Bene diagnoscitur, bene curatur

Coriolanus Taking Leave of his Family, 1786. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson.

Since 2015, I have taken a piece of wisdom to my heart: a fool looks at the destruction of his peer as an event to giddily discuss later. A wise man takes it as a warning.

I probably butchered the wording but the gist of it is clear to me. Over the last six years or so, I have witnessed dozens of journalists exit the industry over a variety of reasons but one particular remonstrance resurfaces over and over again: the newsroom is getting increasingly tribalistic. What was once the domain of (some degree of) nuance is now a rabid lab for in-group versus out-group hysteria.

Of course, theories are offered. Some believe Donald Trump’s presidential triumph inflicted damage on the collective liberal psyche and turned such institutions — in particular media and higher education — into hotbeds of reactionary politics where heterodoxy was punished with warnings, suspensions, and ultimately the termination of livelihood. And pussy hat parades. I actively refrain from including the art class alongside these institutions mainly because I personally view artists to be willful and easy victims to ideological warfare.

Others point to a timeline before Trump, however. And this is a crowd I find myself agreeing with because it seems as if they have a sharper grasp on the chronology of this social meltdown. Prior to the influx of everything-is-the-fault-of-cishet-white-supremacist-capitalism screeching and bellowing, I was partially amused and partially unnerved by how leftists reacted to the analyses from Angela Nagle in Kill All Normies. While living in Brooklyn at the time, I was repeatedly told not to read Nagle about the identity politics enthusiasts’ excesses, absurdities, and strangely religious punitive processes such as requiring confessions out of the ‘privileged,’ and unquestioning loyalty to the identity with the most victim points.

I was once earnestly informed that Nagle was a crypto-Nazi because she, like Glenn Greenwald, committed the unholy media sin of appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show (which elicited a priestly admonishing from The Nation at the time). Several weeks later, the very same person then called me an outright Nazi. For the sake of anthropological curiosity (and comedy), I should mention I’m a Pakistani American who gets mistaken for nationalities from southern Italian, Greek to Peruvian, Lebanese, and one time “East European Balkan bitch” as one passionate activist yelled on Clubhouse. Those even more keen to create racial identity camps have called me “white adjacent” and inform me that I have “internalized” white supremacy.

These accusations of fascism should be treated with little more than indifference. If anything, you should laugh it off. If you are like me and have a propensity for mischief, you can even naughtily ask, “What, pray tell, kind of fascist are we talking here?” But over the years, the treatment of these accusations has undergone an unmistakable attitudinal shift: once rightly seen as histrionic rage worth no serious interrogation, these purposeful efforts to cause reputation-based damage — frequently irreversible — are now treated as credible complaints that elicit concern from HR departments and feverish rebukes from the self-appointed progressive public.

The modern newsroom has actively nourished this sentiment by a multi-pronged approach, which involves publishing screeds that shroud ethno-narcissism and ethnocentrism as worthy causes, accepting bromide pablum that not-so-tacitly encourages racial polarity, and a dogmatic refusal to conduct introspection. I saw this in multiple newsrooms as a journalist. This Substack is not to name the specific names of editors who deliberately and aggressively edited any nuance out of previous reports to create a specific and charged narrative on law and order, gender, race, and the other heated subject matter but to finally have the time, energy, and most importantly in a landscape where people are happy to get you fired for using the wrong tone, let alone the wrong word, the security to speak openly.

If Ludwig Gumplowicz was alive right now, the gaunt-cheeked Polish jurist and sociologist would be endlessly thrilled by the exactitude with which identity politics generally and wokeism specifically have created their own quasi-church in the center of newsrooms, classrooms, neighborhoods, cafes but most dangerously, among friends and family. We have gone from the miserable era of op-eds moaning about your racist uncle at Thanksgiving to now asking for serious advice on how to correct a seven-year-old boy for his “sexist bully” terror and shrill tweets about the non-existent proof of dog-whistling for white extinction theory in an anodyne write-up from a mom essentially noting: I like to make waffles for my toddlers.

This Substack is a breathing point where I am no longer professionally required to exaggerate the positive image or vulnerable status of the in-group (racial or sexual minority and practically anyone who perceives themselves as the “oppressed”) and the innate negative image or irredeemable status of the out-group (racial or sexual majority and anyone uninterested in being cornered into ideological uniformity as well as anyone viewed as the “oppressor”). It’s also just nice to no longer care about X identity being in Y sector for the first time. In a world where ordained transgressive-ness reigns supreme, pitches like “Hi, Mehreen! Look at this vegan Pakistani lesbian revolutionizing the soy milk world. Is there a good time to set up an interview?” are hard to take seriously. (But if you are indeed a vegan Pakistani lesbian in the soy milk sector, hello.)

It is also nice to leave a building on fire when the fire was started by those inside. Marcus Aurelius once advised, "Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself." The modern newsroom, especially the liberal ones, practices this wisdom in pathological reverse. It is exceedingly strict with others, often gloating with a morally superior tone while being shockingly lax with its own self.

And as I hinted at the beginning of my letter to you, I saw my peers punishing and cheerfully ostracizing others for the most innocuous and rather banal actions — from not really caring about the J.K. Rowling fiasco, shrugging about Joe Rogan to asking legitimate questions about the #MeToo movement, practicing hesitation for the call to do away with police altogether, or wondering aloud why so many journalists in their mid-30s claim to be traumatized by trolls online — and I realized that the culture war is not between the races or sexes. Unfortunately, it’s not even between different red, blue, black, or white pilled Wojaks and Pepes. That would be funny, at least.

The culture war is between those willing to accept moral ambiguity as a natural facet of the human condition and those who demand moral certainty. The culture war is between those who refuse to be held hostage by careerist guilt-trippers and those who use varying canonical victim statuses to manipulate people into self-flogging. It is a graceless and nihilistic place to be. And as someone who has never felt any interest in saving people obsessed with self-destruction, I exited the building, the cathedral, the vampire castle — whatever you choose to call it.