You might be tempted to believe something charitable like this if you had never heard of the New York Times or had no understanding of how language works.

But I do know what the NYT is. And I do understand how language works.

First thing everyone knows about the NYT is that they are a (THE) paper of record. They check their sources and follow up. They don’t pull quote people without asking for feedback, typically.

Therefore, when I saw this article, I knew, immediately, that the NYT reporter probably had gone to Alex for comment. Sure enough, Alex confirmed that they did reach out for comment and added that she confirmed the sentiment, adding on:

“(the online right) are gleefully heading off a cliff on a predictable trajectory and (they’re) taking a lot of people with (them), both on a personal and political level.”

If Alex was just venting on Pedro’s podcast, or wanted to be nuanced, or believed that she had worked with good people in the past and didn’t want to throw EVERYONE under the bus, then the moment when the NYT reporter DMed her and asked for confirmation was her bright line chance to set the record straight. All she needed to say was just something like:

“Yeah I was heated in that conversation, I really think the online right wing has gone off the rails recently but I also worked with some good people”

Just a slight bit of nuance and Goldberg would have been obligated to include it, or could have been corrected afterwards, showing Goldberg’s bias.

Alex could have added nuance, she could have given caveats, she could have de-escalated the situation. But she decided not to do these things and added on more derision to the “dissident right” label in a generalized and non-specific way that implicitly framed the people who were previously on her show as bad actors to the audience of the NYT.

But WHICH people are these bad actors?

Alex doesn’t say. But I know how a curious NYT reader would find out.

Just go to Alex’s YT channel, click on videos and organize them by views. Here are the names that come up:

Curtis Yarvin, Simon Webb, Steve Sailer, Morgoth’s Review, Theodore Dalrymple, Carl Benjamin, and, yes, yours truly.

These are the people who, any reader will reasonably conclude, are the “online right” that Alex now says are bringing “immiseration and war”. Anyone who doesn’t understand this implication as printed in the NYT lacks the cultural literacy to competently operate in this environment.

Furthermore, if you understand the language and the situation, just striking a passive aggressive pose like “Who me? I had no idea telling the NYT reporter to go to print with a blanket indictment of my former podcast guests would reflect negatively on those guests” represents SUCH a radical lack of ownership that it shocks the imagination. At some point the level of misunderstanding required to characterize the situation as an accident becomes to great to believe and you just have to say, “POSIWID”.

I don’t ultimately know where the disconnect with Alex is, in understanding, in ownership, or in malice. But I am done trying to figure out which one it is. This is a giant act of self-immolation and I don’t want to be associated with it, even tangentially.

I am sorry if that sounds mean.