You might think “psychotic” is a strong word with which to characterize a typically mealy-mouthed essay from a resolutely boring writer, but how else to describe statements like the ones below, from Ross Douthat in his final column for the New York Times, which are as untethered from reality as anything you might hear from someone conversing with an invisible friend?
We’ve become so inured to this kind of nuttery from rightwing pundits in recent years that we don’t fully appreciate the corrosive effect it’s had on our — well, on our “civic and educational” discourse. Not to mention the many lives it has needlessly and vividly destroyed.
Writing, in 2026, that something called “peak woke” (by which he presumably means the emergence of corporate and educational DEI initiatives) was “McCarthyite” in nature, or that he has witnessed recent “civic and educational collapse” in the state of Connecticut (where Douthat lives) is different from writing, “I am a fluffy pink unicorn” in almost no meaningful way.
I wonder if Ross Douthat could remind us of when exactly people jumped out of windows in the era of “Peak Woke.” When did thousand upon thousands of people have their lives destroyed, their careers ended, their children pulled out of schools, their reputations shattered? Exactly who was imprisoned or executed for the crime of being insufficiently “woke”?
Words have meaning. More importantly they have weight, especially when printed in the paper of record.
Hundreds of millions of our fellow citizens believe things that are manifestly untrue because of the repetition of weighted words.
“Vaccines cause autism.”
“The election was stolen.”
“They’re eating the cats and the dogs.”
Those lies have caused and continue to cause real, lasting, profound harm to real people. Living, breathing human beings, suffering for no other reason than the fact that important people lied about them on Fox News or InfoWars or in The New York Times.
People will go to the polls in a couple of months believing that they have lived through a second McCarthy Era or “civic collapse” because people like Ross Douthat have have told them so, in black and white, right there in Times New Roman in the Paper of Record.
They will make decisions based on these entirely made up facts, decisions that will cause even more needless suffering and death, in the same way that a person suffering from the belief that aliens are trying to kidnap him swings a knife at an innocent passerby.
In a sane world there would be some sort of legal standard, similar to the one that undergirds defamation laws, that places a limit on the publication of these types of poisonous fantasies.
The crux of defamation lies in disseminating information that tarnishes the character or standing of the subject, leading to harm or injury. Shouldn’t we do something about lies that do similar harm to governments or political parties, or even to intangible targets like civic discourse, history and education?
If we can write laws prohibiting the publication of lies that damage the reputations of individuals, can’t we — shouldn’t we — do something (via the law or not, perhaps via revisited institutional or professional codes of conduct) to restrict the publication of paranoid fever dreams that do even more profound damage to the social fabric itself?
