On Thursday, we saw how the New York Times added a Korean-American woman, Sarah Jeong, to its editorial board and defended this action even after Jeong turned out to have been busy, from 2013 to 2015, sending out hate tweets about whites, men, and cops. As we noted, there were critics. But many on the left had Jeong’s back.
At the Washington Post, Eli Rosenberg and Erin B. Logan wrote a piece headlined “An Asian American woman’s tweets ignite a debate: Is it okay to make fun of white people online?” Make fun of? In the article text, they described Jeong as having “spoke[n] sarcastically about white people.” You would think Jeong’s tweets had been playful jabs at good buddies rather than calls for genocide. Rosenberg and Logan called them “old tweets,” even though the oldest of them is only five years old. Then they wrote this:
Without evidence that they had any bearing on Jeong’s extensive body of work, which includes a book she wrote about online harassment, these statements could have perhaps been unceremoniously dismissed as insignificant. But after conservative media seized on the story Thursday, they ignited a firestorm of debate.
What on earth are Rosenberg and Logan saying here? Are they actually suggesting that Jeong’s mountain of odious tweets have no relevance to her employment by the Times? Do they not grasp that the tweets provide a window on Jeong’s character and patterns of thought, and that they are plainly the work of a sick and vile mind – and that such a mind does not belong at the highest editorial level of a serious newspaper?
No: to Rosenberg and Logan, apparently, Jeong’s tweets are trivial, and the whole hullabaloo over them is the fault of conservatives out to make trouble. This is how they frame it: “in a country in the midst of a painful debate about white supremacy and privilege, Jeong’s episode has exposed a deeper rift between some conservatives – whose political ideology has been marked by the rise of a president who has trafficked in racially charged rhetoric and policies – and the left, pointing to a fundamental disagreement about the nature of race and power in the United States.”
Nonsense. The U.S. is not undergoing “a painful debate about white supremacy and privilege.” White supremacy is a fever dream of the left. Actual white supremacists are exceedingly few in number and are effectively powerless. Privilege? Jeong is a Berkeley and Harvard Law grad and, now, a member of the Times editorial board. If that isn’t privilege, what is? As for President Trump’s rhetoric, there’s nothing “racially charged” about it. He has been frank and tough about very real threats to American security – namely, Islamic terrorism and murderous Latin American youth gangs – that the left prefers not to discuss because of its own twisted obsession with race.
After dismissively summing up some of the conservative reaction to Jeong’s tweets, the Post writers quoted a University of Arizona professor, Nolan L. Cabrera, who characterized the outrage as “manufactured” and as “completely decontextualized and ahistorified.” The only way to conclude that Jeong “hates white people” is to be “willfully ignorant of 400 to 500 years’ history and contemporary social context and also the context from which the tweets were sent.”
Sorry, “white men are bullshit” and “fuck the cops” are pretty straightforward – no historical analysis required. Cabrera also served up the usual postmodern line that an Asian woman can’t be racist toward a white man, because racism is a matter of “power dynamics and social oppression.” More nonsense – and even if you do buy this definition of racism, then okay, she’s not a racist, she’s a bigot. Hate is hate.
More on Thursday.