Bari Weiss has perfected the genre of “Brave truth-teller loses job for choosing facts over progressive pieties.”
“If you are a devoted reader of Common Sense, by now you have surely noticed a trend: workplaces—in some cases, storied institutions—that turn hostile to independent thinking seemingly overnight,” she writes in her latest newsletter, presenting us with Zac Kriegman, formerly director of data science at Thomson Reuters. Kriegman claims he lost his job after confronting editors with data that undermined the prevailing BLM narrative.
“I Criticized BLM. Then I was fired,” Kriegman writes.
“The assault on the notion, previously taken for granted, that you shouldn’t punish employees for having heterodox opinions or for voicing disagreement with the political consensus in an organization,” Weiss ominously declares in her intro. “But it is also about the assault on reason itself.”
Kriegman, who was making $350,000 a year, had a eureka moment about police shooting data. “About a year ago, I stumbled on a really big story. It was about black Americans being gunned down across the country and the ways in which we report on that violence,” he says. “We had been talking nonstop about race and police brutality, and I thought: This is a story that could save lives. This is a story that has to be told.”
One imagines him rushing into his boss’s office and slamming a piece of paper with frantic scribbles on his desk—”This changes everything!”
The editor looks around him furtively.
“Has anybody else seen this?”
“No I … I wanted you to be the first.”
“Good,” he says, taking a lighter, setting the paper on fire, and using it to light his cigar. “That will be all.”
Sorry to be obnoxious but it’s hard not to snark about the melodramatic weightiness of these things. But it’s especially absurd to me because of the information that allegedly got him fired.
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