Andrew Sullivan, a self-styled conservative writer who backed Barack Obama and same-sex-marriage, ran afoul of the social justice crowd for criticizing New York Times’ hiring of an Asian-American reporter who wrote racist tweets.
Sullivan’s article, published in the New York Magazine on Friday under the headline “When Racism Is Fit to Print,” points out that conservatives consider Sarah Jeong’s tweets racist, while the political left considers that “simply impossible… by virtue of being an Asian woman.”
Making it clear that he doesn’t want Jeong fired, Sullivan then says “we all live on campus now,” a society in which “we are all mere appendages of various groups of oppressors and oppressed, and in which the oppressed definitionally cannot be at fault.”
'How dare he!' thundered the representatives of what Sullivan called the “liberal media,” denouncing his column as “complete garbage,” his worldview “stupendously dishonest” and his entire opus “a long jam of reactionary bad columns.”
Others accused Sullivan of being “an ardent white supremacist & scientific racist,” an “undisguised white supremacist,” and “an incurious dull-minded mediocrity and an extremely sh*tty and slovenly writer.”
One journalist brought up Sullivan’s sexuality, saying that the legalization of same-sex marriage “freed up gay dudes to be doctrinaire right-wingers again.”
Then there were those who argued that reverse racism cannot exist, and that, as one former Hillary Clinton organizer put it in all caps, “YOU CANNOT BE RACIST AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE” - pretty much exactly what Sullivan described in his article as the political left’s position.
One journalist even suggested, presumably in jest, a GoFundMe so Sullivan will stop writing.
A few voices rose up in Sullivan’s defense, however.
The British-born Sullivan worked for the liberal New Republic in the 1990s but rose to prominence in the 2000s as a self-described conservative blogger who backed the Iraq War, same-sex marriage, progressive taxation, ending capital punishment, Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy and Obamacare.
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