Thinkpiece Bot  🌹

the whole piece sucks, which is not surprising; Bret Stephens is one of the writers I can count on to have a bunch of bad takes to use to expand this bot when it starts getting stale

this half-assed attempt at satire falls completely flat because the NYT's attempt to give a soft-focus profile to every Nazi in America and op-ed space to every Trump voter means that an article calling for banning Jewish people feels perfectly plausible as something they'd print

and Bret Stephens wrote a piece called "When #MeToo Goes Too Far" just a fucking month ago and it was 100% sincere, so expecting people to get on first glance that he's doing a bit when he says to ban Jewish immigrants is arrogant as fuck

both his personal reputation and the reputation of his newspaper mean that people would have completely legitimate reason to think he actually wants to ban Jewish immigrants

basic structure for pieces in newspapers puts most of the information in the first paragraph and more detail as it goes on, so people who just want the basics can just read the beginning and still be informed

he started out with basic red-baiting and pointing out that most of the spies who gave nuclear secrets to the USSR were Jewish and gave very little reason why anyone wouldn't think "well I guess the NYT is going full Breitbart" and read something that's actually good instead

i run a thinkpiece-mocking satirical twitter bot and even i know better than to program it to say things like "Ban Jews" because Jewish people have enough fucking problems without having that pop up looking like a real headline

but also if you're known to be kind of a bigot and are publishing in a newspaper known for plastering fascist apology all over its op-ed section several times a week, you can't expect people to just assume you're being ~ironic~ when you write an article titled "Ban Jews"

and i'm constantly floored by the fact that the fucking ~newspaper of record~ manages to fail the ethical standards that i hold my joke-generating twitter robot to

that's not me being a braggart about how i am better than the new york times or anything, that's me saying that this shit is not that fucking hard and they still manage to fuck it up constantly

next time you're thinking about writing something that you only expect people to read based on shock value, ask yourself: is this the same kind of thing a 4chan nazi would write while pretending that their bigotry is ~just ironic~?