurate.
*see Racial Microaggressions and the Asian American Experience:
"Racial microaggressions were examined through a focus group analysis of 10 self-identified Asian
American participants using a semistructured interview and brief demographic questionnaire. Results
identified 8 major microaggressive themes directed toward this group: (a) alien in own land, (b)
ascription of intelligence, (c) exoticization of Asian women, (d) invalidation of interethnic differences,
(e) denial of racial reality, (f) pathologizing cultural values/communication styles, (g) second class
citizenship, and (h) invisibility. A ninth category, “undeveloped incidents/responses” was used to
categorize microaggressions that were mentioned by only a few members. There were strong indications
that the types of subtle racism directed at Asian Americans may be qualitatively and quantitatively
different from other marginalized groups."
2
I agree. But that doesn't mean she isn't a jerk
5
"Let him..." would be more traditional English grammar.
5
I have to laugh...not at Bret's article, but at all the huffy, stuffy comments. On the left, political correctness. Everyone must be a perfect adult. On the right, victimhood...why does she get to say it, but we don't. Oh, but you do get to say it through "your" president. Every racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic thought. Have you been to a Trump really???
In the age of Trump, adulthood is for losers. What is now important is performance as measured by followers. Will you bring in more readers than you disgust? It's simple math for the Times. Who are their readers and what do they want...and what will they put up with. Conservatives who aren't openly racist or misogynist can pass muster. But it is liberal writers who bring in the masses. And while I'm at it, remember that the truth really does have a liberal bias.
Part of white privilege is that white authors are expected to be more "civil". After all, they are in charge. It is their order that is being maintained. We should expect bombs to be thrown by those not in power. Why is that a surprise? The peasants are angry and hungry, so let them eat cake, but only if they display proper manners and etiquette.
I'm guessing Sarah got the job not despite her tweets, but because of them. I haven't read her tweets, but I will read her articles...and judge the articles on their merit before I cast aspersions. The other commenters here should do the same.
VOTE OUT ALL REPUBLICANS
2
Great! More Trumpy behavior. We can thank ourselves for accepting such behavior. I find it horrifying. Doesn’t anyone care that young people are watching? Already, kids are saying, “Well, the President does it!” Now young girls can point to this foul mouthed female who’s getting all kinds of attention and emulate her disgusting behavior. NYT feeling kind of smug are you with the increase in readership? Shame on the NYT for this choice.
17
Majority culture laughing off crude subaltern utterances directed against whitey (always based upon white envy) further infuriating "Progressives". Secure white straight males swatting away insults by perceived marginalized others, met by collective pale faced shrug, another bogus form of "white privilege".
5
Didn't the NYT just fire Quinn Norton a few months ago for using slurs on her Twitter account? I don't disagree with that decision, I just question why a different standard applies when the object of the hate speech is white people. I find it hard to believe that Sarah Jeong is free of hateful views when she describes white people as "goblins" that should be living underground. Someone that hateful -- let alone with poor enough judgment to tweet views like that to the world (seriously, how stupid do you have to be...) -- has no business at the Times.
60
Ms Jeong tenure as a NYT writer should be judged by her work at the NYT.
The key line about Pravda resonates. The NYT seems to diverge from the BBC and The Guardian. Reading the Leftist/Socialist Guardian - I was not surprised that Trump won, while NYT readers are still gobsmacked and shocked, and I will not be surprised if the Manafort trial does not amount to much.
The concern is that Ms Jeong tweets were not ignored - but were reviewed and considered acceptable to the prevalent group think, which will only add to the filtering of news. The pile on may not be about a new journalist, but the continued editorial direction of the Paper of Record.
8
I dunno, it just sounds like the ravings of someone who needs something to rave about 'cause that's what they get paid for.
9
I think Ms. Jeong should stay at the NYT, until such time she no longer proves of value.
1
I like your wider world view. Sarah & Donald get themselves in trouble on Twitter, so the simple answer is to stop. I took opioids after a few necessary surgeries, and as soon as I could manage my pain without them, I stopped. It is a lot easier to stop when you possess some values & self-control. Good Luck to your colleague in her new position. Want to get her a nice present for her new office, a framed photo of a stop sign.
Brit I tried following your logic and when done I feel it is not there. Speaking as a white man, the target of her many times, I find this person insulting, mean and racist. If this type of person can ascend to working for a newspaper read by many I need to re-evaluate my opinion of many things. This newspaper is one. There are some days I feel that progress made in relations between races and now sexes diminishes as I watch. My logic would say actions have consequences and giving an opinion page perch to a racist person will have many. Insults beget insults and I now find myself writing a stupid note to an increasely ignorant newspaper.
44
Clearly a double standard. Didn't trust NYT before, now will trust it even less.
33
Urgh...it's not that you hired her that is so upsetting, it's that you're inconsistent (hypocritical really) in doing so. I used to proudly mention in conversation that I'd read something in the times. Now I know what's coming when I do-"oh them, they're the paper who..." I'm not going to apologize for you. Very sad.
28
There is a massive difference between the NYT Picks and the Reader Picks, demonstrating a chasm between the relatively liberal reader base and the more absolutist editorial team.
27
@Faust Great comment. NYT is grasping at anything they can to justify their cluelessness. They clearly have no intention of actually listening to their readership.
20
I'm baffled at people who need the euphoria of the likes, the more outlandish, the better. I suppose if one is in a field that requires that type of engagement,it makes sense, ie., if one is a journalist. But shouldn't people be getting their positive reinforcements from their personal interactions with real world connections and friends?
5
@Barbara
I liked what you said so much that I just had to be the first one to recommend this comment, Barbara.
Well done.
1
Come on, look what she said about fellow NYT Opinion writers!
6
Times continues their race to the bottom of the industry by starting to employ tabloid quality people to seemingly no other reason than to appease the bottom tier of the Left...
The abundant and quality pool of journalists who are available and would definitely complement the talent roster is seemingly overflowing with cuts all over...
Yet the Times decides to go for... combo of immaturity, poor choices but certain ideology.
Speaks volumes to current Ed-n-Chief and Ed Bd...
Sad
17
I suspect the outrageous Twitter posts were part of her attempt to brand herself and that world view is precisely why the New York Times hired her. It is also why I am planning to cancel my subscription.
32
As a thought experiment, go back through Jeong's offending tweets and reverse the race/gender of the author and the subject of her attack, say an old white male wrote "I love being cruel to young Asian women".
Or, in the offensive Tweets, substitute Louis Farrakhan for Ms. Jeong and substitute Jews for whites.
There was plenty of opportunity for Ms. Jeong outside of the NYTs. And there are plenty of un-baggaged writers available to fill the job Ms. Jeong now holds. That they chose to hire her in spite of her hate speech and bigotry says more about the NYTs than it does Ms. Jeong. And it says more about the double standards of the left than it says about NYTs.
Move on, nothing to see here. Just another gaggle of elite liberal hypocrites self-justifying another of their hypocritical choices and following their prime dogma - "The ends justify the means."
26
I would question the mental stability of the person who tweeted this tweets. Too similar to Trump with different content. Why in the world did the NYT hire her?
12
Would Ms. Jeong's tweets pass the NYT's moderation standards? Well, then...
52
@CatPerson
Thread winner, all the more admirable for its brevity.
2
@CatPerson - Some people use the "logic" that 2+2 = 22.
When conservatives stop acting like they decide who is American or not American, liberals will stop deciding who's racist or not.
1
@Logan Or.. just a thought... all of us could strive to mean what we say and hold internally consistent views, not take arbitrary positions just to inflame the "other side"
I"m sorry I don't get it. This woman comes across as a truly sick individual both in content and volume. I would not want to have anything to do with her. And I'm astonished the oh so genteel NYT would hire her given how they censor some of my comments which are not a fraction as offensive as Sarah's. Just recently I offered one that was 100% factually accurate while presented with caustic satirical tone. Shame on the NYT for standards that are at once in denial of reality and accommodating of those who spew utter vile with no redeeming value. And please enough of this oppressed identity politics stuff where the defined minority gets a pass on being morally offensive. This deserves contempt.
25
Social media, in my opinion, allows people to engage their primitive brain functions without suffering or benefiting from the consequences. At least in the past adversaries and allies alike were tangible entities, now they are statistical recordings. Cyber aggression might serve as a pressure valve temporarily but compared to the real thing it is so much hot air. When the balloon is pricked where will the thumbsters be? Not on the front line where blood is real and death comes swiftly, almost as swift as pressing a button.
2
Watch out Sarah Jeong, if Brett is on your side, you are doomed.
2
The hiring of Ms. Jeong has left me in incredible dismay with the NYT and signals a level of hypocrisy that this fairly liberal reader simply cannot ignore. The hiring of an individual that would – under _any_ circumstance - express the sentiments Ms. Jeong did (repeatedly!) and then be blithely dismissed as “she didn’t really mean it” is repugnant.
The Times has surrendered the moral high ground and has done so in a time and political environment that calls for a greater vigilance then any time in recent history. Are readers now to understand that, although The Times claims to not condone hate speech, hate speech is acceptable provided it is to “respond in kind” to perceived offences? The credibility of The Times to claim moral outrage is severely diminished.
The Times has made it abundantly clear that the editorial staff _does_ indeed condone hate speech as acceptable when it is aimed at groveling goblins. The discovery of the racist statement #CancelWhitePeople should have, in this writers opinion, been countered only with #CancelOfferLetter. As for this fairly liberal groveling goblin, whom doesn't tweet, perhaps #CancelTheNYT should be in my first tweet
51
White men: the last group available to denigrate based solely on their race and/or gender. Congratulations NY Times, you are now officially part of the problem. And this column... bending over backwards to explain why bad is good; what a team player! Does Stephens get a little something in his paycheck for this? I'm a 67 year-old white man who has spent his life supporting human rights, civil rights, the women's movement, gay marriage, lgbtq rights... and my favorite newspaper hires a person who has publicly opined that I am a bad human based solely on my race and gender.
Goodbye Times and hello WAPO.
53
@Jim Horne, given their recent opinion piece, "Why Can't We Hate Men?" by Suzanna Danuta Walters, WAPO may not be your answer.
1
Can any of you defending this contemptible new NYT columnist explain how she is any different from the Tea Party loons who raved and foamed out the mouth like sick hyenas when America elected a black president or from the 400-pound buffoons at Trump rallies chanting "Lock Her Up"? I seriously doubt it. She is simply another sad symptom of the rage and sickness pervading American society that has only been amplified by social media and the rotten tangerine in the White House. And Bret, I don't tweet either.
17
LIberal double standard???? Don't make me laugh. When Republicans who have sexually harrassed women follow the example of Al Franken, you can talk about it.
2
Really? If one were to insert a real person's name instead of "white person" in Jeong's screeds is there any doubt that she not only would be sued for libel but found guilty of same? Over and over again? And would the Times or any other respectable news organization hire such a person in those circumstances?
Of course not. So why is the Times standing behind this serial libelist? The very acceptance of such recidivism speaks to the moral conscience of this organization.
10
Leaving aside the question of idiots who just can't keep their mouths shut on social media and whether the garbage they post should influence employment, for now...
Bret Stephens seems to be supporting his new colleague here, but I wonder if the opposite is true? Without this column, and his detailed recount of her racist Tweets, I would never have known that this new Times editorial writer had written such racist tripe in the past. Now I do know. Thanks for informing us, Bret. I wonder if Sarah is also thanking you.
We've all had "friends" like Bret, haven't we?
5
@EB — Excellent point. I wonder if Mr. Stephens is protesting too much, in the Shakespearian sense.
3
Leftists have a habit of excepting themselves from their own rules.
18
In one of her idiotic tweets, Ms. Jeong asks us to name one thing white people can definitely take credit for. The answer is: just about everything valuable in the modern world, especially technology. The fact that the Times hired her to be a technology writer puzzles the mind. Who does she think invented the computer, the integrated circuit, the Internet?
33
Racist. Schmacist. That accusation is totally irrelevant to Sarah Jeong's writings and postings. The accusation of "Racist!" these days carries all the impact of "Wolf!" or "The Sky is Falling!".....meaning....not much. Sarah Jeong's problem is that she is completely indoctrinated by a rigid, self-absorbed, so-called liberal college education. She carries around nothing except shallow prejudices, there appears to be absolutely no independent thinking going on inside this young impressionable mind. Its all unthinking, preconcieved notions, no rationalization, no wisdom, no nothing. I think it also shows how low the NYTs has sunk that the Editors find it more important to fill a "diverse" quota of people who fit a certain stereotype.....and whole-heartedly abandon rational independent thought.
30
The leftist definition of racism only applies to whites. Minorities of any hue spew vile comments regarding race and always get a free pass.
18
No, This is not a bad tweet, or two. It's a long series of virulent anti-white tweets. Rascism, pure and simple, and imagining it does not influence her editorial stance is fantasy.
Now, that may very well be what the NYT wants -- anti-white rage on the left is high -- but it does nothing to make the USA a better multiethnic country. You are actually increasing division. (Which, hey, has helped sell papers, so maybe good for the family).
I grew up in Silicon Valley with mostly Asians. Growing up as kids you just accept people look different and have different families, but everyone was American. You can joke about race. You can also see the difference between in friend group razzing and deep seated prejudice (which always pops up). Sarah sounds like someone with a real problem.
Agree there should be context in looking at someone oeuvre, but places like the NYT consistently fall in one direction in what they excuse. You just hired a racist for your editorial board. Readers will judge accordingly.
44
I’m neutral when it comes to Ms Jeong, but can’t get beyond the customarily literate writing of Mr Stephens’ glaring grammatical mistake, to wit: “Let He....” oh, dear me, it should read .... Let him.... I believe even the Bible gets this one correct. But Mr Stephens writes for the Times, is on the correct side of the Trump horror, and is a welcome visitor to MSNBC, so who am I to cast stones. Just a former English teacher.
2
@Suzanne Marie — I've long been confused about which to use (let he or let him), but I'm now sure you're correct:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42097/which-is-grammatically...
Where's the rockpile? My aim is bad but I'll try. I've NEVER tweeted in my life, don't know how, and sure have no desire to learn. But I guess I can throw the first stone . . .
5
I take issue with the broad brush view of "the left." Yes, it is unfair to generalize about any group of people, but it is especially disingenuous regarding the right-left divide in the US. There's no question that a great many on the right march in lockstep and do what they're told to do by Fox News (including our Fearless Leader). But as you can see right here in this comments section, the left is quite willing to criticize its own.
1
I think there is something right and something wrong about the claim that only white people can be racist. I think however, that saying White people can be racist and POC can only be prejudiced does not capture the distinction well. I make the distinction between prejudice and racist by saying that racism is a moral sin, and prejudice is an epistemic sin. It is possible to be racist without being prejudiced and vice versa. See article below for details
https://www.academia.edu/4388792/Racism_and_Prejudice
2
Before my father died he was an old, white man. An old white man who had fought Nazis at Omaha Beach, who was among the American soldiers who liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp (an experience which disturbed him the rest of his life), who invited black coworkers over for dinner long before it became socially normalized, who voted for Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primaries, who was never cruel to another living being (human or otherwise) in his entire long life. But because he was old, and white, Ms. Jeong would have taken a "sick joy" at being cruel to him? Such comments reflect a readiness to racially catalog and vilify individuals that I do not accept.
74
@FB1848
Beautiful! You dad sounds like a wonderful human!
5
A fair-minded, sympathetic column demonstrating, too, compassion, understanding, and thoughtfulness. Excellent, Mr. Stephens.
Once again this liberal has to agree with Bret. She's dreadful.
13
And Rosanne's Tweet?
8
As often happens, NYT is too blinded by its own extremely liberal biases to see that retaining Jeong cannot be rationalized, and is at this point, given all the controversy, a bad idea.
26
As I recall the Democratic Party Libs were more than willing, even eager to overlook and bury comments in Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis paper which excoriated whites. Well, here we go all over again.
12
Every journalist today gets awful, hateful messages on social media. That is a terrible thing, but it does not excuse Ms. Jeong's behavior. Her decision to lower herself to the level of her harassers was hers alone. Hate speech is not satire, and public messages on social media are a billboard to the world. Perhaps the Times could overlook Ms. Jeong's severe lack of judgment were she hired as a reporter with a byline, but as a member of the editorial board, she now speaks for the entire NYTimes. We surely live in Trump's world if even the NYTimes tolerates racist and sexist speech from its most senior staff.
26
Glenn Thrush, Ali Watkins and Sarah Jeong all within one year. Something is very wrong in the New York Times Human Resoources department.
19
Maybe Ms. Jeong should go work at the White House -- She fit right in! LOL! Communications Director?
7
Jeong is literally the "get-out-of-jail" card for every other person who has put out an idiotic comment or two on social media. She is not a one time offender - she is a multiple offender, a racist of the first order. For a paper that has read racism into every Trump tweet how does it square hiring Jeong?
25
I don’t (voluntarily) tweet, so here is a big stone. I write “voluntarily” parenthetically because I am forced to be aware of inane tweeting from its mindless inclusion in news reporting. If you typed out a racial slur or a homophobic rant or a preposterous lie or an insane conspiracy theory and pressed send to world, then you must own it. Or if you lazily approved and re-tweeted any of the above, then you must own it, too. Got it?
4
Hiring Sarah Jeong to the New York Times editorial staff confirms the belief of Trump supporters, and especially the alt right, that New York Times professionals are anti white bigots and white race traitors.
Contributing to such a belief is unnecessarily divisive. It reinforces the decision of lower income whites to vote against their economic interests by voting Republican.
A white man who wrote Sarah Jeong's tweets, only directing them at blacks, Hispanics, or homosexuals would probably become unemployable, even at minimum wage jobs.
35
If it wasn't for the talented foreign affairs and national security journalists and their excellent reporting I would cancel my subscription over Jeong's hiring. This addition to the NYT is very disappointing.
17
Very interested in what Charles Blow has to say about this. I seem to recall a comment made by him concerning statements made by people originate from their real thoughts. Some words(thoughts) are not acceptable no matter who is saying them. Can we as a civilization speed up the evolution into better beings?
14
I’m looking forward to the Wild West coming east to the NYTimes op ed pages: a lot of bush whacking, shooting from the hip and posse justice. Who’s even going to notice the difference?
4
Is the state of journalism really so desperate that the NY Times' only choice for a new tech columnist is an immature writer who can't think of any other way of getting attention than throwing verbal bombs?
Stephens may think liberals are hypocritical when it comes to this point but I suspect he's wrong. I'm liberal and yet, disgusted by this kind of poorly expressed "opinion" writing.
21
Really Mr. Stephens? Consider this. If one were to insert a real person's name instead of "white person" in Jeong's hate speech, is there any doubt that she would not only be sued for libel but found guilty of same? Over and over again? And would any respectable news organization hire such a person in those circumstances?
Of course not. So why is the Times standing behind this serial libelist? Is it not fair to say that the very acceptance of such hateful recidivism flies in the face of the moral conscience of this organization?
11
Only TWITS tweet, so get used to it Sarah and Bret. Oh, and all of the 'outraged' or 'agreeable' commenters, too.
1
The vast majority of the Times readers who have commented here better understand the hazard to journalism, the press, the country, and civility that comes from hiring a racist tweeter with no apparent ability to edit herself than those who chose her. I hope the Times reads these comments over and over again until they understand how badly you have erred.
50
The Times would well serve readers if it would get Eduardo Porter back on the editorial board, or better as an op ed page columnist.
His Economic Scene columns have ended recently, don’t know why. They were often about our economic problems, our inequality, and included facts about other countries. But the column was in the business section with no comments, so it was read less than op ed page columnists.
A sensible, interesting columnist like him, with an international view, is what the public needs in these dark and irrational times.
So NY Times please put Porter on the op ed page, to draw and enlighten your readers.
3
"Let him who is without a bad tweet ...," not "he". Headline writer: if you're confused, drop the relative clause. You'd never say, "Let he cast the first stone."
3
@chaslaw — I've long been confused about which to use (let he or let him), but I'm now sure you're correct:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/42097/which-is-grammatically...
1
"If liberals get to decide for themselves who is or isn’t a racist according to their political lights, conservatives will be within their rights to ignore them."
Thaaaaaat's all, folks!
23
As an old white man, allow me to say that I despise this woman’s racism as I despise the Far Right’s racism. Neither deserve a part in decent media. New York Times, why did you hire her? There’s plenty of talent and expertise out there. Not amused.
30
My disappointment with the NYT has to do with the embarrassing — indeed, laughable — effort to explain away the tweets as merely “satire,” etc. Plus the hypocrisy. This is why I canceled my subscription.
42
Rule I live by: NEVER, EVER make any excuse for a derogatory comment to ANY race.
Rule NYT staff live by: Racially derogatory comments are not okay depending on contexts, to whom they are expressed, and the race in question.
17
The News Paper of Record became the sounding board of racial devision. Picking her to be on the editorial board says more about the Times than Sarah Jeong.The anti Asian stance of the liberal media supporting the discrimination against Asians at Harvard and at exam schools is more harmful than any right wing nut's tweets.
8
Why is Ross rationalizing this? Why is the NY Times really keeping her on? What is the message it's sending? Is it trying to hire every type of outlook---no matter what? And to show what, NYTimes?
We see standards in media and politics falling on all counts.
There are a lot of other good journalsts out there to hire instead.
16
By hiring Jeong the NYTs is taking the position that racism against whites is acceptable.
It is not.
48
It's the double standard that has caused the outrage. Right wing "indiscretions" or "misspeakings" are not tolerated, whereas calling for the extermination of white men and police is no problemo.
22
I've posted exactly one tweet in my life - the morning after the election, asking a friend in Toronto if I could crash on his couch for the next 4 years.
Newsflash: Words Matter. A person's social media feeds are part of the public record. Posting racist and sexist screeds (sans consequence) might work for Con Man Don, but I'd expect the NYT to ask more of its staff.
Sad!
11
Even if you accept that she's not racist, she at the very least exhibited extremely poor judgment in her public communications, to an extent it should disqualify her for a position on the NY Times Editorial Board.
17
This sounds to me less like defending NYT's new tech writer and more like yet another old(er) white man defensively defending his "right" to say offensive things about women and people of color. Jeong calling out white people (mostly men) for how they take advantage of their privilege is not racist, and it's not personal. Sometimes it's just not about you, Bret.
Most “white people” are not threatened by liberal Asian women. That’s why Sarah gets a pass.
1
And in a world of an eye for an eye is the land of the blind. Simply because others violate the norms of civil behavior doesn’t mean the NYT has to stoop to that level.
18
"The person you are drunk or stoned is not the person you are" - There's a Russian saying:
"What a sober man has in his mind, the drunk one has on his tongue"
11
Someone writes a stupid tweet, a couple of hundred twitter users, maybe real, maybe bots, maybe even Russians, in a country of 325,000,000 write snarky tweets in response, Huff Po writes an article with 'calling out' or 'blowing up' in the title, and then the controversy is manifest. Fox News does an anti PC segment that characterizes one tweet as representative of the entire left and right leaning Americans hate left leaning Americans even more. Good Grief.
Wow! That's a pretzel twist to sort of defend the indefensible. Ms. Jeong should have considered her own future before idiotically babbling multiple times per day. She would be relieved of her position if she were to tweet so recklessly while on the board so why bring her on when this behavior is known? I have less respect for the Times for even considering her.
14
I love it when white males tell the rest of us that we have no reason to be upset about anything because I guess we're not magnanimous enough? I mean the rest of us, who haven't been able to ride the 'white male is king wave' that helps all of you white men rise to the top of whatever profession you're in because you're white and male and possibly have a baseline of talent.
1
"Does it represent the core truth of who she is? " I'm afraid it does. She is a mean-spritied writer who can't figure out a way to get her point across without smarminess. To me this evidences a void in the talent area. There are a lot of talented, well-credentialed writers out there. Why can't the Times hire someone of better character, for want of a better word?
17
Someone below suggested that the Editorial Board should now also hire Rosanne Bar.
I second that.
41
I question why the Times chose to hire a divisive personality rather than someone who has a strong resume that doesn't include provocation. Is there no one left who has not compromised themselves by succumbing to the adolescent need to tweet? Was there no one left who is both deliberate and disciplined enough to have never fired a divisive shot off on social media? There are plenty of better options to be sure. Will the Times tell us why they chose to support divisiveness? Whatever Jeong's merits, her faults are not just serious, they are willful and notorious. Does the Times somehow profit from such a provocation? Does it not see or care about at all about adding to divisiveness? Trump was wrong to say that there are good people on both sides, as if one could join a cause one should know is bad and still be good. Isn't it just as likely that a good cause cannot and should not be used to excuse choosing to behave badly? At any rate, this choice sends the message that the Times doesn't care about aggravating incivility further. All the news that fit to print? Or is it now all the news that causes fits?
17
Mr. Stephens, to use an old quote of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, what you are doing here is "defining deviancy down."
15
The left is baffled by its inability to win national elections but its bread and butter identity politics are wholly based on vilifying and blaming whites and men. Dems forget that vilifying the voting majority does not work well on a democracy. The left would walk barefoot over live coals before demeaning any other group the way they speak of white men, and then are shocked when some whites don't vote for them. Just proving all the accusations of racism, of course.
154
@Jeremy Bounce Rumblethud Well said. Thank you.
4
Well, seems the author was less forgiving when the topic was more close to his heart. I remember he called Jeremy Corbyn 'anti- Semite', just because he defended on Facebook the mural in 2012 that some thought to be anti- Semitic. I guess we all are more objective when the issue is not close to us. Should we at least acknowledge this fact and not try to act like we are holier than the Roman Pope?
2
This is, theoretically, a professional writer we are talking about.
The tweets either reflect her judgement or they don't.
If they don't - This wasn't a private act. Do NYT readers really deserve to have someone with such poor judgement as to write something overtly racist/sexist that she actually didn't mean, to an audience of at least thousands, probably more?
If they do reflect, then off with her head, at least as far as NYT is concerned. (I can say that because I have no future as a professional writer, BTW. Nor do I seek one. If I did, I would rewrite before Submit.)
Does she offer something so uniquely singular that outweighs all of this? I haven't heard that yet.
If not, there are plenty of really good, underemployed journalists in all fields, including tech, race relations and gender issues.
I read NYT Opinion to get thoughtful considered commentary.
Fox News, Breitbart, or Slate might be more appropriate hirers for unreasoned public commentators.
NYT - Caesar's wife rules should apply in this instance.
19
I don't know. I have known, to a person, that someone who is drunk is almost always telling the truth. They let you know exactly what they think of you and they broach subjects they wouldn't dream of bringing up when sober. For some, Twitter is that drink.
11
"Is it ultimately her fault for writing those ugly tweets? Yes." Not to mention proximately her fault.
10
She was hired BECAUSE of the tweets, not in spite of them.
25
With a book of Tang poems in my hand, I wonder if the editorial staff of the New York Times isn't like the Emperor Xuan Zong, and Sarah Jeong isn't their Yang Gueifei.
1
I have no idea how the Times vetting process works, but after a year and a half of Donald Trump and the explosion of hate-filled tweets, rallies, and world-stage meltdowns, and the crazed outbursts by his ardent supports I'm puzzled by the fact that the NYT thought it was a good idea to add Sarah Jeong to the Editorial Board.
18
This brought me back to the time Jesse Jackson in what he thought was an off the record conversation talked about Hymie Town. I thought at the time that he was is just blowing off steam. And even my father thought the term was somewhat funny. Still it didn't help when trying to rectify it he spoke approvingly of the Yom Kippur Day Parade.
While reflecting frustration and some real and shocking ignorance about Jews it didn't feel particularly pernicious.
And the degree of anger towards him seemed manufactured. An attempt to derail the good parts of his campaign not the bad parts.
2
How come intersectionality is all the rage until it comes to the totalizing phrase "white people." Or "white men." There's a lot of virtue signaling these days, and too much of it comes as down and dirty attack.
8
Live by the pc code, die by the pc code. Ask yourself, if those tweets had been written by a white person about any other ethnic group, would that person have been hired? Sheesh.
22
As a progressive Democrat I do not endorse or condone the racist tweets and intellectually shallow and arrogant, dismissive twitter tirades of Ms. Jeong any more than I do those of Quinn Norton, which caused the latter to be "un-hired" by the Times in February. see "After Storm Over Tweets, The Times and a New Hire Part Ways" 2018/02/13
Overall Jeong's racist and exclusionary tweets were, if anything, more offensive and contrary to the tone and voice the Times seeks to project than those of Norton. The only, and to me, unimportant distinction, is that Norton was an apparent alt-right sympathizer and associate, and Jeong, an apparent strident leftist and practitioner of identity politics.
Who will be hired next to write editorial material for the Times? Alex Jones, perhaps?
21
I don't know Jeong's work. But Bret, I would ask how someone can make 103,000 tweets over 9 years and yet this monumental expenditure of her life is supposed to not be connected to her core truth. To spend so much time engaging in snarky, stupid, racist, pointless whatever daily combat says something important about someone -- which is maybe that they are part of the problem destroying reasonable discourse in America regardless of their politics. Thoughtful people with perspective to bring to the Times editorial page do not live "unfiltered" lives. They filter their thoughts with reason not outrage and passion. I hope Jeong is now ready to live such a boring, responsible life and give her addictions.
12
This person has problems if as noted she tweets 3 x more than Donald Trump. Whether that should be significant in whether she works for the Times is up to the Times, but I suggest a psychological evaluation.
7
The problem for the New York Times is clear. Every single time they publish a story or an editorial criticizing racial discrimination, hostile racial rhetoric, or similar behavior, the public, with strong justification, can and will say: What about Sarah Jeong?
24
People claiming Sarah Jeong's tweets are racist: they're not.
Sarah's tweets are a reaction to racism in the dominant white culture. And they are justified. It doesn't perpetuate a racist system for her to make them, and no white people were harmed in the writing of these tweets.
Any criticism of white people as a group is often viewed as "racism" by the most easily bruised and guilty-feeling egos among us.
3
@JLC Did any 'white' person choose to be born 'white'?
In the USA, 'white' people fall into 1 of 2 categories: those who were part of the community that sanctioned slavery, participated in it & fought to preserve it vs. those who came much later, did not join the KKK or approve of Jim Crow laws & whose ancestors had nothing to do with the decisions made by those earlier Americans who viewed dark-skinned people as subhuman, or who advocated for the extermination of indigenous people.
Walking down the street in NYC, can you always tell, at a glance, which of those 2 categories any random 'white' person falls into?
What about the Presumption of Innocence?
What about children? What about what we are teaching them?
You don't fight someone's racism by being racist yourself, towards others -- maybe entirely different sets of others who only vaguely resemble those who hurt the people you love.
You fight racism by rejecting racism. All racism.
It's a big world. Many different people.
2
@Jordan
Not really. Do I think those tweets are awesome? Nope.
Do they hurt my feelings as a white person?
Nope. There is no comparison with Williamson's tweets about hanging women for having abortions.
This is a woman expressing her frustration at racists, not a woman perpetuating racism.
Stop acting threatened by her words. You're not.
Hmmm. This liberal white woman finds her tweets deeply offensive, especially “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men." It makes me think of my late father, who championed civil rights when it wasn't popular to do so, who raised me to respect human beings. I'd hate to see someone being cruel to him when he was old and frail.
I think it is fine for the NYT to hire her, knowing she is overtly racist on Twitter, because its important to read foolish people who write well so we understand where their hatred comes from. As she is from a non-white ethnic group, it does help me understand that lashing out is a reaction to the many racist instances she or her family have faced. It doesn't excuse it, but it is good to try to understand compassionately why an obviously intelligent woman tweets stupidity.
But anyone who gets pleasure from being cruel isn't someone I'd want to meet personally. I hope she evolves to find a more helpful way at lashing out against racism.
17
One wonders about Sarah's education. You know how we keep hearing about the 'Crisis in the Humanities?' You know how said 'Crisis in the Humanities' is always blamed on Republicans? Well, people who think like Sarah Jeong are the REAL reason for the crisis in the humanities in American education. This is 'Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go' on Steroids. Can you imagine Sarah sitting on some curriculum review committee? Shakespeare??? Gone. Chaucer??? Gone. Studying the American Civil War??? Gone. World War I??? Gone. Steven Foster songs??? Gone. Then, you have only a materialistic, tech culture left, with an imbalanced emphasis on STEM. And feminism. Sarah has a 'tear it down' mindset of pillage that seeks to destroy and remove. If she has a constructive, positive vision for America, it's only going to emerge after she helps destroy America 1.0. Meanwhile, the Times wonders why so many people would like to reduce immigration levels??? If I moved to South Korea and made such comments, I'd be a thoughtless, rude jerk. That said, I don't think Sarah should be fired. We want to fire people too much in this country. It's the double-standard that bothers me. There is a kind of violent undertone to it that is very dangerous. Finally, let's hope comments like Sarah's will revive our hopes to have strong liberal arts education with good Western Civ. It's such a wonderful, rich tradition Sarah seems to hate so much. That's the sad thing.
9
as a newspaper, the new york times has a prestige that only the washington post rivals. if ms. jeong is potentially the 'next coming' in journalism brilliance, than maybe, (maybe), she should maintain employment with the nyt.
'don't put any of your writing out there if potentially it could be on page one of your newspaper'. a tired addage, but, this is common sense.
social media is a blessing and a curse. i vote for 'curse', as it seems a fetid launching platform for people spewing venom, when divisiveness is already at a boiling point.
Mr. Stephens, you should get out more and talk to real people who do things.
You seem to live in a bubble where "Liberals" and "Leftists" battle righteous "Conservatives" - It's like a very unimaginative version of Dungeons and Dragons.
That some minor scrivner is a racist is unimportant.
That Trump and the Republican Party are proud to be racists is a problem - deal with that
1
If you can’t restrain your compulsion for tweeting ignorant things, maybe you just don’t have a twitter account? Seems extraordinarily simple. If you fail to comprehend this, you deserve to be fired from any place of employment, whether its Bret Stephens, Sarah Jeong or the President.
3
Bret, you've made the only defense possible but that is not enough. If Sarah was only to write about technology, apparently her area of expertise, that would be fine, but she has been hired to be a writer on the editorial board.
It defies credulity that Sarah was hired because erudite technical expertise when her non-technical opinions are so "out there". A cynic might note that Sarah is a "twofer" so let's not go there. She was hired because she is who she is and its a great fit with the new NYT. Sad.
9
Well put, thank you.
1
Note to Sarah and Mr. Trump.
Think before you tweet.
2
Friends don't let friends tweet drunk. Lesson learned. :(
2
Thirty one tweets a day?
When does this gal find time to write?
7
Over 700 comments...
Didn't read them all completely - but 70 contain the word "without"...
Couple of dozen:
> Nitpicked on "him" or "he"
> Snarked on having no bad tweets - because they have no tweets of any kind
No one questioned the gender of the pronoun...
Is this because...
> The phrase is biblical – i.e. atheists bow before spiritual parsing, if not spiritual narrative
> Stoning is one more aspect of governance where women have yet to shatter the glass ceiling (makes it a sort of chicken-egg conundrum)
> It’s always a guy - qed
Somewhere, Al Franken has read your today’s column, and is reflecting on its consummate irony...
2
"liveliness, integrity, maturity, and talent." I'll Grant you she is lively and has talent. . . Is 2 out of 4 really the best the NYT could do? To me, this hiring says bucketloads more about the Times than about Sarah. Very disappointing.
11
I wish the Times would have fired Ms. Jeong. The double standard is appalling. If Roseanne Barr can be fired for racist tweets (and she rightly was) then so can Ms. Jeong.
With this decision, the Times has now embraced the idea that the most vile racist tweets or public pronouncements don't disqualify someone from sitting on their editorial board. The next time someone is nominated for a prestigious position at a conservative publication or in the government and has a long history of admiration for, say, neo-nazis or white supremacists, they will point to this decision and say fair is fair.
This was a significant setback for people of all stripes who oppose racism.
17
Bret has caved.
He would have written an op/ed condemn ping the times, were still at the WSJ.
Too bad. Just another conservative sell out.
6
I'm not canceling my subscription to the NYT, but only because I see publications like yours, the WaPo, etc. as the first line of defense against a president who's doing real damage to our country. You deserve support for that, no matter what.
But as an old white man I must say this: my closest, longest-standing old white man friends are decent, unentitled individuals who would never dream of treating a woman or person of color disrespectfully, in the workplace or anywhere else. So when I read "it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men,” I find her level of blind, projected hatred nauseating.
Just end that sentence with "immigrant children" or "people with pre-existing conditions" or even "women," and you've got Stephen Miller - or your pick of administration officials and GOP congressmen. Ms. Jeong's race and sex don't excuse her comments, or make her any less despicable.
30
For as much as love is love is love is love, hate is hate is hate is hate.
9
I thought I knew humanity...But this week I’ve learned there are men who actually purchase $900 neck ties...And a young woman who averages 31 Tweets a Day! That’s soooo insane...or is not?
6
So the stuff she says spontaneously is not her true thoughts and beliefs, and her edited and reviewed articles are? Sure thing.
Anyway, the only real qualification you need to sit on the Editorial Board is overweening virtue-signaling, so they found the right woman for the job. And shilling for the Board is probably a good way to become a candidate for the next opening. If only Mr. Stephens could overcome his whiteness...
7
Meh—an ok defense. But you’d be burned at the stake for much less if someone managed to find one errant tweet from 2008 in which you used a word that rhymes with stink. But beyond Ms. Jeong, the issue remains of complete hypocrisy on liberal bigotry. As her tweets exemplify—it’s entirely all right according to the liberal progressive mindset to deride “white people“. The term itself has almost become a sort of slur in it’s new usage. I observe my hyper sensitive social justice minded friends on social media pillory “white people” day in and day—the term white people or wypipo is their hip punchline, testifying to a new sort of moral hauteur in the church of the woke. And these types do not have a body of work to balance their self congratulatory bigotry. Yet, people lose jobs day in and day out for the slightest perceived verbal infraction against other victim categories. This is one of the most glaring hypocrisies on the left, the most obvious double standard that gives the lie to all the supposed sensitivity and concern for inclusion. It ultimately creates conservatives and Trump supporters who are sick of all the victimologist double talk. Sure, some “white people” have issues. As do some people of all races, creeds and kinds. Try to employ language more effectively and specify the moral failings you’re calling out instead of applying in the manner of a bigot a blanket statement against an entire category.
13
Yes, what people say (especially in the public venue) matters - every single thing people say, every single time they say something. No picking and choosing. You say it - you own it. What you say IS who you are. NYT has made a bad decision here, and it is not improved by having NYT editorials defend it.
9
If people want a word to define 'the use of a slur against a dominant ethnic group,' they are free to come up with a new one. The word 'racist' and its cognates are already defined and useful.
6
I do not welcome racists, people of bad judgment, and people who have demonstrated their bad character to The Times. I don't care what end of the political spectrum they come from if they have those qualities. I expect that people who write for The Times to be able to edit, themselves and others. I am a Liberal.
12
Her hiring is an unforced error.
20
Not one word about Naomi Wu, the Chinese tech blogger whose life, livelihood, and safety she helped destroy as part of Vice?
16
If the Times were serious about presenting contrarian views (with a wide following), it would long ago have invited Noam Chomsky to submit his views to NYT readers. Instead you wind up defending foolish tweets.
8
I wholeheartedly disagree. Sarah Jeong should never have been offered the position. I've said some pretty stupid things before, both online and in person. Guess what? What you say matters. An occasional misguided remark followed by an apology is no big deal. There's plenty of people unduly punished on social media for a single statement. A pattern of behavior exhibiting racist and sexist sentiments though? Big, big deal. Moreover, Jeong appears to be leveraging these feelings in her readership for professional gain. I'm not saying Jeong is equivalent to Alex Jones. However, you're riding the same wave length if you dismiss Jeong's statements as water under the bridge.
Bret was wrong before and he's still wrong now.
20
If you wanted to build a machine that would pander to the least common denominator in humanity (the 'twits' in us); if you were determined to create a simulacrum of the darkest elements of ‘society’; if you thought it crucial to disseminate disinformation and mindless propaganda to the semi-literate masses, to elevate ad hominems over rational discourse, and to ensure a steady stream of snark to distract the polity from pressing concerns; if your quest was to energize hatred and bigotry, erode social trust, to trade respectable journalism for tabloids, reporters for pundits and press for self-promotion; if your mission in Life were to drown Western Civilization in a deluge of conspiracy theories while simultaneously engaging in massive, surreptitious surveillance, you would make something a lot like “Twitter”...
...Of course, none of that was part of the plan. Yet no social media technology has contributed more to the global collapse of basic tenets of deliberation, decency and democracy…
3
Okay apologists, let's accept that Sarah Jeong's tweets can't be definitionally "racist" because of inherent imbalances of social power. So let's call them something else -- hateful, hurtful, mean spirited, ugly, bigoted ... how about "prejudiced." Does that make them any more acceptable?
23
I come to praise Jeong, not to bury her.
2
Reading the comments here how White folks are offended by Sarah's comments. I am reminded daily by the POTUS and the white people around me that I am not wanted in the USA because of my skin color. Have white people once thought how minorities feel when we get daily taunts from Fox News, POTUS, Republicans, etc? White folks - this is a reminder. USA is not your country and never will be.
1
Two comments.
1. Williamson's "...women who obtain abortions should be hanged" is a dark, dangerous statement that crosses a line, and he was treated accordingly. The tweets from other actors that Stephens quotes don't even come close to this one.
2. Stephens describes many of Jeong's torrent of tweets as snarky and mean, but trusts that she will be kind to her colleagues. Huzzah! Personally, I hope that she will finally retract her bloody claws and be kind to the rest of us, especially those who were born white.
3
@LarryAt27N
Except that's a blatant misinterpretation of what Williamson said.
He stated that if abortion were outlawed as murder then women who were convicted of the pre-meditated murder of their unborn child should face the death penalty. Someone asked if he meant death by lethal injection. He then flippantly stated he was thinking of hanging, and then went into a deeper discussion of how by sanitizing the death penalty we've made it too easy to dole out.
While I disagree with Williamson's opinion, I fail to see how his actual statements "cross a line".
1
Let HIM who is without <whatever> cast the first stone.
3
Before reading this, I'd not given the matter too much consideration, but Stephens convinced me that the NYT should not hire Ms. Jeong.
There are too many talented, less self-obsessed and more disciplined writers out there.
21
The NYT proudly proclaims on its masthead "All the news that's fit to print".
In light of that, Ms. Jeong and her off the cuff remarks clearly promote argument among educated people which is news that is fit to print. It may be controversy but no reason to quiet her voice. Her opinion is relevant at the NYT because she represents a minority without a voice in the broader discussion of race in America today. Asian Americans are overlooked in that discussion and should not be.
1
Notice that he didn't bother to explain the basis of his professed doubt that Jeong's tweets don't represent her true feelings.
5
So racist proclamations are just indiscretions that shouldn't influence any judgement of the speaker?
12
Don't tweet. Too dangerous. Don't read tweets, they make you crazy.
Don't blame anybody who is accused of tweeting. Edge away from the accusers. Be as inconspicuous as possible as you do so. The accusers are the danger and you may be the next to be attacked.
1
"Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone."
And let those who are with bad tweets be treated equally by media outlets such as the N Y Times.
If you're going to fire one staffer for bad tweets, you have to fire them all.
Unless their overt racism helps promote the statist-socialist agenda.
Then it's OK.
8
I find this to be a refreshing oped column. It feels to me to be thoughtful and balanced in attempting to address a serious problem in our culture right now in USA. For me it directly addresses concerns of mine.
1
I can’t believe the Times would have considered someone like Jeong, much less hiring her and then justifying her behavior in the manner in which they did (2 wrongs make a right, does it?) to give s/o like that a platform makes u rethink journalism, the press and media in the Age of Trump. Could Trump have had some substance?I never thought I’d be thinking that. Now it’s like the rug has been pulled from under me. I trusted the Times (maybe even venerated it. . . Uh, a little) and now I’m not so sure. If Jeong is part of the Times, the whole becomes flimsy. 31 tweets a day, snarkiness. How can we be asked to respect that?So I’m shocked. Yes, floored, even. Leonhardt socialist mouthpieces didn t even do that! I was amused, as a former socialist, to see them get a footing. It’s ok. I read the Jacobin when it was out. I have no quarrels w their ideals. And in fact, I agree, but not w their premise about the constitution’s aims. Be that as it may, I’m waking up to a whole new world. To the Times’ board, why? Why? We need good journalists! We need, more than ever, to trust you! Why?
6
Having had my fill of crass, insulting tweets for a while now, I've concluded that many, if not a majority of tweeters, still struggle to leave the "little boys' & girls' room" level of conversation behind them. What can one expect from people with so pathetically little to say?
What caught my attention, however, is Stephens's grasp of grammar. In an apparent attempt to paraphrase the Apostle John's account of Jesus's memorable encounter with an adulteress, Stephens admonishes, "Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone."
Say, what?
Having struggled through an introductory composition course taught by an instructor who aspired to be a "Miss. Thistlebottom," the notorious avatar of the NYT's sage of superlative syntax, Theodore Bernstein, I shuddered at the sight of the op-ed's sub-title.
For I had it drummed into my thick skull by my imperious teacher that the verb let takes an object pronoun. But Stephens tacks a subject pronoun to it.
3
Indeed, what is even more offensive than the bigotry this silly Sarah Jeong has spewed, is the idea that her filth is defensible when taken in "context."
That context being: only white people can be racist because only white people enjoy institutional power. Get that? No longer is racism a human failure, the ability of a person to engage in negative pre-judgement of someone based on skin or ethnicity. Instead, the social justice left has determined that it can *only* be something entirely institutional and systemic, a function of power, and therefore it can only be expressed by the powerful, i.e., white males.
Jeong can write "#cancelwhitepeople," or “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along,” because she's non-white woman, therefore by definition a victim of the racist white power structure. So, hah, just kidding.
Make no mistake: this mindset is no less racist or destructive to our society than that of the tiki torch crowd, because it is based on the same toxic notion that our color fundamentally defines our personhood, even our intrinsic morality, and should be the prism through which we interact with one another.
What perhaps makes this view so dangerous is that it's proffered by the self-proclaimed vanguards of anti-bigotry.
22
No one should be spared for any type of racial or biased twits.
Although it would be great to see a Korean-American be added to the editorial board of NYT, I see the unfairness in her having any influence on the paper. I don't know much about her, but just the fact that she has written that many negative twits makes me wonder about her intent and judgement. I disagree with Mr. Stephens.
6
I am puzzled that Sarah Jeong is the hill that the New York Times has decided to die on. I won’t be reading any of Ms. Jeong’s future contributions and the Times editorial voice is dead to me now because of her addition. Apparently the Times is enchanted by her “woke” perspective; I am not. The definition of racist has not changed in spite of progressive spin. And speaking of spin, to suggest, as the Times did, that this years-long waterfall of racist invective was spurred by online harassment is clearly untrue as Ms. Jeong’s tweets are rarely directed at others but stand alone as her woke and snarky observations. As other commentators have remarked, this episode has brought out the Trump in the Times. To learn of Ms. Jeong’s denial over the repudiation of the “Jackie” UVA rape story was more sour icing on this bad cake. Why her, when there are so many others more qualified and with less dreadful baggage?
36
I have enormous respect for the Times and was dismayed to see Sarah Jeong hired for a position on the Editorial Board, despite showing such a remarkable lack of maturity and judgement in her tweets and public statements.
Let's be honest. After reading many of Ms. Jeong's public statements, I believe she is bigoted against white people and is anti-cop.
Neither she nor the Times have said or written anything to disavow her statements, or make me think she does not *actually* hold these views. The Times has been mostly silent, and meanwhile the far left commentariat has risen up to condone these views, because apparently bigotry against white people is now respectable and encouraged.
If this is the direction the left/Democratic party takes, count me out; this path will debase us all.
The NY Times is better than this.
24
NYT, please think of all of us poor souls that have to defend your paper at a dinner table (which I don't on this issue by the way) to our conservative friends and family. I can agree with them that she should not be hired, but it still puts the NYT in a compromising position. And I am constantly asking them to consider the NYT as a reasonable and responsible voice for journalism based on fundamental values of respectful discourse. She certainly doesn't fit that profile.
I sincerely hope the NYT corrects their mistake and finds another Tech journalist. Surely there is someone out there in the great wide world of journalism that doesn't come with this baggage of vitriole!
You are not being brave here, you are being stubborn and foolhardy.
16
Does the NY Times big boss think if we have a compulsive president of the US, then why not have a compulsive NYT editorial board member, too? It's click bait as the public checks out her writings like they check Trump's every tweet pasted all over our TV screens. Controversy sells?
Ok, Times if that's the way you want it. But there are plenty of sources to read out there, for sure. A click of the mouse.
Your effort to sell notariety is backfiring.
4
It seems the standards of behavior are higher at my accounting firm than for the Oval Office and the NYT editorial page. An applicant with a social media history like Trump's or Jeong's wouldn't make it into the internship program!
13
"If liberals get to decide for themselves who is or isn’t a racist according to their political lights, conservatives will be within their rights to ignore them."
There is no shortage of conservative posts claiming that it is not Trump and his cult that are racists, it is actually liberals and the media that are racist. It is a very liberal (and logical) step to try to be as inclusive as possible, however a democracy cannot function if its citizens are either illiterate or deny reality, one or both of which applies to the vast majority Trump supporters.
In the end, racism will be defined by the people who are persecuted. But Trump and his alt right Qanon followers also blame them as being racist. Giving legitimacy to the perverted thoughts of these people does no service to our society.
1
Bret, you say you are not the person you are when drunk or stoned. I couldn't disagree more. When in that condition the REAL YOU comes through loud and clear.
6
Stephens speaks of acrobatic explanations.
So this from the Times statement he references (linked) in his article:
"Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers. She sees now that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media. She regrets it, ...."
All very reasonable, even if it betrays poor character. But then, I am not a minority and it would be so much easier for me to rise above it, I guess. So would the Times give the same break to a white guy: No.
Lastly, this is such a sneaky column: You've got to like it!
3
I don't think you apply the same standards re: tweets, to those who are not employees of the NYT. Does the name Trump ring a bell?
5
I don't know, Brett. After White folks have spent the last 500+ years since the Age of Exploration de-humanizing and murdering people of color in massive, massive numbers, it is hard for me to call Sarah's tweets racist.
Angry, yes, and understandably so. Caustic, sure. Pent up rage, of course.
Distrusting and disliking White people as a group is kind of understandable for those who have been oppressed for so long.
You reap what you sow. Frankly, I am constantly amazed that people of color have so admirably held their tongues for so long.
Whites love to jump up and down at statements and actions that appear to denigrate them as a group.
Perhaps it is a just reward.
1
@History Guy
History Guy you apparently don't know much about history. "dehumanization, murder, of people of color in massive- numbers" isn't just an effect of white people. The Inca's slaughter 10s of thousands of its captives. Performed savage religious rituals and human sacrifices, enslaved people, as well as territorial conquest.
The Native Americans waged war, slaughter, enslaved, and engaged in territorial conquest.
The slavers that bought slaves on the west coast of Africa bought them from other African tribes that waged wars, enslaved captives, and engaged in territorial conquest.
Slavery, human bondage, war, territorial conquest have been a fact in the vast majority of peoples over the course of human history.
I don't say this to justify anything above its just point of order.
6
Everyone should take a minute to read some of the harassing comments Sarah Jeong received online. She was threatened with sexual violence and physical assault coupled with some of the worst slurs in existence for people of Asian descent.
Remember that she has gone through life as a woman and visible minority and thus dealt been subject to harassment and slurs, as well as more subtle racist acts, her entire existence.
Think on that deeply for a while. Maybe you still think she shouldn't be on the editorial board, and that's your right—but be fair and really consider how you would react to this kind of protracted, evil harassment.
(Also she didn't call for the censorship of emily yoffe––that's a ridiculous assertion)
1
@FortissimaGreene,
Was Sarah Jeong threatened by every white man on the planet?
Her racist remarks were applied against an entire race.
I never threatened Ms. Jeong.
12
@FortissimaGreene
That's what happens to vicious racists who gleefully spew repulsively racist bile, repeatedly, in public. I understand that David Duke needs a 24/7 body guard, too.
2
Forgive me Bret, but your Times bias is showing. If I had written what Ms Jeong has on her tweets I would expect blowback from an offended readership. Trump’s racism does not excuse any other person from being held accountable. Since she is in technology I, perhaps, can see ignoring her tweets as a writer, but I would surely confront her in any office situation. Putting her on the editorial team which creates the direction of the Times is really too much. People who are promoted into managerial positions should be as much above reproach as possible, and yes we all are guilty of something. But racism is a dark insidious idea that affects people that are around a racist. I have worked against racism and discrimination for years and while there is plenty to say about “old white men,” racist tweets and attitudes that throw around derogatory emotional feelings without any thought and activity (non-violent) only heighten the gap between people rather than remedy the situation...no matter what your political leanings. I am deeply sorry that she has had to endure discrimination from others, but tweeting about it with racist comments only makes the pit deeper.
2
Racism = Prejudice + Power
In American society today, Asian women do not hold power.
Her comments are expressions of her prejudice.
Who among us is free of prejudice?
2
The subgroup to which she “claims membership” is the most successful in the country. She has a degree from Harvard. The poor, powerless thing...
24
@James
Well that changes everything, James! Thanks!
"Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone."
Let's get this right: John 8:7
"...he stood up and said to them, “Let *him* who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone...” (ESV Translation)
And this from a conservative.
1
I'm as liberal as it gets and yet I'm increasingly disturbed by the willingness of many of my liberal fellows to tolerate bigotry as long as it's directed at white people or is spewed by a person of colour.
Take Joy Reid as an example.
When it was first revealed that she'd posted several hateful things about gay people, she apologized and life went on.
Then it was revealed that she'd posted many more such things and she denied it, using the Anthony Weiner lie / excuse that she'd been hacked.
When that was revealed for the lie it was, she offered up the lame excuse that while she couldn't believe shed hated on gay people so much, given her history, she could understand how some wouldn't believe her denials.
She didn't apologize or explain why she'd said so many hateful things about gay people.
And that was enough. Her employers at MSNBC gave her a pass.
Would they have done it had it been a conservative at Fox News?
Bigotry is only wrong when it's committed by those on the opposing team and that's a seriously risky thing for a polygot liberal democracy.
9
Hypocrisy. The Times would not hire someone who uttered similar tweets about Muslims, Hispanics, blacks, women or any other "protected" group. But old white men? Tweet away; the saltier the better. Jeong revealed her true colors and liberals and lefties rushed to her defense, revealing their own implicit, deep-rooted and abhorrent biases.
24
Twitter and Facebook are (still) tacky.
4
I like Bret Stephens. The NYT was right to hire him.
7
I think I can understand Ms. Jeong's anger against white people (I don't agree with blanket anger/prejudice against groups of people, but I can imagine where she's coming from).
However, what I don't understand is why the NYT thought it was a good idea to hire someone who so clearly has expressed hate against the newspaper they are now going to join--as a major writer!
We've all heard stories about social media and the perils of being judged by a future employer based on your Tweets or posts on Instagram/FB. Honestly, this is puzzling to me, that the NYT would hire someone who clearly is not on board with how they run the newspaper. It wasn't just one Tweet, and Ms. Jeong wasn't even an employee when she Tweeted her negative views about the NYT. I could maybe understand an employee venting anger, but why even consider someone who has such obvious hatred for your organization?
As for Ms. Jeong herself--why would you want to even work for a company which you clearly hate? You are talented, smart, and obviously have worked hard to get where you are, and could probably write your own ticket to wherever you wanted to work. Do you really want to work with/for people you don't admire, trust, like? That's a puzzle, also.
6
When I was Ms. Jeong's age, I was still pretty immature in some respects. Coincidentally, at her age I was also rigidly liberal-lefty, unlike now.
I tried to keep this in mind in reading her vacuous Twitter feed. Mine might have been similar at age 30 if Twitter had been around.
However, The Times didn't reward my attitude at age 30 with a spot on its editorial board.
Rather, I went to law school and the experience was humbling. Thank heavens I was rather harshly socialized. It did me a world of good. A couple of years after graduating at age 31, I found myself able to do much more to help people than my jejeune pre-law school persona would ever have achieved.
If I'd been put on The Times's editorial board, I might have stayed stuck in my self-righteous, judgmental, myopic rut.
Like at least one other blogger in this thread, I was sufficiently appalled by The Times's decision that I was going to cancel my subscription. I don't want to pay for racist bilge. But yesterday I read Ross Douthat's column on the crisis in the humanities. It was so insightful and masterly that I couldn't bring myself to cancel my subscription.
10
I agree we have gotten way too righteous about what is right and what is wrong. If going only by ranting Tweets cost everyone their jobs , we'd be looking at a different president. Most of us would be looking for different jobs.
People of any color are entitled to their opinions. If a black person tweets something about whites, it's totally free speech. Same for whites about blacks, pick your colors and insert them here.
Tweets are an immoral, impersonal, frightening place where we feel free to rant and vent. The only people that need to worry about what they write are people whose every written communication is preserved and judged as a part of history. So, yes, a president's Tweets are preserved legal documents. Trump is in deep guano.
Normal people that don't make national policy nor affect the world's very existence can be free to their opinions. They can even be free to be mad at others. They can even Tweet it.
If Twitter doesn't have the option to delete all tweets more than a month (or a year) old, they certainly should. The ability to search for offensive words and phrases in one's full tweet history is uncovering all manner of years old offensiveness. This is happening regularly with sports stars, as they are young enough to have picked up tweeting while young and stupid. As the tweeting generation gets older, we will see this ruining careers in many more fields. People who don't like you at work will start doing this to you, and reporting old tweets to HR. HR will start regularly checking on new or existing employees. Delete your twitter history now, or face the consequences later.
The Times is jumping into our social media mess, to be trendy, cheapening itself and lowering standards. It’s exploiting the controversies of today’s nasty twitter world, by hiring this compulsive tweeter of nastiness.
Nice work NYT, in fitting in with the downward direction of our political discourse. Trendiness is all---but the consequences? Lowered status for the Times, which it cannot afford.
Is Trump setting the tone? What happens after he's gone?
5
shouldn't that be "let him who?" "Him" is the object of the imperative "Let." The subject of "is" would be "who."
1
Mr. Stephens, I'm not sure I find your well-reasoned defense of Ms. Jeong's hire fully convincing but I will say this:
You did a MUCH better job of it than the NY Times official statement and Ms. Jeong's "counter-trolling" excuse.
9
Good luck to Sarah Jeong. Now if only the Times would cease the ever-increasing articles about "whiteness" and "white supremacy" and "white privilege." A tweet is one thing. Front page articles in a newspaper of record is another. And categorizing an entire group of people by the color of their skin is the definition of racism...even if they are not the minority.
6
why would I want to read anything written by someone who writes such drivel? why would I consider her opinions to be of value?
I don't tweet and I don't use Facebook not for moral superiority but because I want to preserve some domain of thinking that is reflective, informed by knowledge and differentiates satire from snark
8
This story has (not surprisingly) gotten very little run in the NYT, so thanks for mentioning it. One does wonder how anyone working at The Gray Lady keeps track of the nuances of liberal thinking. So “social context” is now an excuse for racism? Good to know. I assume there’s a fairly detailed description of what counts for “social context” in the New Employee Handbook. Or, let me guess, I’ll know it when I see it?
5
If I put Jeong's tweets in this comment it would, rightfully, be rejected as inappropriate for the NYT's comment section. How Jeong herself is considered fit for a coveted position as a professional editorialist is beyond me. She's racist, sexist, ageist, and shown violent tendencies. Rather than issue a genuine apology she came up with excuses. Fired? She should never have been hired. Her offer should be retracted: there are plenty of strong journalists who keep their temper in check. As for being a poor oppressed minority a quick check shows she moved from Korea to NYC when she was three, went to UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School. Letting her disgusting posts (plural) slide would be yet another extension of the privilege this woman has enjoyed since birth.
11
Jeong's tweets (including very recent ones) are juvenile, unimaginative, and frankly resemble the tweets of the traitor in the White House in their gratuitous meanness. You can hire whoever you want, though; you already have columnists I don't read, she's just one more.
5
I cannot help but think that if the words "black" or "Jew" were substituted for "white" in any of her tweets, she would not have been hired.
9
Bret Stephens is telling us that what Sarah Jeong tweeted is now the norm for many and that it does not represent the totality of her work or views. But, so what? The content of those tweets, posted between 2013 and 2015 and not "old" as the NYT headline suggested, is what counts. Why does the NYT hire a writer who, even if not always, submitted to that norm? Why should what is a norm on Facebook or Twitter become the norm for the NYT? Because the NYT is competing for clicks with those websites. Business is the business of the NYT too.
7
“oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men”
By "old white men" does she mean the ones that fought WWII, Korea, Vietnam....those guys?? Twitter often reveals a persons character or lack thereof, as in this case. Thank God for free speech.
16
Ms. Jeong's tweets are not just anti-white, they are vicious and suggest that harm should be done to whites. This is exactly the kind of disgusting garbage that has prompted suicides and mass shootings, and although twitter should have banned her for those statements at the time, it's disgusting and unconscionable that she should be allowed a voice in a publication that claims to stand for good journalism. If she is to be given a pass, then why not hire Alex Jones as well. His garbage stinks just as badly.
14
Wow what is this new attitude of justifying racism in any form and shape? Is the Times twinning with Fox news?
Absolutely unforgiveable attitude from fellow journalists. You are mixing up loyalty to fellow journalists with the social ethics of the situation. Whats next, a forgiveness campaign? Why blame Trump or Elon Musk for their hurtful tweets, after all it's but a tweet moment. Perhaps we should forgive Brock Turner, after all it was just once and it was 'outercourse'.
If you need a tech writer and one who is a woman, then please open your eyes, there is plenty of talent here in the west coast. Why does the Nytimes which has been the voice of sanity in these troubled times need to stoop to questionable levels?
26
Snark if you must, but Fox News would never employ a person who wrote such things.
9
If you take the same tweets and substitute the word "black" for "white" would the NYT have hired her? Of course not. Which says more about The Times than it does about Ms. Jeong.
13
The New York Times only pretends to be hiring Jeong despite her racist and sexist tweets; it’s actually appointing her to its editorial board because the editorial board shares the sentiments she expresses in her tweets. The editorial board endorses racism and sexism as long as it is aimed at whites or white males.
39
@William Case
BULLS EYE!
9
For heaven's sake NYT, don't fire this woman! Your publisher will be subjected to a barrage of Tweets that would choke an ox. Youthful indiscretion of three or four years previously should be overlooked. Forty is the new twenty.
3
Wondering if a white male tech writer with a history of unpleasant tweets about Asian women would be invited to work for the Times? And on the Editorial Board at that.
36
The New York Times has clearly failed to seriously consider Sarah Jeong’s “ integrity and maturity “ ... or lack thereof, as demonstrated by her copious unsettling tweets.
12
Here's a thought--How' bout stay off Twitter.
Good grief, you want examples of racism ... listen in to conversations among Asians ( American and otherwise ) discussing the nature of Africans ( American and otherwise ).
9
Having someone like this on the Editorial Board really compromises my faith and trust of the NYTimes. Bad judgment all around.
20
But she is not adult! She’s "Shock Jock". She's 60’s Leftists performing protest street theater as they "bleed inside each other’s wounds.” She's like my kid as he came down with “16- year- old- mouth" disease.
Shock is easy, especially if one never bothered learning to write a two page composition in the 5th grade.
8
Thanks Bret. I like open debate, dialogue, and for columnists to be consistent in their arguments. Her argument that she was defensively and satirically trolling online attackers doesn't hold water and it is not a good defense for the Times to accept and use. When is Michelle Goldberg going to comment? Doesn't she have an obligation since she was leading the mob to get Kevin Williamson fired from the Atlantic?
10
"The person you are drunk or stoned is not the person you are — at least not the whole person."
I think it shows the real person, and the ancients agreed with me: the ones in Rome who said "In vino veritas," literally "in wine is truth" -- what you say drunk with your defenses and social filters down IS the truth about you.
I feel that in so, so many obnoxious, racist, vicious tweets over a number of years, only a handful of which have been mentioned in the NYT, Sarah Jeong showed the truth about herself. Maybe she'll be a mature, and better, person at 50, twenty years from now, than she has revealed herself to be in the past several years.
That's when it will be time to consider putting her on the Editorial Board of what remains the most prestigious journalistic institution in the USA.
Send the very young journalist with the snarky, sophomoric, and stupid tweets back out to work in the industry until she's grown up a lot. At the moment she's shown herself to be no more of a real grownup than the people she was allegedly only attempting to "counter-troll," a weak, insultingly ridiculous attempt at an excuse.
10
Ms. Jeong is a distraction for the New York Times, and gives the impression of a double-standard. The Times can find another technology writer without civility baggage.
11
As a life-long Progressive I am continuously flabberghasted by the cringing response of the Establishment media to inexcusable
hate speech by minority voices. The cowardly meely-mouth alibi from the paper, claiming the words were meant ironically, as a gentle mocking sense of humor is pathetic. Your management is like a puppy that took a whiz on the carpet. And adding the claim that it was a joke while also claiming that it was only fair play to pew a torrent of insults on white people makes no sense. The assertion that the NY Times knew of the tweets and were OK wih that is a big Pinocchio. Be ashamed.
31
In general Mr. Stephens' position is well thought out and sensitive, if applied to a Opinion columnist, an individual. The Opinion of the NYT however must be beyond any question of bias.
Ms. Jeong’s tweets are racist, denigrating white Americans. Perhaps her first assignment for the NY Times should be an essay in which she interviews whites, presents them with her tweets, and her reasoning behind them, and gets reactions. If she is unwilling to go face-to-face with the folks she attacked in her tweets she has no business being at the Times or any other news outlet.
13
I'd suggest that a) if we actually rooted out every lousy remark, there'd be precious few who'd ever be allowed to write anywhere, and that b) if you never say anything dumb, you're likely not worth reading in the first place. And if we went back in history....
So like a number of other commenters, I'd prefer to ad Jeong's columns and judge them for what they are.
1
In his habitual pompous tone, the author manages to throw liberals under the bus yet again while letting the reader know how high above the fray he stands. The twitter usage of Ms. Jeong seems to me to show a lack of self discipline, whether I agree or not with her point of view, that I think should not be brought to the editorial board of the NYT. The excessive use of twitter by trump which appears to be condemned universally, is exceeded multiple times by Ms Jeong and hers should not be ignored.
8
Well, which is it? Jeong living the unfiltered life, 31 tweets a day revealing the worst in herself, or not "representing the core truth of who she is"? So many mature, self-controlled superior writers and editors out there, and with all those worthy candidates, the NYT chooses to elevate Jeong to its editorial board. What gives?
11
Even if the NYT had some reservation about employing the privileged, well-educated Sarah Jeong in light of her obnoxious tweets against the existence of white people, Ms. Jeong's other, less-celebrated tweets calling for the death of police officers probably put those doubts to rest. Welcome to the NYT!
15
Twitter is the written equivalent of a Whoopee cushion; It's a goof. Please don't tell me 280 characters form a coherent human thought. It's belching from the rooftops and mooning passersby. At best it's an ad platform and at worst a sandbox for the irretrievably stupid. See it for what it is and let Sarah Jeong get on with her job.
2
And BTW on the subject of grammar - "Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone." Should be 'him' not 'he' in that sentence. Take out the subordinate clause and you are left with 'Let him cast the first stone.' The clause merely describes 'him' and does not change the pronoun to the subjective case. You're welcome.
4
I think Mr. Stephens was using a verbatim quote from the Bible to make his point.
1
This is the fault of publications like the Times and other "mainstream" media (I'm of the opinion that these types of media are no longer mainstream, but niche, facebook has far more readers). By legitimizing the results and goings on of internet media like Twitter, and not seperating yourselves clearly from them, the public views you the same. Obviously the fall of print media forced many journalists to find work using internet media, but never did you differentiate between untethered, unfiltered, unedited work and actual thoughtful journalism.
Plus, I thought the editorial board was about opinions? Racists have opinions too. They may not be likable opinions, but there they are.
I don't have a Twitter, but i do think people have a right to their opinion and others have a right to react to them. But the streets are watching and, surprise!, nothing is deleted on the internet.
1
It’s up to Sarah Jeong’s employer to decide whether or not to fire her. It’s up to the readers and subscribers to decide if they want to support the decision and if they value her work. There may be hypocrisy involved but freedom is our ultimate value and I would not trade that for anything.
3
I've been in a similar situation that Ms. Jeong finds herself in. Before twitter I would strike back at a troll on forum or chat rooms. For me, it was like a verbal game of chess with no harm taken.
Then I read about a person in China who had said or done something in real life and an outrageous amount of people wanted to watch her die in some pretty inventive ways. That's when the light-bulb came on and realized it is 3 grade schoolyard bullying.
I guess none of us really ever grow up.
1
If you are a tech writer you should know that tweets shouldn’t be offensive. They are public record for a reporter and as such need to be reasonable. I’m a white woman who is the same size as Ms Jeong.I feel threatened by her tweets in part because of her assumption about who I am as a white person. I can only assume because her remarks are visible to the public that she believes in them. If Alex Jones can’t use the...public persona just acting ...argument about why he shouldn’t be held accountable than neither can Ms Jeong.
6
I have never used Twitter, never signed up for an account, and see it for the career-destroyer it is. So I guess that means I can cast the first stone. Instead of a stone, here's a question: if any commenter here in the NY Times chose to use one of these odious Sarah Jeong tweets as a comment, that comment would get flagged and censored for violating standards. Further, somehow pretending that people who hold abhorrent beliefs and seek to profit off those beliefs should be afforded a seat at the table of ideas alongside actual scholars is an idea both laughable and demonstrably bad for the free exchange of ideas. It is possible to combat trolls without resorting to lazy racism. It is possible to spew invective at detractors without resorting to racism. Sarah Jeong has disqualified herself for any role in the public eye. Hardly astonishing then that Bret Stephens is her new champion.
12
I started on the Internet before the web, where the main way of communicating was through Usenet Newsgroups (they still exist by the way) on some topics where my view weren't that welcome.
I learned the hard way that anything you wrote would be interpreted in the worst way possible. I also learned that it was better to write something nasty about someone and let it age for a day before sending it A fair bit of the time, I didn't send it or revised it.
I'm not on twitter. There's a price to be paid for immediacy and brevity. Those in the public eye or want to be, might take another look at the bargain they make when using twitter.
Just imagine if Trump had a twitter suspense account. He writes what he wants but the post has to age for a day before it gets posted. That would be smart for Trump, but probably bad for the world's appreciation of Trump. Thank goodness Trump isn't disciplined enough to do this.
2
In Vino Vertas and the Wooden quote "The true test of a man's character is what he does when no one is watching" show the faulty characterizations in your Op-Ed.
The person we are sober is also not the sum of who we are. Alcohol lowers inhibitions, but does not create new beliefs just because we are momentarily drunk. We just no longer care if what we say and do affects others.
The same goes for social media posts. That you are angry or excited when you post something does not mean you don't already feel that way on one or more levels. Someone who is not a racist will not suddenly spew racist invective if a black person cuts them off in traffic or is rude to them.
When it comes to public office and positions of power / authority the person spewing invective makes themselves unsuitable by their own actions that clearly show their internal thoughts and motivation. Generally speaking people display to the world what they want the world to think of them, and in doing so can easily lie to hide the worst of themselves.
9
Nothing about Roseanne Barr? ABC's reaction to her tweet was over-the-top virtue signaling. And I heard nothing but praise for ABC after that.
6
So Asians aren't a privileged race? What evidence do you have for this seemingly unsupportable claim? They attend better universities, get better jobs, have higher salaries, have better health, live in better neighborhoods... Am I missing anything?
What's your definition of underprivileged? Mean tweets?
The problem is that the always-outraged Left is fundamentally racist in their casting of whites as forever privileged and Asians as underprivileged. That absurd dichotomy is a relic of a time gone by and is not supported by statistical evidence.
12
Curiously, it appears that Sarah Jeong has been treated very well by the dominant white culture, with educational opportunities (Berkeley, Harvard Law) that are to die for, so to speak. Many whites, by contrast, are doing very poorly.
Her defenders evidently think oppression is a racial birthright, to be passed down from generation to generation, regardless of the facts. The sooner she is gone, the better, but I won't be a subscriber to watch it happen. I am terminating now.
16
@Wine Country Dude
I agonize every day now about my subscription. The Times offers so much that I like but the stench of their hatred and bias against white men is really getting rank and raw.
6
Judge how she performs at the Times. Unfortunately for her she already has been given the benefit of the doubt. She doesn't have much room to prove her value to the NYT's discourse.
Trying to convey nuance and internal conflict of ideas in tweets is near impossible especially when the character of the person is not known to the reader. See the reaction to The Nation publishing a poem. That is all poetry is, ambiguity and exploration of the subconscious. Yet in this day and age with our shallow president all ideas are in your face, bold and capitalized exclamations. No one wants to hear the long, start to finish explanation with questions and answers to follow.
Twitter must die. And Facebook, take all the rest with them. It would only take a small percentage to stop using these "services" to lead to a crash in their stock valuations, and then membership would start to spiral downward just as it spiraled upward. Who wants to tweet when fewer people are paying attention? We lived for thousands of years without this stuff, we will be just fine ending it now.
1
I agree - Sarah Jeong's hateful speech should be out in the open for all to read and (hopefully) disagree with.
The larger issue, though, is that the NY Times and its columnists can not editorialize any longer against racism, racist policies, etc., given their decision to employ someone themselves who spews virulent racist speech.
13
This is one of Jeong's tweets:
"Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins"
This is so obviously bizarre and ridiculous that I believe her statement that it was satire. Anyone with a sense of humor can see that. It is not racism, but a caricature of racism. The only problem I have with many of her clearly satirical tweets (e.g., "White men are bull___") is that they aren't all that funny. Someone of her intelligence should be capable of a higher grade of humor, even on Twitter.
When Mr Stephens calls for objective criteria for racism, I want to know what objective criteria should be used to evaluate whether a statement is actually poking fun at its literal meaning.
1
@Steve
I actually see where she was going with that. I do get the parody.
1
Talk about situational morality. So we are not who we are when drunk or stoned? Tell that to all those in jail who made mistakes when drunk or stoned. They were judged quite harshly for not being themselves. What's next? Not being yourself when you are sober? Seems like we are now parsing out when its OK to be nasty as well as who is OK to be nasty. Making excuses for being "nasty", isn't all that far from excusing people from responsibility for all types of acts when they were pressured into repugnant behavior. I recall similar excuse making following WWII.
7
If you haven't seen them, it's worth a look at Jeong's tweets. It's not one sent out in bad judgement - there are literally hundreds. While some I can see a few as reasonable responses to really nasty trolling, they go well beyond that as a rationale. And while I'm somewhat sympathetic to Stephen's suggestion that we should allow for past imperfections, his cursory statements that her journalistic pieces are "interesting" (with no examples or evidence) are not enough to convince me that this is such a case for forgiveness. Add to this the NYT's vastly different standards for treating other journalists for much less egregious infractions, but in the "wrong" direction (Quinn Norton, Bari Weiss), and I think this has been a very unsavory episode for the NYT, and gives great fuel to the right.
7
I’m all for second and third chances, . I write some I’ll-advised comments to articles from time to time, but I keep getting another chance to do better. But this isn’t my job, I don’t get paid to write comments and other people aren’t paying to read them. Ever since Trump degraded truth, recklessly threw insults and slander, and tweeted whatever he felt like, he has apparently given all of us license to go to the dark side. Is there any responsibility for those who get paid to write? Can’t they be held to a standard without be scolded and branded?
1
No. The answer is no. In no way should her tweets be explained away. Racist is racist period.
8
The left and the right both have their objectionable people.
As a white man, I couldn't care less about Ms Jeong's tweets. As a liberal, I'd like her held to exactly the same standards as anyone else.
As for social media, if I used it, I'd probably say/tweet something sooner or later that I'd regret. That's one of many reasons I never have used it, and never will.
1
Hiring Jeong just adds to the claim of fake news and unabashed bias. I don't think MSM collectively understands that the idea of fake news includes news that is incomplete by intentional omission of competing claims and facts and unchecked bias. It is also fueled by obvious double standards. News organizations become fake, when they obsess over the transgressions of one party, but are blind to the same poor behavior and hypocrisy of the the other. Most see media as a watchdog of truth, not party, and guardians of our principles and ideals. When the NY Times is adamant about the racial language of one party but not all parties, they damage trust. Since the Times can justify hiring Jeong, the Times has granted more credibility to its detractors while eroding their own credibility and trust. So many talented people in this republic-why pick a fight and add to the divisiveness when you could have chosen from so many other worthy and wise minds who could have helped unite us instead?
8
The Internet has destoyed the whole concept of intelligent dialog. No one listens critically to anything anymore. Through the interent, we read material composed deliberately to provoke an emotional response, to provoke mass reaction, a flash mob of comments that all say the same thing....either slavishly supporting an outrageous thought or knee-jerk profanity laced, irrational opposition. The so-called Social Media is, in reality, the exact opposite.....its Anti-social. Lonely isolated people in desparate need of emotional stimulous from other lonely isolated people.....millions and millions of them. The Internet amplifies the worst in all of us. TAX the Internet. Its not, nor has it ever been, "Free".....and NO, you do NOT have a "right" to Internet Access.....
1
Although I am a rabid fan of yours and follow you on MSNBC and always listen with respect, I want you to see that in the very first paragraph of this opinion piece, you manged to use both the words Liberal and Conservative and put in the word abortion for good measure. This is the not good Mr. Stephens, even though you are simply giving the facts to begin with. This division is the problem with the us and them mentality and why the main man in the WH has a problem with the press. Please consider.
I'm an immigrant, white hispanic. I arrived 25 years ago in Atlanta, GA. I never noticed white people being mean. Sometimes a little condescending, perhaps.
But lately I do feel the difference (now in Houston TX for 15 years). Particularly the treatment from those with less education than what I have.
And what tipped the scales on my perceptions was my only son, born and raised in this country of ours. We never tried to make him of "our tribe" but rather let him be himself. A couple of years ago he surprised us regarding how he was speaking of non-Hispanic whites! We certainly did not tech him that. That was his own experience talking.
That was the last clue as to the change in environment for race relations. So Jeong's tweets are more reaction than pure action, and while disheartening, they are not as reprehensible as someone asking for people's deaths.
I was ambivalent about this issue at first, partly because I think there is something right and something wrong about the claim that only white people can be racist. But this quoted tweet from Sarah Jeong, which was supposed to outrage me, actually illustrated why attacking white people is so different from attacking other groups.
“Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?”
The commenter who posted this quote said it was "Dehumanizing and eliminationist in any context about any group of people." I thought it was both funny and true, and I didn't feel threatened by it in any way whatsoever. I will remember it anytime I lather myself up with sunblock. Anybody who feels threatened by it needs to seriously get a life. Why? Because it is totally lacking any context of discrimination or abuse. It is just one person saying something nasty and funny about white people. That's what makes it different from Roseanne Barr's Planet of the Apes reference, which conjures up centuries of pseudo-scientific attempts to justify slavery by comparing blacks to nonhuman primates
If you live your life with kids pulling up the corners of their eyes and making sing-song noises, get handed a coat and hat when you are the guest of honor, greeted with a "how", or be told to get back over the border, you do experience an angry emotional response. You feel diminished, belittled and powerless. And if you tweet, you may lash out.
If you live your life without experiencing discrimination, and then say women who have abortions should be hung, you are angry because you do not have absolute power over all others, just some. And if you tweet, you diminish, belittle, and overpower your target.
Neither behavior to excess is attractive, but to compare them is a false equivalency.
Leave speech alone, unless it calls for immediate violence, is slander or libel, or violates a vert few other highly protected categories like child porn. so-called hate speech, is not one of those categories. Let the marketplace of ideas figure it out, and it will.
1
Sorry, not buying it. Jeong would never have even tried to disparage any race other than whites. Her career rightly would have been over in a nanosecond had she or anyone dared. But somehow PC protections do not apply to whites, either white men or white women.
Jeong was born in S Korea, a wonderful country. She eventually became a naturalized US citizen. Can you imagine Americans of any race who live as expats abroad insulting the nationals in their adoptive country as Joeng has done to white Americans? Me either. If expat Americans would dare to do such a thing, at the very least, it would be considered to be ungrateful to their hosts, and also racist, xenophobic, etc. And the obvious question would be asked, why do you choose to live here if this is what you think of us?
The NYT is officially losing its way if this is whom they choose to represent them in such a prestigious position. If their decision is not reversed, it will be a marker of the end of the NYT as a serious news outlet.
12
"Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone."
Right - well I don't have a Twitter, so I can safely say that her toxic views have no place at a serious publication like the NYT. She belongs at Buzzfeed or TMZ.
9
If you are stupid enough to use Twitter for anything, then at least have the character to take responsibility for what you say. Talmudic arguments about what people really mean or the supposed content of their character may be good in Philo 101 but those of us who live in the real world should probably know enough to keep certain angry "inspirations" to ourselves.
9
We should call many of these tweets for what they are: racist....
[ Precisely, then there is no reason for the New York Times to have such a writer. ]
25
Jeong's contempt for white people is more than evident. But we also should acknowledge that she is a member, or at least a candidate member, of the elite. A graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School and a "person of color" (an absurd and meaningless term, in my opinion), After a couple of years of working in hip journalism, she is now poised to enter the "heavenly realm," the newsroom of the New York Times.
Jeong's Tweets are the language of Total War, urging the eradication of a whole race of "inferior" people. Change the racial labels, and she could be writing for Die Sturmer in Nuremberg back in the 1930s. She is the leftwing equivalent of Ann Coulter and perhaps in some ways even worse.
"So, welcome, Sarah, to the Times." I'm disgusted by your newspaper's insensitivity and cowardice over this issue.
34
Allow me to cast a stone. I am an adult. I am held to adult standards in my workplace, community and circle of friends and family. I am responsible for my words and action and often fail. If I were to use language as Williamson and Jeong have I would be fired from my job, loose standing in my community and be shunned by friends and family.
Words matter, whether spoken, printed, tweeted or sent by semaphore. I have found the words of Williamson and Jeong to be repellent and serve no other purpose than to be corrosive to public discourse and civil society. In the case of Jeong the number of tweets is irrelevant, it is merely verbal incontinence which has no place in any newspaper.
I will not judge Mr. Williamson, Ms. Jeong or Mr. Stephens on their politics or the color of their skin; I do judge them on the content of their character. Character revealed by their own repeated words.
44
Correct. She should not be fired (or not not hired). But neither should Rosanne or Quinn Norton from their jobs based on similar tweets. It's the double standard that really makes people dubious.
21
Let's not forget that that the journalists, celebrities, and quasi-celebrities getting caught up on in these "social media furies" are not on Twitter by accident, nor are they tweeting provocative things by accident. They are seeking to build their brand and draw attention to themselves on these platforms. As such, they should be judged by what they say.
For people whose profession is words, i.e. journalists, I just can't seem to find too much sympathy when they stumble in their attempts to build their brand.
29
The only legitimate critique of Jeongs tweets is that as a technology writer, they should be more aware of the eternal life of all things digital. Even then, it’s a minor quibble.
3
Sarah Jeong is a WRITER. This is how she makes her living!! She, perhaps more than others, should be held accountable for her words. Tweets have all the thought of a hasty phone call and all the authority of the written word. We all know that now that we have a bombastic president who relies on tweets. Sarah Jeong, as a writer covering technology, certainly should know that. If the Times does not hold her accountable for her racist comments, then that speaks volumes about the selectivity of their censorship and moralizing on the topic of racism. Shame on the Times! Shame on Sarah Jeong!
39
I defended Williamson at the time...
[ Imagine the sort of person who would defend the proposed murder of women. These are monstrous words, not surprising unfortunately but monstrous. ]
6
@Nancy
He wasn't advocating "murder of women," he was advocating capital punishment for the crime of killing their fetuses. If you truly believe abortion is murder, and you think the death penalty is appropriate for murder, then it's a rational position.
Thank you for this very thoughtful piece.
3
Mr. Stephens,
I am a staunch liberal, but I read your column regularly and always tune in to what you say when you're on TV. While I disagree with much/most of your opinions, you are a principled and consistent conservative, something we badly need in our discourse. Sorry to hear anyone calling you epithets in the past. That being said you are conflating many different forces at play here.
Bari Weiss made an honest mistake and she was criticized appropriately. She states that people made her out to be a "ghoul" and a "racist" and perhaps there were a few fringe outrage comments that crossed the line; however, she was clearly annoyed by the volume of redundant (fair) criticisms not by the vileness of the comments themselves. Criticism is not the same as silencing or censoring. Some criticism crosses the line -- and I believe it has with her on other occasions -- but this is not one.
And on a totally different plane, white people are not victims from Ms. Jeong's remarks either. You are a scholar and hardly need a history lesson on the sociological subjugation of people of color and the institutionalized racism that exists as a result. Criticizing white people -- even aggressively and crudely -- is not morally equivalent to making putrid insults about women and asking that violence come their way (or about insulting marginalized groups). If you don't understand that, then it will take much more than comments and letters to your columns to address that.
1
@Julian
Your point is right on. Context is crucial. Also, I believe that the underlying intent of the writer and speaker is important and I would be curious to know how Ms. Jeong understands her tweets.
1
@Julian Racism is racism. Hatred is hatred. Judging someone by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character is what's messing up our country today, and everyone is guilty of it to some extent.
2
@Julian
I don't think that was his point. I think that he meant that folks can not be reduced to the dumbest or meanest things that they have said or written (allowing that somethings might be dumber or meaner than others).
Stephens has actually been consistent here in defending both Williams and Jeong (allowing that this might be one of the dumber things that I've said. Who knows anymore?)
When I taught in an urban high school I was sometimes verbally attacked by young people (not my own students) as "Caucasian". Trying to be reasonable, fair, cool, and professional in an atmosphere of racism, I found my idealism damaged.
18
Actually, I think the truth is in the offhand statements. In his comments, written and in informal conversation, Kevin Williams exemplifies the cruel, pitiless scorn of the American right (especially towards women). Sarah Jeong's snarky, condescending and racially insensitive observations reflect the narcissism of tech culture rather neatly.
19
I sympathize with her views of old white men especially given the nastiness out of the one in the White House, Mr Racist in Chief. And his minion Mr Miller is no sweetheart either. But I don’t like her language. It’s cruel and mirrors Trump’s in its cruelty.
9
Let HIM who is without....
The original was phrased differently. The sentence started with "He."
1
I have never been on Twitter, or even Facebook. Gasp. Therefore, I’m a qualified stone thrower. Let’s give her a chance, and see what happens. ONE second chance, that’s it. Don’t disappoint the avid readers and commenters. Seriously.
66
@Phyliss Dalmatian
And I have never been to Spain, but I'm somewhat partial to the music.
I also think the young woman deserves a second chance. To be honest, I've become increasingly suspicious that her Tweets really were attempts at sarcasm, irony, or humor that just fell flat.
Finally, you gotta wonder how serious this Williams guy was about the stuff he wrote.
1
@Phyliss Dalmatian
Sure, and bring David Duke in too! His racist statements are decades old now...
1
@Phyliss Dalmatian Oh... but Comments to the NYTimes count also.
1
If you think it, and say it, (or tweet it), be prepared to live with it
190
@ken rozeboom Okay, but does living with it mean "it" has to dominate or dictate how others see someone, or, forbid, ruin one's life, employment potential, and community stature?
We should also respect people who show restraint and look askance at those without it. Writing 31 tweets a day is irresponsible. I'm sure if I wrote half that many I would say things that misrepresent my more fundamental thoughts and I would regret it.
4
It's the hypocrisy that bothers me.
We're all so ready to shame others for what we consider offensive comments, while feeling no shame whatever when we ourselves are called out for offensive comments of our own.
We live in a culture where verbal self-discipline is not only not encouraged, it is actively discouraged, with social media playing the role of the Great Uninhibiter.
Until we actually speak, or tweet, or comment, and then the feeding frenzy ensues, and we are ripped apart, or we rip others apart for what we and they say, often when emotion has overcome our good sense, unconscious to our own claim to entitlement at the expense of others.
And we feel no shame. We refuse to see the double standard we apply to our own tweets and comments and those coming from people who are on our side of the political spectrum, and those coming from people on "the other side."
If writers are going to be hired disregarding whatever offensive tweets or comments they have made on social media, then this standard must apply to all writers, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they fall.
I commend you, Mr. Stephens, for welcoming Ms. Jeong and not pre-judging her by her tweets. I just wish that more liberals held to the same liberal principles with regards to writers whose tweets they find offensive.
9
We live in an age that prizes speed and volume over thoughtful discourse (and the Times comments section is usually a stark example - the earliest comments garner the greatest number of Readers' Picks). As the media devolves into clicks and eyeballs, the impetus for this behavior only gains strength.
When the paper of record climbs aboard this train and devotes additional space to the noisy and the rapid-fire, it may be time to abandon hope. Thomas Paine required 46 pages; the American Revolution deserved that much more than 140 or 1500 characters for a cogent case. It's just common sense.
1
If we were all to be judged by the worst comments we've made, almost everyone would be on a persona non grata list. However, there is reason for concern based on the persistence and repeated nature of Sarah Jeong's comments. How someone behaves consistently behaves in an implicitly public forum, such as Twitter or any form of social media, is not an inherently unreasonable measuring stick of character.
However, as Bret elucidates nicely, using this as the only measuring stick does a disservice to a robust and thoughtful body of work. The strength of this body of work is the reason for Sarah Jeong's invitation to the NYT Editorial Board. And this invitation comes with responsibilities. I personally have often felt troubled and challenged by columns from Bret, Ross Douthat, Lindy West, David Brooks, David Friedman, and many others. However, they have behaved as consummate professionals, upholding the standards of citing sources appropriate to the nature of their assertions, thoughtfully interrogating their own positions, and encouraging open debate and commentary. If Sarah Jeong does the same, then I only look forward to her columns. If she does not, and fails to uphold the values of the editorial board, then her participation can be reevaluated.
(As an aside, I do fall in the camp that believes a power imbalance is inherently part of racism. However, prejudice is not bounded by power, and falls in the same odious category of discrimination. Perhaps a semantic argument only)
2
Social media is public. It's like taking out an add in the front page of the newspaper.
If you want to vent and say nasty things, then do so in private. My dad used to say things that were a mixture of Archie Bunker and Alex Jones! But it was the opposite of who is really was. He didn't do it in public.
I realize the issue of this article is judging a person on the basis of their total work, not a few off the cuff nasty remarks. It's about liberal bias, which absolutely exists.
HOWEVER, it's time that we stop pretending that social media is some private conversation between friends and family. I'm showing my age, but talking like this in public is rude and disrespectful. Shame on Alex Jones, Shame on Donald Trump, Shame on Sarah Jeong.
It's time to start imposing consequences. If Sarah Jeong does this again, she should be fired. Hopefully we can fire Trump in 2 years.
4
I agree with this article.
One more point: "racism" is NOT power + prejudice or whatever liberals are attempting to re-define it as based on some critical theory scholarship from the 1970's. A more appropriate term for that concept might be systemic or institutional racism.
Everyone outside of a Sociology class at Brown can continue to use "racism" to mean its generally accepted definition:
prejudice/discrimination based on race.
In any event, systemic/institutional racism can be anti-black, anti-white, anti-Asian or all-of-the-above because "power" is not a monolithic, rigid social force. Power is contextual and its diffuse and it is certainly the case that in many contexts the powerful-powerless dynamic is not black and white, so to speak.
Consider the powers-that-be who admit students to our leading higher educational institutions certainly wield power and they appear to be actively discriminating against Asians and whites because of their race. Look at California where public affirmative action has been outlawed to get a sense of the magnitude of this power.
Finally, conceding only for argument's sake that anti-white racism should be called "reverse discrimination" or something else, it's still wrong for all the same reasons racism is wrong. Jeong's proponents have muddled a debate about the impropriety of making hyperbolic race-based statements on Twitter to leap to the conclusion that reverse racism cannot even exist.
9
I never liked "LOVE is never having to say your sorry." Instead, LOVE is when neither party knows who's luckier. Therefore, until racist tweets can no longer discern who's demonstrably luckier between tweeter and target, the one whose LOVE's got more to lose needs to apologize.
A compulsive lack of discretion which endangers herself, can spread hate and deceit, and seems the worst way to seek change. "Quirky" tweets are not a good excuse, nor are her deliberate writings. Seems like a bomb one never knows how and when it will explode. Life is a cohesive society require tact and discipline, not snarkiness.
4
Most of the tweets I've seen (in the journals since I don't use twitter) can be characterized as the kind of needless snarky behavior one sees from people who are very young and still learning how to be in the world. There are, however, something on the order of 100,000 of these outbursts not a couple, and Ms. Jeong is not an undergraduate student. This is not behavior one expects, or should have to tolerate, from a professional. It will be extremely difficult to take her (or, increasingly, the Times) seriously. My guess is I'll ser her byline and pass on by.
8
I consider myself a liberal, I have lived Berkeley, CA for many years, and am associated with UC Berkeley, however, I do have boundaries and do not tolerate certain inappropriate behavior or comments which demean others. I do not find meaness,vulgarity or violence necessary knowing that other acceptable expressions of feelings are available, one does not have to act like a troglodyte to get a point across. I would hate to give up my subscriptions to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or the NYT, but I would if articles began taking such an unfortunate turn.
17
There is an old saying, "Never say or write anything you don't want to appear on the front page of The New York Times." I guess those of us who still subscribe to that will have to find another newspaper as the example. And I vehemently disagree that you are not the person you appear to be on Twitter. One can easily argue that that IS in fact the person you are. Is that not who Donald Trump proves to be, with each and every tweet? Personally I suspect there will be more incendiary tweets from Ms. Jeong. It's only a matter of time.
26
I guess my experience is more lowbrow: I was raised never to do anything you wouldn’t want your mother to read about on the cover of the Daily News.
2
Reihan Salam wrote an excellent piece on Sarah Jeong for The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/the-utility-of-whit...
One of the more illuminating defenses of Ms. Jeong's tweets is that they are not hateful or racist if taken in context. That leads us to the question of what exactly this context is. Per Mr. Salam's piece:
"In some instances, white-bashing can actually serve as a means of ascent, especially for Asian Americans. Embracing the culture of upper-white self-flagellation can spur avowedly enlightened whites to eagerly cheer on their Asian American comrades... it allows Asian Americans who use the discourse to position themselves as ethnic outsiders, including those who are comfortably enmeshed in elite circles....
Think about what it takes to claw your way into America’s elite strata. Unless you were born into the upper-middle class, your surest route is to pursue an elite education. To do that, it pays to be exquisitely sensitive to the beliefs and prejudices of the people who hold the power to grant you access to the social and cultural capital you badly want. By setting the standards for what counts as praiseworthy, elite universities have a powerful effect on youthful go-getters. "
3
Interesting: it takes a conservative to be fair on this issue. The left is unable to be fair. Isn't this part of the problem?
15
The comments here are beyond disturbing. Instead of arguing that this powerful young woman, who will be joining the New York Times editorial board and who attended Harvard University, should be welcomed because she has had other things of considerable value to say, her offensive tweets are defended because, as an Asian female, she is therefore somehow powerless and therefore there is no negative consequence to any prejudices she might have or express. The New York Times editorial board is one of the most powerful institutions in America, it drives the agenda for most of the media.
25
I don't tweet.
This is my stone.
9
Let the powers at NYT read the mature, intelligent, and thoughtful posts here and reconsider their position on Ms. Jeung. In this hypersensitive time it is a wonder why all the fuss about her, and why she was not immediately disowned. A very strange --and very indefensible!-- place to make a stand.
11
I simply cannot understand why anyone uses social media anymore. We have seen countless careers damaged as a result of thoughtless old tweets, Director James Gunn most recently.
Jack Dorsey says he cannot shut down Alex Jones because no rules were broken. So why hasn't there been a massive migration away from Twitter? If Trump and Jones are the last men left tweeting, no economic basis for Twitter to exist. Likewise Facebook. After everything we have learned, why is anyone still interested in engaging with Facebook? People are happy to boycott Chic-Fil-A or the NFL, but not Twitter and Facebook?
Stop complaining and just walk away, make a real impact on the business. And we would be doing a big favor for thoughtless people like Sarah Jeong by kicking the legs out from under these platforms where their inane musings will otherwise be permanently memorialized.
4
I have a subscription to the NYT because I highly value the journalistic integrity of those who work there. By accepting the racist tweets of Sarah Jeong, the Times appears to be holding a double standard, and gives fuel to people like our current President to demonize an important journalistic presence like the Times as a purely liberal outlet of fake news.
There are other good news sources out there, like the WaPo, who I do not have a subscription to because there is only so much news I can read in a day.
But it is possible that I'll give them a try for a while. I may or may not be back.
21
If the President is the example, does that in general confer that people who use Twitter are twits? Or are the real twits the ones who read more into every micro nuance and salivate at anything at all deemed "offensive" so they can pounce on the poor unfortunate who foolishly (or otherwise) tweeted a twitdom?
Whatever happened to the old common sense idea "if you don't have anything nice to say about someone, keep your mouth shut?" Now the din of cacophony of everyone on their soapbox threatens to overwhelm us even more. And this memory is persistent, as Ms. Jeong is finding out. I don't quite get the appeal of the platform, given all these long term side effects. Perhaps, and hopefully sooner than later, Twitter will come to be seen as cigarette smoking is - it was "cool" once, and almost everybody did it, but the long term consequences were too high a price to continue the indulgence.
2
Ms. Jeong's tweets may be prejudiced and bigoted, but they are not racist. A person in a minority group (e.g., Korean-American) can’t be racist against the group in power (e.g., white people). That said, without question she showed show poor judgement. A lot of people in their teens and twenties show poor judgement when they post on social media. The world would be a better place if more people thought before they tweeted — and apologized, preferably before their questionable tweet history comes back to haunt them. (Mr. Williams was ~41 when he tweeted that women who have abortions are guilty of premeditated homicide. Surely he knew that remark would be inflammatory...)
The logic stated here is baffling to say the least. Korean-American is a term used by those that subscribe to the liberal backed identity based politics which many people resent. Saying a group of people can’t be racists because they are not in power is laughable. If you view, define and only see people based on their color or race you are, to a degree, exhibiting racist characteristics. To think what power is universally held by white people is absurd. There or plenty of non whites who are in powerful positions. Ms Jeong has been afforded a position that no right leaning person would ever get if the situation was reversed. I would also say that writing for the Time is a position of power as well, so she can in fact be a racist.
Let’s see how she works out but I’m not optimistic. The NYT’s may have just officially jumped the shark. No offense to sharks who have no power, unless you happen to be near one in the water.
3
@KD "A person in a minority group (e.g., Korean-American) can’t be racist against the group in power (e.g., white people)." So KD, what do you call Latinos that biases against blacks? Surprised? you shouldn't be.
2
This entire controversy reminds me of bullying.
One boy is harassed non-stop by bigger, richer, more popular boys. No matter what the boy says - in class, on the playground, in the cafeteria -- the big group of bigger, richer boys scream obscenities and hatred at him. The teachers say nothing.
But as soon as the boy being bullied says something similar back to those rich bullies, the bullies (and their rich parents) demand that the boy be expelled from school for "bullying."
There is no evidence that Jeong went out of her way to tweet nasty things at innocent bystanders. She responded to the nasty trolls who would NOT stop bullying her in the same manner that they bullied her. She fought back by turning their nasty words back at them.
Responding to bullying behavior in kind is not bullying. Going out looking for targets is bullying.
And those who are condoning the nasty tweets directed AT Jeong while demanding that she not respond have a double standard. Responding to bullying is not the same as bullying itself. You should know better -- unless you are a bully.
@RJ
She didn't just respond to the bullies though, she called for an entire race of humans to be cancelled. A better analogy would be that the bullied kid brings a gun to school and shoots everyone indiscriminately.
3
@Samuel Russell
What a ridiculous analogy.
When a bully screams non-stop at a victim "your family is gonna die" and after days of screaming it the victim says "no, your family is gonna die", you would lock up the victim because he responded in kind.
Sure, the victim can turn the other cheek and let the bullying continue. But the victim of bullying should be allowed to respond to bullying in-kind.
My philosophy has always been to question authority, no matter their race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or political party. Taking pot shots at The Man is as American as apple pie and Grateful Dead music.
"My main point was that we should be judged on the totality of our work, and that we are more than just a collage of quotes from our social-media history or some foolish utterances from the near or distant past. "
No. Wrong.
Once a thoughtless jerk always a thoughtless jerk. This reeks too much of the abuser's defense: "Hey, I was only kidding!"
Anyone who is given a public soap box is 100% accountable for EVERYTHING they say. If you don't like that rule, find another line of work.
25
I think Tweeting is ridiculous, a point proven daily by Donald Trump. Why does anyone Tweet? And why is Tweeting (such a silly word) usually a vehicle for rage, insult, and narcissism?
Stephens answers these questions by declaring, "that's the way we live now — unfiltered…" Well, I'd like to suggest we find another way to live. Civil discourse, which we self-righteously bemoan the absence of, has never resulted from "unfiltered" bursts of spleen.
So step away from the keypad, take a deep breath, count to ten, or rant at the wall. Just stop self-publishing the first angry thing that comes to mind. Put a lid on it, people!
In fact, we can also stop commenting in The New York Times. Face it, we persuade no one. Most of us read our own comment, check for replies and recommends (are we admired?), and get on with our days. Besides, we're all sounding more and more like Donald Trump on a tear about "conflicted Bob Mueller and his 17 Angry Democrats."
I prefer not to. I'm counting to ten.
2
These tweets don't seem to be isolated examples, and they do not indicate that the writer is interested in judging people by "the content of their character," to quote Dr. King. Don't we have enough loud-mouth tweeters in the current national conversation? Is this the best the Times could do?
9
"We should call many of these tweets for what they are: racist." So just how many racist tweets does it take before you would label the person as racist?
And you say that the test for working in a place like The Times should include integrity. Integrity means that you consistently hold to a strict ethical code in opinions and actions. Are these racist tweets, as you yourself call them, a sign of a consistent positive ethical code? I think not.
29
It's funny that Williamson's mistake was saying what all conservatives actually believe but know they can't say because it is too horrible even for their base.
I wish conservatives would be this truthful about everything so we could kick them out of every discussion and actually accomplish something. Imagine what a debate on climate change would look like if everyone who screamed "GOD WOULDNT DO THAT" was removed from the discussion. We might even get something accomplished again!
I've read an article "elsewhere" in which Jeong characterizes her worst tweets as a form of "counter-trolling", and expresses regret for having used that tactic.
I have this to say to Ms. Jeong. Speak plainly. Try to understand that the majority of your audience - wherever it may be - may not recognize what you call "satire" when it's deeply disguised beneath a barrage of unpleasant, hurtful verbiage. The written word can be tool that's very hard to manage, because not all human minds work the same way.
Or if you must turn to satire, avoid the use of language that's employed in all seriousness by quite a few genuinely disgusting people. I don't think I need to enlarge on that.
(This comes from an "old white man" who feels compelled to warn you that if "being cruel" involves physical abuse, be prepared to spend some time in the House of Many Doors as a guest of the county; or if it means just a flurry of words, prepare to be ignored.)
3
Looks like 18 reasons why I should cancel my Twitter account. I never use it lest I get Foot-in-Mouth disease
4
I don't know much about Sarah Jeong's work, aside from her tweets. I agree with Stephens that they are obnoxious and are appropriately labeled "racist." Those who try to defend them with the dogmatic insistence that "racism is prejudice plus power" don't even win the argument on their own terms: As a graduate of Harvard and Berkeley, and a member of the wealthiest ethnic group in America, who is now (still) poised to assume a position at the "paper of record," Sarah Jeong is hardly to be numbered among the wretched of the earth.
"Progressives" will occasionally pay lip-service to "intersectionality" and the relevance of economic class, but their defense of Jeong shows this is mostly a charade. Their real ideology is built on a simplistic, Manichean notion of a world divided between the oppressed--women and "people of color"--and their oppressors--white men. It is a sort of racialized, latter-day version of what used to be characterized as "vulgar Marxism."
13
As an old white man I kind of agree with her derogatory tweets about us. It's not that we're all bad but when we see old white men in congress debating what women should be allowed to do in regards to their health and well being it's downright embarrassing and we need to be called out.
3
I will be very aware of what Jeong will write in her columns the time to come. I never twitter, she did and does. What I read in Brett Stephens column about her tweets worries me. Of course, every one can change position, but to apologize is only the first step. One can easily forgive, but it will be very difficult to forget. One way or another it is very difficult not to read an article without some suspicion based on the knowledge you have about what the author wrote in earlier days.
And something else: for column writers of the NYT it will be from now as walking on eggs: it will be very difficult to judge the twitterings of other people, from now on, without being remembered of the messages Sarah Jeong sent.
2
Isn't one Trump in this country enough?
15
@vermontague Correction: MORE than enough?
4
A track record of 110,000 tweets (31 per day) reeks of arrogance, self-importance, and immaturity. I would not hire a babysitter who could not stop herself from tweeting her every thought, much less an editorial board member.
NYT, you're making it very easy for the right to paint the left as thoughtless, hypocritical, and rude. Please be mindful of the right-of-center majority that will not take kindly to Ms. Jeong's witty Twitter repository. Most will simply find her inflammatory and line up to pull the lever for Trump again.
So, NYT, make a choice: do you want to be right, or do you want your side to win elections again??
28
The reality is, what ever you wish to call them - the left, democrats, socialists, progressives, they dish out hatred by the 5 gallon bucket against anyone who disagrees with them. Rather than accepting that people can have differing opinions and remain civil about things. So, in a nut shell, they are no different than those that they pillory.
The Internet, and it's varied parts, have allowed many who would have previously been ignored to achieve their 5 minutes in the spot light. But this doesn't happen because of the breadth and depth of their position. It requires a level of superficial shock treatment. The more outrageous the better it is because people, stupidly, retweet, like, and what ever other stupid stuff they do on social media.
4
The WSJ understands that of which you write. The NYT, perhaps not so well. It is difficult to understand why you would move, but you did. Enjoy your new colleague! By the way, I imagine that the tone and content of what you write has not changed since your move, but I don't enjoy reading you nearly as much as I did at the Journal, where you were can't miss reading. I imagine that context matters.
1
I do not condone her tweets. That said, suggesting women be hung from trees for having abortions is pretty specific and violent. It's not a generalized disdain or contempt. I do think there's a difference.
115
You're right, Williamson's "hanging women" remarks, and Sarah suggesting that White people be "cancelled", celebrating the future death of White people as a whole (and indicating, sarcastically or not, that this was, in fact, her own plan all along), and suggesting that White People should live underground.........are indeed, very different.
The latter appears to be far more sincerely malevolent than the former, not to mention the latter being roundly defended and applauded by many in the media and the political punditry.
At least Brett hasn't surrendered the entirety of his self-awareness, and at least he still has the grace to call hypocrites hypocrites.
3
@Anne Actually, wishing for the death of white people "cancel white people" is a pretty specific call for violence, and does indicate, in your words, "generalized disdain or contempt". But the left has "generalized disdain or contempt" for all who disagree with it, which is why Jeong still has a job at the Times and the Atlantic canned Williamson. Oh, and of course, Williamson is a white male and Jeong is part of a supposedly repressed minority. Your sides' hypocrisy knows no limits.
1
@Jeremy Cohen: The probability of a woman being murdered is much more likely than the 'future death of all white people' of that we white people will all end up being forced to live underground.
Good column -- thank you Mr. Stephens. The most important thing is that people are honest about their world views and I think Sarah Jeong has been. She is free to hold her views and the Times is free to hire her.
That said, most people don't agree with Ms. Jeong's neo-Marxist belief that human identity is formed and defined by our relation to the White Male oppressor.
Here's hoping that our public intellectual class is moving on to more interesting and holistic work and thought wrt human identity soon.
2
Im glad he acknowledges whats going on. Conservatives make racist comments and they are fired on the spot. Liberals make racist comments and excuses are made as to why its no big deal and they get to keep their jobs. This is part of the reason why a large part of the population sees the media as biased.
341
Funny, Trump makes racist comments all the time with no consequences at all.
@albert I very much agree with this. I can understand how people on the left can intellectually distinguish Jeong's tweets from similar ones aimed at minorities, but that doesn't stop both sets of tweets from being ugly. There's just no upside from saying "Jeong Did Nothing Wrong!" and I don't understand why the left not only fails to condemn utterances like Jeong's, but vigorously defends their ability to say them.
5
@albert Racism is a system of oppression wielded by the dominant culture. One cannot be racist against white people because of this. One can be prejudiced. But if the target of the comment is actually a racist, then what result?
Let's set those who have elected to become hypocrites aside.
Bret defended Kevin Williamson and now defends Sarah Jeong.
I was extraordinarily dubious about Mr. Williamson, and I am extraordinarily dubious, I think even more so, about Ms. Jeong.
Both seem to hold deplorable views, a problem that Ms. Jeong at least seems to compound with a lack of self-discipline in her public (i.e., Twitter) comportment.
I am aware that platforms like Twitter in particular, and the Internet age in general, make self-discipline difficult, to a large extent by design. But in such a difficult era, we should be bringing the best forward. That goes against Mr. Williamson and Ms. Jeong both, to my mind.
Now, I shall not be casting any actual stones, and I shall try to stay away even from metaphorical ones. But I shall not be ashamed to write a comment in disagreement, review it, and after consideration, put my name to it.
Let he who is without self-discipline spend three seconds composing his reply.
1
Perfectly reasonable, but the point is that everybody has deplorable views, if you look hard enough.
I thought I could undermine and bring down Twitter from the inside -- by being a user. A couple weeks ago Twitter locked me out for twelve (12) hours. I have concluded that the best way to bring Twitter down is to stay off of it and not use it. I have not returned to Twitter since the day I was locked out for twelve (12) hours. So far my personal boycott has been a victory for me.
The best way to eliminate Twitter, is the same as with any consumer product -- do not enlist, register, purchase, rent, lease or use the product in any way.
3
Look, we have so many other real problems. There's vast income disparity in the United States and throughout the world. There's a 17-year-old war in Afghanistan. Cities and islands are literally being wiped out by climate change. There are millions of refugees being displaced due to corporate greed, military industrial complex, climate change, and political instability (often the legacy of colonialism, imperialism, and the latest proxy wars).
Oh, those right-wing pundits and their donor overlords would love to distract everyone from real problems by stoking more insipid media culture wars.
So keep Sarah Jeong in her job. You need a different perspective. But don't get distracted from putting REAL articles on your front page.
Bret, you make the point that Sarah Jeong’s tweets get more attention than her long form journalism but somehow don’t represent who she really is since they are the product of a more reactive, less-considered thought process. I would argue just the opposite; her offensive tweets more accurately reveal who she is since they come more spontaneously and are less edited than her more lengthy stuff. And, as you yourself acknowledged, her offensive tweets are so numerous! They constitute a pattern, not an anomaly. They’re her. To hire or not to hire? Well that’s a separate question...whoever makes the decision should just be aware of who they’re getting.
32
So she apologized and said it was a mistake to respond to online harassment with racist tweets of her own. The real question is when and how did she apologize? At the time, and in full public view? Or now that it has been brought up with a highly sought after position on the line for her? If the latter, then it should be bye-bye Sarah, thanks for the self-serving apology.
13
This reader has never even heard of this woman.
I am certainly not impressed with the details in this article of this woman's history. But I will continue to be a reader and then I will decide.
I support the free press being willing to publish all sides of any issue or opinion.
But as a reader, I certainly can form a negative opinion of a writer and avoid future articles.
3
Nice turning of the cheek, Mr. Stephens!
There’s a difference between calling for the murder of women and trash talk racism. Neither is pretty, but wanting to kill a third of women because of a bizarre idea indicating a serious problem ( abortion survivor? Williams needs psych assessment) versus just disliking white people, I’m not seeing equivalence.
As a white woman, I can ignore the white hate. But some guy who wants to murder me? That’s worrisome.
3
Hw about making this a rule? You may not insult the powerless but you must insult the powerful.
98
@Jane Smiley And who, pray tell, gets to decide who is "powerful" and who is not? That's the rub.
4
@Jane Smiley - Define "power."
3
@Jane Smiley
Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia have been discriminated against for years for the very same reason: They are the "powerful."
1
I have not read Jeong's work as Stephens has, but I will take him at his word that her work has real merit. However, I think it is those unguarded comments, in private conversations or on social media, that often tells us who we are and who others are. As someone famous said, when someone tells you who they are, believe them.
23
I'm an octogenarian that struggles but manages to keep up but do not tweet and have no plans to do so. I don't wish to be limited in my words .
Tweets have no place in conversation and anything worth while saying requires multiple sentences and proper signatures.
12
I am without a bad tweet because I've never made a single tweet.
I speak as a liberal Democrat--I'm disturbed by the things Sarah Leong has said on social media. I would never hire her. Maybe her rhetoric never rose to the level of ‘should be hanged,’ but her uncontrolled anger has been on full display.
You cannot tell me that people like her or Mr. Williamson were unable to exercise any restraint on social media. We all know by now that our digital mishaps can come back to haunt us. So, I believe people say exactly what they mean. No person types out or says the words: 'hang' or 'hanged' or whatever the actual tweet said and then presses the "send" button without a little: "and I absolutely mean it--you baby-killing liberal women should be executed" going through his mind.
Are Ms. Jeong’s tweets the core of who she is? Maybe not, but that's no excuse. I've written some sharp stuff in emails. Just before I click "send," I ask myself if I will stand by what I say. I will not hit "send" until the answer is "yes.” That people who write professionally don’t do this is not believable.
I wanted to read Mr. Williamson’s exact tweet, but he has deleted it. He won’t stand by what he said, and, by the way, he’s expressed that sentiment more times than one now-vanished tweet and some isolated pod cast.
Neither of these people should be awarded a place in a mainstream publication. They should stick to the fringes and write an occasional op-ed.
36
Those who judge Brett Stephens to be an"Arab-hating, climate-denying, pedophile apologist" do so, accurately or not, based on his published punditry -- the very same thing he's paid to do on this page.
He can claim to be none of those things, but not by referring to the opinion his friends and family have of him, unless he's inviting the readership into his home rather than asking it to read him in these pages.
Similarly, Sarah Jeong is being judged on what she's written, not what a nice or ironic person she may be. Writing, after all, is her business. If a writer doesn't expect to be taken at her word, a newspaper would not appear to be the ideal career choice.
25
I'm a liberal and I'm sure I have said things that I regret. But what I am not is a professional writer. Leong is and when she goes on twitter, she is going there in her professional capacity. What she says at home or to her friends is her business. I have a salty tongue at home, but I never cursed in my professional life. What she says on social media is everyone's business; it's part of her professional identity. She deserves to be called on this, just as Kevin Williamson was. Here's the reality: people who respect women don't call on them to be hanged for having an abortion even in so-called jest. He may not like to know this, but this told me more about him than any measured thing he ever said. Ditto for Leong's comments about whites. They show a carelessness and ugliness that simply don't belong on these pages. If I said about Asians what she said about whites would have gotten me fired in my professional life and I would have deserved it.
73
@Ceilidth
There are people who seriously contend that non-whites can't be racist. Of course, East-Asians are not regarded as "of color" for purposes of arts funding, at least not in New York, so maybe Ms. Leong feels a need to "other" white people aggressively in order to maintain street-cred.
1
"Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone."
Good column by Bret, and he does seem to be consistent in his own position - at least with respect to The Atlantic.
But the real point here is that the Times would never have kept a conservative columnist with a history of equally racist tweets. Even if it wanted to, a tsunami of reader indignation would have forced its hand.
And the argument that Ms. Jeong was merely responding to hateful tweets directed at herself doesn't invalidate the comparison. Conservative commentators get threats all the time, including death threats. I wonder how the left would respond to a planned conservative hire at the Times with Ms. Jeong's tweet history. Would it claim "satire" or "justifiable responses in kind" to defend such a conservative? The mere asking of such a question is laughable.
11
There is nothing the President can say, do, or tweet that can do more damage to the New York Times, to bring more discredit upon in the eyes of much of the public, than the Times has done to itself with this hire and, perhaps even more so, with its breath-takingly mendacious claim that in her biogted, vulgar tweets Ms. Jeong was simply "imitating the rhetoric of her harassers", rather than revealing her true character and beliefs.
60
Philip Pullman responding to someone who objected to him calling the Son Of G-d a scoundrel:
"Yes. It was a shocking thing to say, and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked.
No one has the right to spend their life without being offended.
Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if they open it and read it, they don’t have to like it.
And if you read it and dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me — You can complain about it. You can write to the publisher. You can write to the paper. You can write your own book.
You can do all those things, but there your rights stop.
No one has the right to stop me from writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read."
1
Why do "conservative" writers always play the Sarah Palin victim card?
"My main point was that we should be judged on the totality of our work..."
Define "totality." A grown person throws out an absurd statement that wouldn't be uttered by a sane 12 year old with a conscience, then we are asked to treat it as an anomaly not fitting the "totality." This is bad faith arguing.
To compound the word games, Bret mocks the backlash as personal persecution. Grow up!
7
Stephens asks, "does it [i.e., hundreds of racist tweets over a long period] represent the core truth of who she is?" And then he simply asserts that this cannot be so. I disagree. Angry people will sometimes say, what I said when I was mad doesn't matter, so don't be bothered that I was cruel; give me a pass. But what people say when unbuttoned is *exactly* who they are, in their deepest self. No action by the Times has more disillusioned me than (a) deciding to hire Jeong even though knowing of her screeds, and (b) deciding to keep Jeong on the roster hoping this will blow over. Classic Trump-like behaviors.
8
" But it’s also a reason to temper our judgments about people based on the things they say on social media. The person you are drunk or stoned is not the person you are — at least not the whole person. Neither is the person you are the one who’s on Twitter."
Suppose the altered states of anger and drunkenness did the opposite of what the author suggests: reveal who we really are when not censored by facade--a continuum of the adage, "who we really are is revealed when no one is looking."
What seems important: has Sarah apologized for her previous tweets? Recognized her incendiary and racist comments? We all make mistakes, but are we willing to amend when we come to our senses or receive the right to represent a national publication such as the Times?
8
I've often noticed bigotry in most people and indeed in most journalists, all one needs to do is read their twitter feed, and to notice bigotry when it occurs. We are all human, as is Ms. Jeong. What one hopes is that people will come to recognize their own prejudices and work to overcome them with time. It seems at one time Ms Jeong harbored strongly racist misandrist thoughts about white guys, that's not a job killer in my book, nor should it be for anyone else with similar but different prejudices.
"All the mental burps and inner screams that wisely used to be left unspoken — or, if spoken, little heard and seldom recorded." Or as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said in a recent interview commenting on this social media phenomenon (I paraphrase): Everything that is thought doesn't have to be spoken and everything that's spoken doesn't have to written."
1
I really enjoy your columns, Bret. I often feel the heat of Ross Douthat scorn; it’s warm and personal. I agree with Michelle Goldberg more often than you, but she still grates in a way that you do not.
You are, when it is all said and done, a gentleman, at least in the persona that issues from your columns and your jousts with Gail. (Gail Collins, by the way, is very much a gentlewoman herself!)
I am not sure what this new voice will add to the mix, but it looks like I’ll find out. Given the ferocious Twitter history you recount, I am at a loss to understand why you deplete you hard earned credibility defending her. That was your call, though.
Keep using your formidable powers of reasoning and persuasion to attempt to turn my mind favorably toward conservative thought. You haven’t convinced me, but you have interested me.
Thanks.
1
Roseanne Barr, welcome back.
22
Far and away NOT even similar and to suggest so is to exercise an obscene level of white privilege and false equivalence. Barr directed her venom at member of an oft-abused group gang for most of history has not been in a position to push back. Keith is simply exercising her perogative to push back.
1
I'm feeling contrarian about this-- I am actually grateful that the plethora of comments from M. Jeong has surfaced, because it enables me to evaluate her future articles, and The Times' financial opinion pieces, through the prism of her clear and repeated biases ( there's also a YouTube video of her lecturing at Harvard in which she castigates white men, clearly a more thought-out observation than her tweets).....any reasonably thoughtful person seeks news and information from a variety of sources in these charged times, and her prejudice informs, rather than negating, her writing, and my ability to evaluate it....
5
Mr Stephen makes a strange and unsubstantiated effort to defend Ms Jeong through a left-right lens followed with an appeal to fairness by saying that she is not overtly racist in her long form writing.
Ms Jeong likely went to a pretty good college and has had excellent opportunities in her work life. She has also likely had pretty good models for public writing as a result. I get the notion of turning racist language back on whites to make a point, but maybe you only need to do that once for shock and awe. But an extensive trail of racist tweets suggests she really was enjoying the cruelty as she herself confesses. I'm what Mr Stephens would describe as "someone on the left" and I find Ms Jeong's tweets disqualifying in her elevation to a national news platform. Everybody thought once Trump became President his aberrant, unhinged and indecent tweets would cease and he'd pivot to statesmanship. Painfully, we've had to accept what you tweet is what you are.
5
Bret displays a pretty un-thoughtful view of racism if he truly believes that minorities making fun of white people is the same thing ("racism!") as centuries of genocide, slavery, white supremacy et al that has made up their experience. I had a good chuckle reading the pearl-clutching around Sarah's twitter comments presented here.
There certainly have been times, as a white man myself, when I've felt angry or attacked by comments like these. It takes a lot of introspection (and therapy in my case lol) to not take things so personally. I'm feeling secure enough now that I do not feel personally attacked when Sarah says #cancelwhitepeople, so lucky me I guess.
For the people who do feel anger around someone being racist towards white people (lol) I wonder what baggage they are still carrying and what work they need to do to let go of that?
People who’ve spent a lifetime trying to look past color expect to be treated the same. Pretty simple, no?
3
For a paper that has crucified the President over each and every tweet, called for Roseanne to be crucified and lose her livlihood, it is beyond laughable that they would defend this woman and her tweets. One law for thee and another for me.
48
"Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone?"
Wrong case.
"Please release I, let I go..."
4
Bret, what world do you live in? Tell me another occupation, school teacher, CEO, policeman, pastor, pick one, where we just forget about flaming, hateful, comments, made over and over again, directed towards people. That somehow we just over look all that and say, yes, but they are really bright, smart, a good speaker, innovative, so we should just overlook that hateful venom they occasionally or perhaps frequently spew out.
When are we, should we or would we, be comfortable with that? To make a generalization so negative against a huge population of people is just ignorant. At its most profound definition. It’s hateful and harmful and other horrible things, but above all, it is just ignorant. That somehow we would then say, no, because of these other qualities I am comfortable with them teaching my children, policing our neighborhood, preaching on Sunday or Saturday, you just don’t see that happen. Yet in this instance, you welcome her to the Board, where she will offer judgement on events and others written and spoken word. That is ignorant.
33
Quoting Jesus doesn't help here. The question at hand is, Why be so sure Sarah Jeong's ugliest tweets aren't the real her, or at least a big part of the real her, and the rest of her "nicer" tweets, and her writing in general, merely a veneer of pretend civility covering an inner anger at all white people?
If someone is mostly good, but does one bad thing, we say it's out of character for that person, and forgive them. But if that person repeatedly does that bad thing--not when a child, but when an adult (as is the case of Sarah Jeong), even though he or she mostly does good things, we are likely to say the person has an incorrigible bad side.
Why should it be any different with Sarah Jeong and her racist tweets? So what if she spat out a hundred thousand over the course of a decade, and the racist, ugly ones are not the norm? That several were racist and ugly isn't a sign of them being out of character. It's simply a sign that she herself is of bad character.
The Times has hired her, but I won't be reading her.
33
Stephens has to find fodder to keep defending the real racist in this country. Meanwhile Canada is being attacked by the racist, extremist coalition and he is indirectly defending and enabling them. He knows this.
1
"The person you are drunk or stoned is not the person you are — at least not the whole person." Well, 103,000 tweets is a pretty large sample of the whole person. What she says on Twitter makes me doubt her judgment on everything else. The Times' willingness to give her a platform makes me question their judgment, too.
67
I was glad to see this article because there was a noticeable silence from the Times leadership since the initial furor over her hiring. By lowering the bar - and you really lowered the bar on this hire - the Times has painted itself into a corner for all future hires because the bar will be relatively easy for anyone to get over. NY Times - you made a very dumb move defending her and you will pay for hiring her for years to come.
53
The problem with Ms. Jeong's tweets is less with their substance than tone. Her comments reveal someone who is immature and lacking in substance, which is typical of a person with limited life experiences.
21
I agree, Bret.... Now if you could have said it in 25 words or less, this 'tempest' would have been given the ;teapot' it deserves....
1
The hypocrisy is palpable. When will folks stop calling everyone they disagree with racists? Or examine themselves with the same lens? It's like the Moral Majority went Democrat. Remember them?
19
I guess I am free to cast as many stones as I like as I have no bad tweets - well, no tweets of any kind actually. But I do regularly comment in these threads and were they ever unearthed for some reason, they would show me to be a variable person, sometimes measured, coherent, sometimes not, contradictory, hypocritical, egocentric, insightful at times, and at others, really dumb, and yes, hateful when it comes to my pet peeves.
We are not what we say. We are not even what we believe and to reduce any of us to those things is to miss the essence of who we are. I find the essence of people in these forums behind their words. That is why I comment in The Times and don't twitter.
Twitter demeans us all. It's reductive and plays to our worst instincts. And that's not who we all are. Even Trump. I can't stand the guy. He makes my stomach churn. But there's people who say he's a really nice guy in private. Could be true. But you wouldn't know it from the tweets.
We've all said stupid stuff or lashed out in anger when we shouldn't have. But isn't there a limit? If Sarah Jeong were a right-wing white male, the Times would've dropped her like a hot potato. The outrage is justified. She crossed the line too many times.
I applaud the Times for providing its readers with a broad range of views. We all know the Times leans left, but it brings on people like Stephens and gives op-ed writers from the right a chance to put their views before its readers. That said, the Times looks hypocritical in this instance.
25
Lots of pretend disapproval followed by exoneration! Others got fired, why isn't she?
39
This is way beyond one or two unfortunate lapses of judgement. This is a history of hateful opinions expressed gleefully. FIRE HER NOW.
62
Hateful opinions are legitimate expressions in an environment of rampant racism and sexism. Her comments are no different than a recent op-ed that espoused the hatred of men for being male.
2
I would think that when the NYT is looking to hire a person to write about technology, they could find someone qualified who understands that repeatedly sending out racist and bigoted statements to the world via Twitter (or anything else) is something that will be with you forever. Those will never go away.
Hence, this person should maybe realize after the first few bad tweets - "hey, maybe I shouldn't be on Twitter?"
And the NYT - in making their personnel decisions and how these decisions will reflect on their brand - would be wise to consider to what extent these personnel are able to control their worst impulses.
29
Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone.
----------
Trouble with that spin is: It was well over one tweet, and well over a one-time occurrence. It wasn't a joke either. It's her attitude. Some of us have seen it up close: Mean Girls mixed with ethnic resentment, perhaps even crossing over to hatred.
This woman had every opportunity. Decent education, that she never parlayed into paid employment, likely because she would have faced ethical trouble with those tweets, passing a State bar examination which generally includes a personal character requirement.
I don't lose any sleep over her: Ta Nehisi Coates apparently turned down the same offer. Lydia Pohlgreen allegedy left the Times too, despite extensive courtship. Ms. Jeong's sentence will be that -- with all her acclaimed tech talents and legal education -- she is going to be working for a legacy institution at the Times, under a lot of white men, some older, some younger...
Her pay, the way she will feed herself, will come from everything the twitter handle despised. She has sold out to the White Man. (I don't thin like that. That tweeter does.)
Be nice to her, eh Mr. Stephens. Disillusionment is hard, and she is young and just realizing: no matter her alleged accomplishments, she will never break the race barrier and leave her own skin behind. I suspect, with her elite education, that is a harder thing for her than most. Self-love is not something those schools teach, nor is practical work.
3
A most interesting perspective of who we are (or may be) and why we say the things we say. No one doubts Sarah Jeong's intelligence, only how she uses it, and what remains to be elucidated is what led her to her generic dislike, and ending in discriminating, the generic folks with white skin. Was she humiliated, even harmed physically, by a white man, to react in such a way, and unleash her crude dislike, if not hate? Your quote to not throw the first stone unless blameless ourselves is interesting, as it would demand complete silence, something impossible to achieve in imperfect human beings like ourselves, that think the world rotates on the 'chit-chat' we engender day in and day out. Actually, if she is to be on The New York Times Board, she ought to clarify her 'tweets', however stupid they might be, as the generalization of a given 'ill-besotted stiff' is never wise nor just. And she ought to know that.
1
Sarah's long form journalism benefits from craft, insight, research and editing.
Unfiltered blurb dumps at the rate of 110,000 in less than a decade should be taken for what they appear to be - an inner voice which, actually, does speak to who she is.
Many a true word spoken in jest, in drink and in tweet.
8
I would like to hear someone try to explain the substantive difference between the tweets of Sarah Jeong and the tweets of Roseanne Barr.
74
"Let he who is without a bad tweet cast the first stone."
Okay.
I don't tweet, don't follow tweets and think most tweets are a waste of time, so I guess I can cast a stone.
All racism is repugnant, in my humble opinion.
But when a minority race member makes derogatory comments about the majority race, I consider that a reasonable protest (usually).
Just my humble opinion as a non-tweeter.
1
Her tweets are hideous and bracingly unhinged. I certainly don't believe they speak to her entire person or belief system, but I do question the judgment of those who would grant her this platform. Core values should never be so selective, even in this new social media normal.
43
The choice of Sarah Jeong and the Times' defense of Sarah Jeong is another example of it's OK if someone I agree with makes racist remarks but heaven help you if you're on the other side of the ideological/political coin. Hypocrisy at its finest.
20
The identity politics which Jeong's commments issue from, encourages racism and double standards, because it is a form of tribalism, and it identity politics is racist by its very nature. Sara Jeong is a direct result of the anti-white racism that is being taught in almost all universities, and which is being mainstreamed.
If one tweet doesn't matter, then please undo what happened to Roseanne Barr over one bad tweet. How come Sara Jeong was excused for her bad tweet, and hired afterwards, while Barr was pilloried and guillotined, and fired for it? The reason is that there are some kinds of hate and some kinds of racism which young people are taught are perfectly fine, even virtuous, while other kinds of hate and racism are completely prohibited and will result in your ruin.
This is idiotic, it's unjust, it's untenable and having double standards like this, encouraging anti-white racism like this, will only breed more divisiveness, more resentment, and more problems in our nation.
We are a nation which prides ourselves on applying the same laws to everyone, but as Jonah Goldberg argues in his book "Suicide of the West", with identity politics we are pushing the overthrow of a constitutional democracy by identity factions and tribalism.
59
"Him," Bret. It should be, "Let him who is without a bad Tweet throw the first stone."
4
I can't believe that I agree with Bret Stephens.
The tweets were racist. Full stop. And I'm pretty sure she wouldn't take the time to get to know me or my husband as we are middle aged, white people. But since I don't like people who judge others based on skin color, I probably wouldn't like her either. I'll give her writing a chance since she must be very good at her job for the Times to hire her in the first place.
4
Why don't we call all of this unfiltered swill, nastiness, and unchecked utterances on Twitter and elsewhere by both sides as social media diarrhea, or incontinence if you are a bit embarrassed to use the former term. I hope one day to return to calling the 'Outhouse' the 'White House' again, given the stench that emanates from it presently.
4
Yes! Thank you for this. There is no human who has not said some foolish or ignorant thing at some point in their lives. All but the wisest (those who abstain from social media or only engage in painfully boring sharing) can be ruined by some stupid thing they posted on social media years ago. I always assumed "thought crime" would be imposed by governments. We are imposing it upon ourselves! Add that to the general erosion of human discourse and intelligent discussion brought on by social media and I would argue that the sum of all the tweeting and posting and blah blah is harmful to society and individuals.
3
To hire someone like Ms. Jeong it to abandon objectivity and fairness. All whites are not the same; all blacks are not the same. People should be evaluated as unique individuals.
49
But when an old white guy like Donald Trump is elected by old white guys (admittedly with others) who voted for him as he uses his office to benefit old white guys (admittedly with others) shouldn’t old white guys be a target?
1
I am very much left of center, and I have not read Jeong's work -- not even the tweets beyond the ones quoted in a couple of articles and columns -- so I really don't have an opinion about whether she should be hired by the NYT or not. However, I would like to say directly to her that the tweets I have seen quoted are both racist and agist. They offend me. They also are a gift to the Republican mega-donor class, who assiduously promote racial divisions in order to further an agenda of ever-widening class inequality.
32
I find it hard to believe that the most prestigious newspaper in the US could not find a couple of dozen other candidates who are more qualified and have less baggage than Sarah.
32
Substitute black or Jew (me and mine) for white in her tweets and the answer is clear. I’m not buying and I no longer trust the NYT, which has been my preferred. news source for over 40 years. And based on my personal experience, this comment won’t survive. By the way, I’ve never made a tweet and don’t plan on starting now.
30
Meh. Let her write.
I can understand wanting to cancel white people, or at least the concept of white people. I’m tired of white fragility, anyway. We should take a little criticism and feel a little pain.
2
By this standard, all of Trump's tweets are just innocuous mental burps and undigested thoughts that shouldn't bother us. Anyone can say anything on Twitter and be excused for it. And when you are drunk or stoned and do something appalling or destructive, well, it's not really you.
She can tweet whatever she wants and the Times can hire whoever it wants. But credibility on both parts is damaged.
9
Interesting that you don't mention her ridicule of the NYT. Like Ms Jeong, I too read it for the unintended humor.
7
If we, liberals, want to be credible, we shouldn't be hypocrites. What's good for the conservative gander, should be also good for the liberal goose.
15