NYT: How Dare People Disagree With Me!
A liberal editor can't believe that, after Trump's re-election, people are no longer meekly submitting to the formerly all-conquering woke dogmas he espouses.
In the New York Times opinion section, a liberal sportswriter is extremely peeved that, since the Vibe Shift, Americans once again have the audacity to disagree with his opinions, when he thought all such impertinent dissent had been permanently eradicated during the Great Awokening:
I Can’t Believe We’re Still Arguing About This
May 28, 2025
By Will Leitch
Mr. Leitch, a contributing editor at New York magazine, is the founding editor of Deadspin.
When I founded Deadspin, a once popular, now quite dead sports culture website, back in 2005, I came up with a set of guiding principles that I hoped would help distinguish it from its competitors. One of those tenets: We are not going to talk about Pete Rose.
Yet, here we are, 20 years later, still arguing about whether Pete Rose, barred from baseball for betting on games, belongs in its Hall of Fame. I shouldn’t be surprised: The recycling of decades-old disputes increasingly feels like a constant of modern life. The zombie arguments that we once assumed were long settled keep lurching back into view — half-dead yet somehow still cluttering up the public discourse.
… Name a cultural or political fight we were having 20 years ago and we’re probably still having it. Access to safe and legal abortion? The benefits of affirmative action? Whether L.G.B.T.Q. people deserve equal rights? The true nature of Bruce Springsteen’s politics? We’re endlessly relitigating debates that felt decided decades ago.
The main reason, of course, is that we elected Donald Trump again as relitigator in chief. …
At the risk of being accused of relitigating an old debate myself, I do often wonder if Barack Obama’s Martin Luther King-inflected insistence that “history is on our side” and we’re on “the right side of history” (phrases he used often) set us up to believe — foolishly, in retrospect — that there were historical corners that had been turned and fights that had been forever won. We were told that the long arc of history bends toward justice — or at least toward the progress of finding interesting new things to bicker with one another about.
Why in 2025 are we talking about old, boring topics like should Pete Rose be in the Hall of Fame instead of talking about new, exciting, relevant topics like Emmett Till?
I think it's hard to overstate the impact that Elon Musk's liberalization of Twitter's content moderation has had. There were all these ideas that had been worked out on the fringes of the Internet, but were completely or heavily gatekept from social and legacy media. Now, for better (race realism, opposition to trans-mania) or for worse (anti-Semitism, vaccine quackery), they can spread like wildfire on Twitter.
The point being, 10 years ago, only someone who was *extremely* online was likely to be aware of e.g. race differences in intelligence. As Steve well knows, if you tried to explain to explain this in a normie space, you would be met with instant censorship and lynch mobbing. So your typical NYT liberal sportswriter could remain smugly ignorant. But there's no gatekeeping on Twitter anymore, so there's a major outlet for controversial ideas. Which really irritates the Bluesky libs: the thought that someone, somewhere is disagreeing with them on sacred values without being censored.
Notwithstanding the recent DOGE buffoonery, it's really quite astonishing how much impact Musk has had across several different domains throughout his life.
I've read quite a bit about Emmett Till, including his mother's book, and written a Substack on him. It's pretty obvious he was brain-damaged at birth and didn't know how to keep his mouth shut.