On Wednesday, Sheryl Sandberg — chief operating officer of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and author of the 2013 female-empowerment book Lean In — told Fortune that she was resigning because of the fierce urgency of the moment with the impending overturning of Roe v. Wade: “This is a really important moment for women. This is a really important moment for me to be able to do more with my philanthropy, with my foundation.”
This is what is known as getting ahead of the story. The very next day, the Wall Street Journal reported the real story:
In reality, it was the culmination of a yearslong process in which one of the world’s most powerful executives became increasingly burned out and disconnected from the mega-business that she was instrumental in building. More recently, there was a fresh irritation: Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal contacted Meta about two incidents from several years ago in which Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer, pressed a U.K. tabloid to shelve an article about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard Inc. Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, and a 2014 temporary restraining order against him. The episode dovetailed with a company investigation into Ms. Sandberg’s activities, which hasn’t been previously reported, including a review of her use of corporate resources to help plan her coming wedding to Tom Bernthal, a consultant, the people said. The couple has been engaged since 2020.
Remember in 2017, when Harvey Weinstein announced his own resignation? “I cannot be more remorseful about the people I hurt and I plan to do right by all of them. I am going to need a place to channel that anger so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party. I’m going to do it at the same place I had my Bar Mitzvah. I’m making a movie about our President, perhaps we can make it a joint retirement party.”
Once again, woke politics is how powerful people and institutions expect to buy themselves indulgences from the cultural powers-that-be for their own sins. It is less a demonstration of virtue than the last refuge of scoundrels. (This is not a new observation — see Victor Davis Hanson, Jim Geraghty, and Kyle Smith with further examples.) It is why it is easier to cater to woke Westerners than to do anything about slavery and genocide in Xinjiang. Amber Heard’s alliance with the ACLU while promoting Aquaman is of a piece with the same phenomenon. So is washed-up athletes coming out of the closet or taking a knee, or what Jussie Smollet did. It is the mask that vice wears in public to pretend to be virtue.