In my previous post I critiqued these claims by Michael Hobbes:
In that post I focused on some of the specifics of “defund the police” and “abolish ICE,” but I want to dig in to the more general style of argument being promoted by Hobbes.
It goes like this: The online left promotes some idea or cause — defund the police, abolish ICE, proclamations that “black lives matter,” or something like that — skeptical voices react to the newfound salience of this idea or how it is being expressed, and then the online left complains that this idea is obviously good, and would obviously win over people, were it not for that damn mainstream centrist or center-left media. In this worldview, there’s basically nothing more important than what The Atlantic or The New York Times says about the subject in question, and if these absolute pinnacles of prestige and influence don’t describe the controversies to their readers in exactly the right (left- or far left–coded) way, doom will ensue — people will be tricked into believing the wrong things. In the natural state of affairs, absent from the interference of these malign actors, of course the online left’s favored causes would enjoy mass support — almost definitionally, because they are The Left and of course they know what the masses want!
The above paragraph might sound condescending or oversimplified, and it suffers from an important flaw I’m not going to hide from: Hobbes and Co. would fervently deny that this is their belief system. They would say something like “Well, of course the MAGA media ecosystem is worse and far more influential than The New York Times!” The problem is, when you look at their revealed versus stated priorities — what they spend their time thinking and writing and posting and, all too often, open-lettering about — it becomes clear that my view is correct.
For example, in 2023, the online left spent an absolutely massive amount of time and effort trying to shame The New York Times into “doing better” on trans issues. The Times, they screamed at us, is a deeply transphobic institution. You would have thought, based on the hours and dollars spent on this cause — multiple open letters, articles and segments in NPR and On the Media and elsewhere, endless social-media posting, and GLAAD parking a truck outside of Times HQ to spread the gospel on this issue — that nothing was more important that revealing this fact to the world.
“I Signed the New York Times Open Letter,” went the headline of an article in The Nation by Hanna Phifer. “I Have More to Say.” After explaining that she signed the letter two minutes after she was asked to — that is, she didn’t read it — Phifer briefly mentions the problem of right-wing anti-LGBT bigotry, but then spends the rest of the colum denouncing both the Times and other center-left outlets.
She writes:
The Times is not alone in its obscene coverage of transgender people. Other prestigious publications like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and New York magazine have played their part in pushing forward narratives that put the lives of trans people in danger.
If center-left coverage of this community is “obscene” and “put[s] the lives of trans people in danger,” I’m not sure that leaves anyone much room to describe the (many!) pundits who are actively hostile to trans people, and who very publicly wish them ill!
I’m not going to rehash the specifics of this campaign here, other than to say that it was demonstrably bullshit — my main point here is that it’s very hard to imagine how this amount of time and energy possibly could have been worth it. Unless, that is, you view the Times as an almost supernaturally important institution, and view even even minor disagreement with it in an existential light.
One more Times story before we zoom out: Remember the Tom Cotton thing?
