Kids and Cowards: What Really Happened to Donald McNeil at the New York Times
The New York Times is imploding. Or, more precisely, it is engaged in an act of auto-cannibalization whereby reporters at the top of their fields are being summarily dispatched by an in-house mob that claims that the work of these colleagues is a threat to their personal safety.
The latest target was Donald McNeil Jr., who started as a copy boy at the paper in 1976 and, until January 28, was the Times’ star COVID-19 reporter. That career came crashing down when the Daily Beast ran an article on January 28 accusing McNeil of “Using ‘N-Word,’ Making Other Racist Comments,” as the headline declared. The reporter reached out to McNeil for comment, but McNeil was busy covering the pandemic, and didn’t notice their email. When he did, his first reaction was to tell the Daily Beast “to f**k off,” according to his account of the affair, published on Monday in Medium. His second impulse was to explain: On a trip to Peru in 2019, while working as an expert guide for a Times-sponsored trip for high school students, one of the teenagers asked whether McNeil thought a 12-year-old should have been suspended for using the “n-word.” To clarify, McNeil asked whether the student had called someone the offending word or “was singing a rap song or quoting a book title or something.” In thus asking, he repeated the word itself.
Newsweek
The New York Times staff panicked because they’ve created a dictionary of Deplorable words, any of which if uncontrolled will lead to their own professional and possibly personal destruction. “The Deplorable Word, as used by author C. S. Lewis in The Magician’s Nephew, is a magical curse which ends all life on a fictional world except that of the one who speaks it.”
In The Magician’s Nephew, the children who are the central characters, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, come to a lifeless world called Charn. In an ancient, ruined building they awaken a queen called Jadis. She tells them of a worldwide civil war she fought against her sister. All of Jadis’s armies were defeated, having been made to fight to the death of the last soldier, and her sister claimed victory. Then Jadis spoke the horrible curse which her sister knew she had discovered but did not think she would use. In speaking the Deplorable Word, Jadis killed every living thing in her world, except herself, to avoid losing the war to her sister. …
Near the end of the story Lewis has the lion Aslan say to the central characters from the Victorian era:
“It is not certain that some wicked one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as the Deplorable Word and use it to destroy all living things. And soon, very soon, before you are an old man and an old woman, great nations of your world will be ruled by tyrants who care no more for joy and justice and mercy than the Empress Jadis. Let your world beware. That is the warning.”
What the Woke have done is create a lexicon of verbal nukes and are now fearful of their own creation. It is a book of frightful spells which even they don’t know how to control.