As Sailer notes today: “New York Times Hires Extremely Diverse New Columnist”.
Her name is… drumroll… Michelle Goldberg. And, amazingly, she’s a Lefty.
As a welcoming, the NYT posts a brief interview between her and Gail Collins:
Gail: Well, you’ve picked quite a moment. What’s your take on Donald Trump? I don’t mean “Are you happy he’s president?” How do you see your role as a columnist — articulating a national cry of pain? Re-evaluating him on the basis of what happens each week?
The only unacceptable answer is “Crawling under the bed and assuming a fetal position.” It won’t fill 850 words — trust me, I know.
Michelle: Remember a few weeks before the election, when Hillary Clinton said, “I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse?” I think she was basically right. Part of the job of a columnist, as I see it, is to bear witness to a nearly inconceivable civic disaster, and part of it is to grope toward an understanding of how it happened and how to move forward.
Gail: It’s certainly a different gig than commenting on presidencies past. With Obama it was one heck of a lot of policy. With George W. Bush you had this perfectly normal guy whose tenure got devoured by a war. I’m not usually accused of rooting for Donald Trump but I am truly praying he doesn’t go down that route. Prospects, however, looked a little dim this week.
Michelle: Yeah, I think we’re learning that the Constitution may, in fact, be a suicide pact. It’s a source of constant astonishment to me that the country has handed over the means to destroy civilization on this planet to an unhinged lunatic who lost the popular vote and was installed with the aid of a hostile foreign power. It’s such an epic institutional failure that it calls everything we thought we knew about this country’s stability into question.
Gail: You’ve written for a lot of publications, online and off. Slate, The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, Salon, The Nation…
And on and on it goes.