Andrew Sullivan Departs "New York"

As he foreshadowed a few days ago Andrew Sullivan has bid New York Magazine adieu. The same kind of woke millennials who chased Bari Weiss out of the New York Times have induced Sullivan to walk away from New York. 

Sullivan explained in his last column yesterday:

A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

As you may recall, Sullivan has taken exception to the leftist orthodoxy about transgenderism. One suspects that these opinions have made transgendered people feel unsafe. It defies reason and even imagination.

As for Sullivan’s conservatism, he explains precisely what that means.

And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.

That is the kind of “conservative” who is no longer welcome in the pages of New York Magazine. So, Bari Weiss was harassed at the N. Y. Times for being Jewish and for supporting Israel. Andrew Sullivan is leaving New York Magazine because he does not accept the transgender orthodoxy.

If you don’t think that the mainstream American media is in trouble, think again. And, if the media is in trouble, America is in big trouble.