Hiring Policies and Procedures

Last post I told you the next post would be about the hiring practices at The New York Times.  So here we go.

In the course of my checked life and misspent youth, I have held many jobs.  From stock boy at a Sears store which no longer exists, to a software developer during the pioneering days of the commercial internet for an insurance company which no longer exists, to a senior executive at a City of Chicago department which no longer exists.  

Hey, wait a tic.  Am I sensing some sort of...pattern here?

Nah.  Probably nothing.  

Anyway, lots of jobs doing lots of things.  

Now take a deep breath because here comes a long paragraph.  

But in all of my many and varied professional experiences, which included both getting hired and hiring others, and getting sacked and sacking others, I have never, in my life, been at a workplace, humble or grand, at which a someone had been hired with great fanfare on the basis of their claim to have a very specific and unique kind of expertise ... then were paid a lot of money for that very specific and unique kind of expertise ... then they publicly confess that they have no such expertise and, in fact, had never had any idea what they were talking about ... and were nonetheless retained by their employers in that very prestigious position.   

Resume padding?  Sure.  Seen it.

Sketchy references? Yes, I have been a friend's "Vandelay Industries".

But those are, on the whole, minor infractions.  Instead, imagine you're running a high-end restaurant and you hire a woman who says she did four years at The French Laundry as chef pâtissier.  Then you put her in the kitchen and tell her to make her magic, and an hour later you find her at her station, starting at a block of chocolate and a blob of dough.  The floor is littered with broken eggs, and she is  muttering, "I... I don't know what this is."

Or imagine the contractor you hired to build you a deck has shown up with a truck load of mulch, popcorn and a can opener, and he confides that he has, in fact, never joined two pieces of wood together in his life.  

Which brings me around to  the subject of The New York Times' most recent wingnut affirmative action hire:  David French.  I guess their pages weren't already larded with enough horrible Elite Conservatives Thought Pieces from David Brooks and Bret "Bug" Stephens and Stephens' ex-wife Pauline Paul and Ross Douthat, which is why Arthur Gregg Sulzberger drove the NYT labor van down to the National Review parking lot and David August French was the first one who jumped it.

French came laden with a deeply problematic past-- 

Just what we didn’t need: Another asshole @nytopinion columnist saying conservatives *discounting the Black experience* (!!) are no more extreme than lefty excess in trying to create inclusive environments on college campuses. Then denying he said so. https://t.co/XVGAz62Zxf pic.twitter.com/wip3f3fIWL

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) February 5, 2023

-- which he quickly "rethought" while in the NYT labor van en route to the paper's Op-Ed page.  So, one year ago, in January of 2023, there he was, up on the Times' Opinions masthead, announced with all the attendant fanfare.  

The NYT explained they brought him on as "[an] expert on the law, faith and politics" and praised him for his "factual and intellectual clarity" and "moral seriousness".  But mysteriously, the words "Republican" or "Conservative" are nowhere to be found in his official Times' C.V.

So, as you read the rest of this, keep in mind that French's factual clarity and political expertise are two of the specific skills which landed him at the Times.  

From David French, 1/25/2024:

Never Trumpers Never Had a Chance

By David French

And immediately I have a problem.  Literally any Liberal who writes about politics with "factual clarity" could have (and did) tell you this back in 2016.  So how is this breaking news for the Times' newest Conservative Thought Leader?

Ah well.  Moving on.

The Republican presidential primary is all but over.

We already know that.  Move on.

It’s déjà vu all over again. Since the moment Trump took the G.O.P. primary lead in 2015, he’s never relinquished his hold on the party.

We already know that.  Move on.

And since Trump’s hostile takeover and unexpected 2016 victory...

Hey dummy, it's not a "hostile takeover" if the party throws him the keys and begs him to drive.  Move on.

French then notes the many Democratic victories since the GOP gave itself over, body and soul, to the Umber Grifter.  

Then...

This is in part because while Democrats have been able to mobilize an effective anti-Trump opposition, conservative Never Trumpers — Republicans and former Republicans like me who have desperately tried to break Trump’s grip on the party — mostly failed.

Because as we have been telling you since two days after Trump came down the fucking escalator,  Trump is the Republican party.  He speaks to them in their mother tongue, because he is a manifestation of the rage and racism and resentment that Conservative media knocking-shops like [checks notes] Mr. French's former employers has spend decades feeding to the GOP base.

And then comes the kicker (with emphasis added):

It’s now clear to me that we never had a chance. And the reason is equally clear: We did not truly understand our own party.

No.  You didn't.  And I can only begin to imagine the enormous psychological resources that men like David French had to employ to hold themselves in a such a state of willful delusion about things that were happening right in front of them all along.  Such a state of willful delusion that they made their living, decade after decade, propagandizing tirelessly on behalf of a party and movement that existed only in their imaginations.   Lying to themselves so aggressively every day.  Having to shut their  eyes tighter and tighter to blot out the madness that was blossoming right there in their own garden so they could go on writing about the awful, amoral and dangerous Barack Obama and the Democrats.  

French then stops to light a candle at the shrine of St. Reagan, and swaddle himself in the fading, righteous warmth of the Good Old Days of the "disgraceful and unlawful" Bill Clinton.

Then...

No one would claim that every conservative had character ... but I refused to believe that the G.O.P. would broadly excuse, rationalize or defend a Bill Clinton in our midst.

Yes, in French's telling, Trump is "a Bill Clinton in our midst."   Fuck you.

Then...

I wasn’t just wrong; I was completely, embarrassingly wrong. The winds were shifting. I could sense it, but I didn’t fully understand it. Not until Trump made it all plain.

We warned you. 

Reviewing old essays by conservatives opposed to Trump, the most persistent complaint was simple: The man wasn’t a “real” conservative. At the same time, others among us remembered the Christian conservative outcry against Clinton’s infidelity, and believed that an argument about character would pull believers away from Trump’s grasp.

But no. 

When we told you, over and over again, that you were building an army of reprogrammable meatbags you would never be able to control, this is what we were talking about.

If animosity toward Democrats was the primary Republican value, even more than ideology or character, you can see how Never Trumpers were destined to fail. 

When you were warned over and over that you were building an Doomsday Machine with no "off" switch, and that it would destroy everything, this is what we were talking about:

The central problem is that when animosity toward Democrats is the primary value, any critique of Trump has to end the instant it’s perceived to help or signal agreement with Democrats.

 And finally:

I don’t regret my arguments against Trump. I’d make them again, and I will continue making them. I do ask myself how I missed the sheer extent of Republican anger. And I’m deeply, deeply grieved by the thought that I did anything in my life before Trump to contribute to that unrighteous rage.

I don't ask myself how people like French -- recently-former Republicans who have since colonized the "Liberal" media -- missed every single thing of importance that was happening right out in the open the whole time.  They were too busy making a living inventing scary stories about Liberals and feminists and people of color and Hillary and campus speech codes and LGBTQ+ people and The Kenyan Usurper and feeding those stories to the meatheads to notice or care about the long-term catastrophe they were courting.

What I do ask myself every day is why men like David French have been awarded the lucrative and prestigious jobs they have?  Because men like French didn't just passively miss everything: they spent their adult lives energetically working for Team Evil to build the Doomsday Machine that now threatens to destroy everything we value.  

It's great that French finally figured out what we Liberals figured out decades ago.  And that he feels really bad about not noticing it before now.

But what I ask myself every day is how such a person, who confesses to have been staggeringly wrong all along about the one fucking subject he was supposed to know better than almost anyone else got hired by The New York Times to write about that subject on the basis of his "factual and intellectual clarity" and "moral seriousness"?

And then I remember.  

There is a Club...

Burn The Lifeboats