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Matt's avatar

Trans activists have become so dishonest and hyperbolic that they're becoming their own worst enemies. I also don't think they realize how much they are turning off otherwise left-leaning voters. A politician's support for child transition treatment is a deal-breaker for many at the voting booth.

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Gamp and Grimes's avatar

“While the segment does include an interview with Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, his voice is mostly used to represent the “other side” in the classically superficial style of subpar journalism everywhere — the producers make no independent effort to really get at the truth, and they clearly default to the stance that the open letter authors’ claims are true as written, with just about every editorial choice, big and small, pointing in that direction.”

I apologize for the long quote, but Jake Silverstein’s name is something of a trigger for me.

Silverstein was the NYT magazine editor when Nikole Hannah-Jones published her ‘1619 Project’ essay claiming, among other things, that England was deeply conflicted about slavery at the time of the American revolution. This is incontrovertibly false.

(The only people speaking out against slavery at the time in England, then the most powerful nation on earth, were Quakers and it would be decades before they were allowed in either Parliament or England’s elite universities. They were literally a marginalized minority. The Quakers wouldn’t even began to form the basics of the abolitionist movement until the 1780s. A host of things would have to happen, including the emergence of William Wilberforce and a mass evangelical movement amongst prominent, affluent non-Quaker women in the 19th century, before there was even a hope of making slavery an issue in England. Decades later.)

Silverstein was told by the historian they’d hired to fact-check that these claims weren’t true. He overruled her.

Post-publication he was told by respectful and sympathetic historians in an open letter that they weren’t true. He and Hannah-Jones snidely questioned their motives.

Jake Sillverstein is a sad reflection on the NYT. He has played a real part in fostering the culture of dishonesty and misguided activism in media that this letter (and the subsequent coverage of it) exemplifies.

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