Has the American equivalent of a Cultural Revolution become too much even for progressive mainstream media? Staffers at the New York Times openly revolted against the paper, signing a declaration that Adam Baldwin describes as saying that “the New York Times is no longer a safe space for them because too many words have been published with varying viewpoints.” The acute issue was a report last month that presented all sides in a controversy over pediatric gender transitioning, a term to which Adam refers as “whatever euphemisms they’re using for genital mutilation and puberty blockers that they’re giving to kids, underage kids without consent to their parents or behind their parents’ backs.”
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Welcome back to my VIP video series “The Amiable Skeptics,” featuring my friend Adam Baldwin! Adam is well-known for his long and storied Hollywood career, starting with My Bodyguard, and especially for his roles in Full Metal Jacket, Firefly, its film sequel Serenity, Chuck, and The Last Ship.
This story took an unexpected turn almost immediately after we taped this episode. Rather than cave to the woke mob — as the NYT did when they fired James Bennet for publishing an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton that made staffers feel “unsafe” — the Gray Lady grew a pair and told their staffers to shut up or get out:
Memo from Joe Kahn to NYT staff responding to yesterday's letter re: trans coverage.
Times leadership says the paper "will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums." pic.twitter.com/bjLruJVPnf
— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) February 16, 2023
Even the Gray Lady has its limits for extremists, it seems. At least this week.
Unfortunately, the rest of the media still has yet to push back in any significant measure against what looks to us like a replay of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, especially in the transgender debate. Cultural Marxism has the same materialist ambition to make The New Man as in Mao’s day and during the Soviet era, only this takes it to a literal sense. “The argument here,” I say, “is that man is the ultimate God and that man is the ultimate Creator.” Once we go down that road, I continue, then it’s easy to objectify others as fodder for the atheistic Utopia that the extremists want to create. “But in this case,” I warn, they’re “using children as a commodity to promote [their] own ideas.”
It’s “gender theology,” not gender theory, and the media is part of the Inquisition to prevent debate or dissent to it. The New York Times briefly stood up to that Inquisition this week, but don’t expect it to become a habit.
Be sure to watch, and join the conversation in the comments!
