I am pretty sure I predicted this, though I’m not going to trawl back through my posts to see for sure. Pamela Paul is a heterodox op-ed writer at the New York Times, tackling topics that you wouldn’t expect to see of a regular columnist save established “house conservatives” like Ross Douthat. But Paul wasn’t a designated “conservative writer.” She was a liber and was, for nine years, the editor of the NYT Book Review. I presume she was recruited to the op-ed section for both her writing ability and her depth of analysis. And she chose to take on controversial topics—apparently with a slant not to the paper’s liking.
Of course she got pushback, though what came from inside the paper we don’t know … [A] piece from The Hub [argued] that Paul had no right to write about “scholasticide” or to point out that Gaza’s universities were assaulted by the IDF because they sat atop Hamas tunnels, had plenty of weapons inside, and because students were even taught to manufacture weapons. How dare she point that out? …
Is it any surprise that an elite white writer, with no protection of minority status, was given the pink slip? Although the NYT gives an unconvincing denial below, I don’t believe it for a minute. Paul wrote with passion, panache, and, above all, sensibility … And the NYT can’t have its “progressive” leftism criticized, not by a white liberal writer. So they parted ways. I predicted they’d deep-six her, but hoped against hope they wouldn’t. They did.
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Of course the NYT won’t clarify this further, but … [n]ow she’s gone. What anodyne “progressive” writer will they replace her with[?]
