327 Comments
Jan 13, 2022·edited Jan 13, 2022

"It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like." Wow, that's it in a nutshell.

Expand full comment

This is important precisely because the Anglosphere has always been the well spring of freedom and liberal society and is now backsliding into an Orwellian nightmare. It is important to all because it can end in one of three ways 1) the same Orwellian nightmare to which it is spiraling 2) a violent spasm and orgy of rage by the deplorables who will rise up to sweep the self-proclaimed elites and their acolytes from power and confiscate their ill-gotten gains or 3) a return to sanity and cleansing of the woke madness. Right now I prefer option 3 but inch toward option 2 with each new offense by lunatic left.

Expand full comment

Common Sense does a great job exposing new voices who have freed themselves from old media. However at some point these voices need to band together to create a true competitor to NYT, WaPo, etc. My view is there are too many individual voices on substack who should be working together.

Expand full comment

My resignation letter to my government agency will sound similar to this one.

A beautifully articulate explanation of the times we are currently living in. The best of luck Tara, I have subscribed to your substack and look forward to your work.

Expand full comment

There was a bumper sticker in the late 60s that said, “You’re not paranoid. They really are out to get you!” My friends and I laughed. We are not laughing anymore. I absolutely agree with Tara’s observation that this phenomena began on university campuses and has spread from there. We see weak national leadership, indoctrination rather than education, the rise of anti- semitism, concentrated power and wealth in the hands of a few, deteriorating honest journalism, a lack of questioning what is going on among most people, and an overvalued stock market. It’s beginning to look like the 1920s and 1930s all over again and it’s coming from both political extremes. Tara and Bari. You are two strong fighters for freedom of speech and honest journalism. Brava to you both.

Expand full comment

I'll keep my eye out for articles and I will look for your book.

Best of luck to you.

I am so grateful for substack.

I refuse to buy any of the major papers here in the US even when the Wapo and NYT are offering me deals for a $1 a month. Useless rags. I do not have cable because I find the news on CNN, MSNBC, FOX and the major networks to be no better than cheap propaganda.

YET....I pay over $200 a year for substack subscriptions for only 4 authors because they are worth reading.

Expand full comment
Jan 13, 2022·edited Jan 13, 2022

Tara, congratulations on waking up, but I think it's a little disingenuous to blame this on radicalism that emerged from ivy league schools.

This tyranny we're all experiencing started with progressives, specifically progressive journalists and influencers.

Basically, when anyone questioned the progressive worldview, or pushed back against the "diversity" crammed down our throats, we were labeled bigots. That bullying was very effective, and the snowball that followed was the inevitable end result.

Expand full comment

I am no longer surprised when lefties wipe the fog from their eyes and 'suddenly' realize that they didn't know what were the repercussions of their befuddled world-view. Painting the dystopias of every Marxist state as mis-applied Marxism, they plow on into Marx lite, never having read Marx or Lenin, at least not critically. A world view that excludes God Is a world view that proceeds without light. It attempts to describe what it will not see.

And, the answer is, yes, I have read Marx, and found his ranting preposterous.

Expand full comment
founding

“Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.””

——————————————————-

Brainstorm? Really?

This reminds me of a road trip to Calgary when my buddy in the back, who definitely did not have vodka mixed in the Tropicana he was drinking, sudden said

“What the f***???”

That is when we realized we were driving near the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Fort Macleod, AB called

‘Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump’

I feel like they should have canceled that one before they got to ‘brainstorm’, no?

“The buffalo jump was used for 5,500 years by the indigenous peoples of the plains to kill bison by driving them off the 11 metre (36 foot) high cliff.”

Obviously, it’s indigenous so it really cannot be offensive because of diversity and stuff, even though it was fairly shocking to a car full of frat guys who then spent the next two hours coming up with fake names for Canadian towns we drove through like ‘Blunt-Force-To-Groin Tractorsville’.

😂😂😂🦬🦬💀💀

Expand full comment

I wish Tara well, but the Substack big hitters already cover this ground pretty thoroughly.

I suggest a narrow focus on calling out particular Canadian insanity, which is almost invisible to Americans, so thoroughly is it censored in American MSM--perhaps that is already planned. Canadian Wokeism has a particularly and nauseatingly sanctimonious stench--a bunch of tight-assed white people lecturing America about its many failings...

Expand full comment

"The story of Tara Henley is the story of countless liberals. Until recently, they were the ones pushing everyone else to be more tolerant, more understanding, more open-minded, more compassionate."

WHAT?? When, exactly? When was the "story of countless liberals" one of "pushing everyone else to be more tolerant, more understanding, more open-minded, more compassionate"?

Please provide examples. Show your work.

Tolerant of Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin? Tolerant of JK Rowling and Martina Navratilova? Tolerant of PA Governor Casey (no, I'm talking about the pro-life Casey, the elder Casey)? Tolerant of the Colorado caterer? Tolerant of Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson and Condoleezza Rice?

My God, the list is endless. I'm just getting started.

Cancel culture ideology is NOT a recent phenomenon; it's been the modus operandi of the Left everywhere, and of the Democrat Party in America, for YEARS.

PUH-leeze do NOT insult our intelligence or our memories with such claptrap as "Liberals have always been the compassionate and tolerant and open-minded and understanding ones". Good grief.

Expand full comment

Books are wonderful. Mark Twain said, “The man who doesn’t read has no advantage over the man who can’t read”

As a believer my supposition is that we are made to worship, something. This new ideology is a very strict, very severe, religion. Puritans would blush at its draconian edicts. I’ll pass on it and stay with Christianity, a much more merciful, and grace oriented system

Expand full comment

Good for Ms. Henley. My observation, as a news consumer outside the newsroom, is that it took the insiders who have become shocked by the shift to “wokeness” at CBC, NYT, PBS, NPR, WaPo, McClatchy, etc., so long to catch on to what was happening to their profession. If this shift wasn’t evident before the 2016 election, it should’ve become obvious then, as the media - led by the Times - continued to push the farcical, subversive narrative of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. The same shift has been underway for years with the media peddling irrational panic about climate change.

I’m grateful that reporters such as Bari Weiss, Nellie Bowles, and Tara Henley have seen the light, and are reflecting it back onto their once-respected profession. They join others who awoke before, such as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Tracey. Better late than never.

Expand full comment

This line up top speaks volumes: "a parody of the student press." Newsrooms increasingly occupied by those under 30, fresh out of Columbia J-school where they learned about media from a prof with pronouns.

Expand full comment

Everything she said could be said of our own NPR, which is why I turned it off several years ago.

Expand full comment

I want to feel sympathy for Ms. Henley but this is not a phenomenon that sprung Athena-like in the past 18 months.

This has been brewing at least as long as the mid 90s when I was chastised for using the term, “ladies,” and holding the elevator or other door for people who menstruate. I was borish and crude for such patriarchal vulgarities.

It only got worse from there.

I say I want to feel sympathy because I do. But part of me thinks that Ms. Henley is reaping what she and those like her have sewn for the last 30 years.

This is the world you demanded. Now you complain that you got what you asked for.

Were you really that obscenely blind?

Do us all a favor and work hard to fix what so many of us struggled against for decades… not 18 stupid months.

Expand full comment