After nearly half a century of a prolific career at the New York Times, Donald McNeil is departing into a slightly premature retirement with the sort of comforts and luxuries that most plebeians could only dream of. But that doesn’t change the sheer injustice of the terms of the star science reporter’s departure from the paper of record, namely how a band of spoiled brats succeeded in getting the New York Times to abandon every iota of principle to cower to the mob.
The New York Times should be ripped for rewriting their own rules to fire the well-intentioned McNeil for using the n-word “regardless of intent.” But not enough has been made of the tail that wags the dog. Just as newsrooms and offices across the country have been blindsided as crybaby millennials have joined their ranks without leaving behind their identity politicking on college campuses, the adults of America have to understand, deconstruct, and dismantle the next iteration of woke bullies hellbent on joining respectable society. The McNeil saga offers a telling microcosm of the most spoiled brats of Gen Z. That microcosm is worth dissecting in detail.
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The trip where McNeil uttered the career-ending word was a Peru edition of trips branded “Times Journeys,” which are journalist-led excursions born from 2012 fears of the paper’s financial future. McNeil helmed the fortnight-long “Peru: Public Health and Development in the Andes,” a student-specific trip that costs $5,490, not including airfare.
Already it’s worth asking who are the teenagers with parents willing to spend $6,000 for a two-week trip to study public health in Peru. Well, the New York Times’s media columnist Ben Smith provides a little insight into that matter.
In his Sunday column, Smith speaks with student Sophie Shepard, who claims to have spent the most time with McNeil during the trip in question. Shepard, then a recent graduate of Phillips Academy — Andover, laid into McNeil, who she described as a “grumpy old guy.”
“He got very defensive very quickly about it,” Shepherd claimed of his response to critiques of Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning history book recommended by McNeil before the trip. “It’s just a book. It’s just making this point. It’s very simple. It’s not racist.”
Shepherd, who also claimed McNeil said that “racism is over,” witnessed the n-word conversation.
“I’m very used to people, my grandparents or people’s parents, saying things they don’t mean that are insensitive,” an anonymous Ivy League student told Smith of the incident. “You correct them. You tell them, ‘You’re not supposed to talk like that,’ and usually, people are pretty apologetic and responsive to being corrected. And he was not.”
So who are the 17-year-olds who have the audacity to tell off a globally recognized science reporter with 45 years of experience reporting from 60 different countries? Well, they’re precisely the ones with parents willing to put up $6,000 to, as per Shepherd’s own admission, put a designer New York Times trip on a resume. They’re the sort of trust fund babies, like Shepherd, whose parents sent her to a school with a nearly $60,000 boarding tuition. Without over-type-casting the kids on the trip, it’s still not unreasonable to resent silver-spoon, lily-white “one-percenters” who have never considered for a day in their lives that they don’t have the utmost moral and intellectual authority over any hard worker who doesn’t completely toe the generational line of wokeness.
Woke bullying doesn’t stay on the college campus, and as the McNeil mob has demonstrated, it’s not staying at Choate or Phillips Exeter. After all, is it any wonder that the biggest bully at the New York Times, reporter Taylor Lorenz, graduated from a top-dollar Swiss boarding school only to defame and dox people she doesn’t like when she’s not trolling teenage girls online? In the age of AOC and Commie Chic, the wokes cannot explicitly claim class superiority as a matter of income, but the game is still the same.
While the working class, and its champions, like McNeil, don’t have the time to learn the lexicon du jour, the woke aristocracy can keep their place as our cultural gatekeepers by shifting goalposts at will. Consider that the wokest liberals in San Francisco will boycott their local SoulCycle for insufficiently declaring that Black Lives Matter, yet continue to blast down the housing dezoning bills that would help the working class and minorities the most, but at the cost of the property values of the wealthy.
Nonwoke people would ignore the mobbing of McNeil at their own peril, as the likes of Shepherd and her ilk will ramp up the revolution destroying the American workplace on short notice. It’s class warfare against the plebeian class just the same, but a far more sinister strain where merit and standards no longer matter.
