Nikole Hannah-Jones Is the Donald Trump of the New York Times

The latest round of controversy at the New York Times followed the insane firing of reporter Donald McNeil Jr. for repeating the n-word in a conversation about other people using it. The Times initially defended the ridiculous argument that “we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” a standard that is so completely divorced from common sense that . . . I’d make up a comical reductio ad absurdum example of the stupidity of this, but the most extreme possible example already actually happened with the firing of a black school security guard in Madison, Wis., in 2019 when a student called him the slur and he repeated it solely for the purpose of telling her not to use that word against a black man: He “told the student multiple times ‘do not call me that,’ ‘do not call me that word,’ and ‘do not call me a N-word,’ using the slur during the confrontation.” The merciless hammer of zero tolerance fell on him; the guard got his job back months later, solely due to nationwide media attention.

McNeil has not been so fortunate, but there was a problem with the Times standard: 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones has used the word repeatedly on Twitter, most recently today. (So has op-ed writer Jamelle Bouie.) Now, if you apply things like reason, intent, context, and common sense, you might distinguish those cases on the grounds that these are African-American writers writing about racism. But that was not the standard deployed against McNeil. So, faced with the risk that the Times standard might apply to Hannah-Jones, who cannot under any circumstances be fired for anything, they changed the standard. When Hannah-Jones violated Twitter’s terms of service by releasing the private contact information of a Washington Free Beacon reporter who reached out to her for comment, the Times again defended her. As Isaac Schorr details, this really is only the tip of the iceberg of how fear of being accused of contradicting Hannah-Jones has led to her essentially dictating terms to the entire newspaper’s personnel — who can work there and who can’t, and why, ruining multiple careers in the process:

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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The latest round of controversy at the New York Times followed the insane firing of reporter Donald McNeil Jr. for repeating the n-word in a conversation about other people using it. The Times initially defended the ridiculous argument that “we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” a standard that is so completely divorced from common sense that . . . I’d make up a comical reductio ad absurdum example of the stupidity of this, but the most extreme possible example already actually happened with the firing of a black school security guard in Madison, Wis., in 2019 when a student called him the slur and he repeated it solely for the purpose of telling her not to use that word against a black man: He “told the student multiple times ‘do not call me that,’ ‘do not call me that word,’ and ‘do not call me a N-word,’ using the slur during the confrontation.” The merciless hammer of zero tolerance fell on him; the guard got his job back months later, solely due to nationwide media attention.

McNeil has not been so fortunate, but there was a problem with the Times standard: 1619 Project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones has used the word repeatedly on Twitter, most recently today. (So has op-ed writer Jamelle Bouie.) Now, if you apply things like reason, intent, context, and common sense, you might distinguish those cases on the grounds that these are African-American writers writing about racism. But that was not the standard deployed against McNeil. So, faced with the risk that the Times standard might apply to Hannah-Jones, who cannot under any circumstances be fired for anything, they changed the standard. When Hannah-Jones violated Twitter’s terms of service by releasing the private contact information of a Washington Free Beacon reporter who reached out to her for comment, the Times again defended her. As Isaac Schorr details, this really is only the tip of the iceberg of how fear of being accused of contradicting Hannah-Jones has led to her essentially dictating terms to the entire newspaper’s personnel — who can work there and who can’t, and why, ruining multiple careers in the process: