Read on Twitter
Alright, well I know some folks have been following this, but it appears @jonathanchait has written a follow-up article about my friends, so allow me to provide my view. I won't link to it, since it's just clickbait masquerading as intelligence.
The short version is it's like Chait saw a minor fender bender, steered a gas tanker into it, and then reported on the fire caused by the people in the fender bender.
(Also, I'm in the middle of packing up my whole life to move across the country, so I'm gonna try to avoid getting sucked back into this absolute nonsense.)
Chait's newest "take" is a defensive tantrum showing the lack of self-awareness we are all accustomed to from famous opinion-havers.
I've worked in the arts, consulting, politics, and even academia. I've seen a lot of bullshit and gotten pretty good at recognizing it. And @jonathanchait is a bullshitter.
Like Donald Trump, he is convinced of his own genius, and struggles to see the perspectives of others when it runs counter to his own assumptions about his genius.
. @jonathanchait has a narrative that he is emotionally invested in (always a bad place to start), and that he is professionally invested in (ditto). So he noticed something that happened, and when no one wanted to talk to him, he just assumed he was correct.
Then, Chait used his rather large platform (~189k followers plus the readership of New York Magazine), to air his incorrect version of events as the truth.
The fallout has been significant. One person, the only person @jonathanchait named as an example of the bad guys, was subject to exactly the response you would expect from Twitter. Given Chait's ~189k followers, he should not be surprised by that result.
As a result of the harassment this person received, they talked to their friends in their professional network, some of whom made a decision to be protective of their traumatized friend within the professional space they oversee.
You can certainly argue about their response--but what you can't argue is that without the harassment driven by @jonathanchait's work product, they would never have faced that decision in the first place. What had been a private matter would have stayed one.
Their decision set off further reactions and infighting, mostly because everyone was already feeling traumatized and tender about the world already, and @jonathanchait threw an emotional hand grenade into the middle of our professional community.
He did this for no reason except to further the perception that he is a great leader in the charge against an enemy he assures us is really out there somewhere.
Anyway Chait's newest work of writing describes it as a "meltdown," and basically ignores the fact that he incited a mob and then covered it as though it confirmed all of his prior expectations about those people.
Even if everyone comes away from this unscathed long-term, @jonathanchait turned a bunch of people's lives upside down (me included) for a couple of weeks because he assumed, like we white men so often do, that he was correct.
But as you know if you follow me, he wasn't correct.
You know why he wasn't correct? Because if you work for a firm that consults with the Democratic Party and its range of affiliates, and you imply the goal of protests in defense of Black lives is to elect Democrats, that's really not great!
And you do it while the world is paying attention to Black lives more than it ever has, that's really extra not great! In fact, it's kind of racist! I think even the guy who tweeted it sees that.
I don't know the entire story internally, because my friends don't break their NDAs to me either, but I can absolutely see how that tweet would have had the result that it had.
Like most things where race is involved, the pain is at least as much about the accumulation of suffering over years (and centuries) as it is any once incident. Not to dismiss the pain of this incident, just to point out that racism is very reasonably *kind of a sore spot*.
Now @jonathanchait, having already provided us his staggeringly uninformed take on that initial incident, has provided us his staggeringly uninformed take on the fallout.
He also took the private communications of a bunch of private citizens, cherry-picked the ones that supported his narrative (didn't use any of mine, I noticed), and weaponized his uninformed views against a bunch of strangers.
A bunch of people's lives and careers got turned upside-down for a week and change, and he's just out here racking up clicks.
Anyway, one of the elements of systemic racism (and sexism and other forms of bigotry #intersectionality) that I've noticed over the years is that such a large majority of the white men at the top of every elite institution are bullshitters, like @jonathanchait.
Basically if you're not a white man, you almost always have to be actually good at your job. People won't accept bullshit from a woman (and they'll often dismiss competence as disingenuousness--looking at you Hillary. Liz, and Kamala).
If you are an educated white man in these fields, you can advance farther and faster than a woman or a person of color, easily. Even now, even in progressive politics. I know because I've done it.
But here's the thing. If you're a white man, and you want to advance beyond *that*, it really helps to be a bullshitter. Because the bullshitters control the access to the (mostly white male) rich and powerful people.
Which brings me back to @jonathanchait. Because all he did here was project his inaccurate assumptions onto a situation he didn't understand at all. He was then so confident in his assumptions that he saw the fallout from his own actions as evidence of his correctness.
And he can say things like "but I have a degree from an elite institution" and "I write for a prestigious magazine" because what he can't say is "I've done the work to learn the true story," because he hasn't.
And look! It gets clicks! Lots of them! We white men love a reason to feel like the good guy! We just want to be heroes!
And it's also exactly what we (white men) are trained to do.
Why do I know all of this? Because I am a white man and I absolutely am a bullshitter myself by nature. I'm trying really hard to unlearn it, but it's not easy.
Anyway, if it were up to me, @jonathanchait would probably lose his job at @nymag. Not because he needs to be "canceled." But because he is a bullshitter who's taking away an opportunity from someone who could do it better.
Maybe that would be the kick in the pants he needs to stop bullshitting and try doing something honest with his time like looking inwards.
Frankly, if he did that, I'd find his opinions a lot more interesting.
Frankly, if he did that, I'd find his opinions a lot more interesting.
Oh also whoever sent those emails to Chait, that was extremely shitty. You violated the trust of your friends and your professional community. I get being sick of everyone's feelings. But this is unhelpful.
And if @jonathanchait doesn't lose his job, I'd happily settle for him ceasing his practice of borrowing the details of other people's lives just to make himself seem important.
