The New Yorker holds a festival every year.
It’s you standard exercise in pseudo-intellectual mental masturbation, so all the deep thinkers, people like, “John Mulaney, Judd Apatow, Jack Antonoff and Jim Carrey.” (In case you are wondering, this is me mocking the whole enterprise.)
Well, the editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, decided that it would be a good idea to invite white supremacist Steve Bannon, and the cancellations rained down like cluster bombs in Yemen:
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, will no longer appear as a headliner at this year’s New Yorker Festival, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, announced in an email to the magazine’s staff on Monday evening.
The announcement followed several scathing rebukes and high-profile dropouts after the festival’s lineup, with Mr. Bannon featured, was announced. Within 30 minutes of one another, John Mulaney, Judd Apatow, Jack Antonoff and Jim Carrey said on social media that they would be pulling out of scheduled events at the festival. Right around the time when Mr. Remnick announced the cancellation of Mr. Bannon’s participation, Patton Oswalt did the same.………
In Mr. Remnick’s email to his staff, he said that even New Yorker staff members had expressed discomfort at the decision to invite Mr. Bannon to be interviewed at the festival.
Gee, you think?
How does someone who is too stupid to cut his own meat end up editing the New Yorker anyway?
They were gormless to invite him, any fool could see what the reaction would be.
And they were gormless to dis-invite him — giving him the sort of attention he wanted from his enemies.
But worse yet, they missed the chance of giving the following introduction:
"Many of you claim to be disgusted by the next speaker.
"But I invite you to study. We looked upon 'shigellosis' to cure dysentary.
"Surely you can look upon this similar product, the result of an infection attacking the cause of liberty, and defeat it.
"Listen to the noises made, as a doctor attends the sounds the body produces from this illness.
"Learn from it, and form simple arguments to reject it.
"Truth applied liberally can wipe this away.
And now I present our subject."