Shrill Leftist Press Escalates Its Outrage Machine

BUCK: It is amazing, Clay, to see some of the ongoing back-and-forth between members of the — I think we could call it “the elitist media,” because they’re not elite because they’re good —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — but they belong to institutions that think they’re better than everyone else, and we’ve had a few these fights recently. Even Bill Maher was saying recently that the Washington Post writer — who is now fired, so ex-Washington Post writer — who came out and said that she thought that Dave Weigel should be fired because he retweeted a joke — and it was clearly a joke. He retweeted it, and she wanted him gone. I also thought it was fascinating to watch that she…

Felicia Sonmez is her name. She is now looking for work. I cannot recommend her journalistic credentials to anybody out there. But she also — did you see? — wanted discipline against anybody who defended Weigel! So if someone does something bad at your company and you say, “Hey, I don’t think that’s so bad,” the new position of the shrill, authoritarian, postmodernist left is: You need to be punished for disagreeing with me that the person who did the thing should be punished.

I’ve never seen that escalation before. That was interesting. But then it doesn’t stop there. Felicia Sonmez is indicative of a more widespread reality among leftist women in media these days who simply… Not only can they not take a joke. They refuse to allow anyone to make a joke. Matthew Iglesias is a well known left-wing guy who writes a lot of stuff. He’s actually… He strikes me as among the… He’s smart for a leftist, I think it’s fair. I’m not a big… I don’t know his work very well.

But he’s not like a Joy Behar is what I’m saying. He’s not a total moron. He’s a pretty clever guy, and he wrote this:

These are what we would call “dad jokes,” right? On Father’s Day no less! This is, “Hey, there, Clay, I flew in from Vegas over the weekend and boy are my arms tired,” harmless, corny jokes. Taylor Lorenz responded to Matt Yglesias for this one:

BUCK: That is the quote. She kept going, by the way. There’s more than that. These people have… She is mentally ill. There’s something deeply wrong with her.

CLAY: They have totally lost their minds. You can’t even make a joke about covid without — and, by the way, to your point, it’s clearly a dad joke. It’s not a malicious joke in nature. Oh, these people… Here’s a good way of thinking. Has there ever been a really great person with an awful sense of humor? Do you think that there are really funny totalitarians? Most of the time the answer is no. I bet most terrorists don’t sit around making each other laugh all the time because generally complete fealty to a dogma and the opposite of humor, and increasingly that’s what you see online from all these blue check mark journalists.