Tl;dr:

• The New York Magazine cover story on Ta-Nehisi Coates' new anti-Israel book is an argument in favor of a kind of supercharged racial wokeness, which is aggressively and explicitly opposed to knowledge or nuance.

• The cover story is a message to other elite legacy newspapers and magazines warning them against an anti-woke "vibe shift". Decision-makers should expect wokeness not to go away, but to re-intensify after November, whoever wins the White House.

• The cover story is also a message to the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party that at least some members of the Establishment have their back. The anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party is not going away.

New York Magazine Wants You to Know That Knowing Things Is Evil

If you follow us on X (and if you don't you should), you may have noticed that we have a regular practice of quote-xeeting a dumb headline from a legacy media outlet and adding the phrase: "Smart people no longer trust legacy media."

This is the big insight that led to the creation of Sphere Media. Right-wing ideologues, libertarians, a subset of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and middle and working-class people in the middle of the country have always known not to trust mainstream media. But, largely in the wake of Covid and BLM, the educated class of decisionmakers who are those media's main audience have also learned that, very often, their work product contains political activism disguised as facts, or even, just straightforward BS. The goal of Sphere Media is to provide intelligent media for decisionmakers who realize the current prestige media ecosystem is broken.

Which is why we felt we had to broaden the aperture from our regular coverage of policy to write about a truly extraordinary—if that is the right word—article. It is a cover story in the prestigious New York Magazine.

Ostensibly the article is about a new book of essays by the famous best-selling writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose focus is on the Israeli-Palestine conflict.

Why are we writing about this on a news website for policy professionals?

Because the real purpose of the article is to try to resurrect, or breathe new life into wokeness, a phenomenon that seems to have at least somewhat abated recently. This is something that policymakers should keep on their radar. A lot of people think there has been a "vibe shift" with regard to wokeness.

This notion of a "vibe shift" has been on everyone's lips for close to a year. When ostensibly moderate figures like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman and numerous Silicon Valley figures have come out full force against wokeness, many thought that "the vibe is shifting", that the woke narrative will finally be forgotten.

Well, New York Magazine, at any rate, wants to keep the vibes very much where they were in the Summer of 2020.

Are you tired of BLM? That's fine, we have BLM 2.0; this time the evil whites are the Israelis, and the good blacks are the Palestinians.

And who better to bring back wokeness 2.0 than the man who had such a key role in its first version, the man himself, Ta-Nehisi Coates?

It's forgotten now that Coates played a key role at The Atlantic, during the later part of the Obama years, in promoting the narrative that Obama's election was not the sign that America had arrived at a post-racial promised land, but to the contrary, evidence that white supremacy was more deeply entrenched than ever, and that a politics of unambiguous racial grievance was more necessary than ever. His blockbuster hit cover piece "The Case for Reparations" made the argument that white supremacy was just as bad, or almost, in Obama's America than under Jim Crow.

And now Coates is back, with a new book, making an equally simplistic and absolutist argument about Israel and its occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

But what occupies us here is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or even Coates himself, but the truly extraordinary article that greets his return to the intellectual scene.

The article is an obscenely obsequious fluff job of Coates, but in the process of fluffing him, the piece puts forwards very clear arguments about what political debates should be.

A common criticism of wokeness is that it's a cartoon view of the world, with blameless POC victims on the one hand and evil white victimizers on the others.

The article says, yes, that is what wokeness is, but it is good.

The article is very explicit about this.

The article is also very explicit about a necessary corollary to this view, which is that knowledge and nuance are bad—evil, even.

If there are Good Guys and Bad Guys, full stop, and the Good Guys are—at this very moment!—oppressing the Bad Guys, then every attempt to inject factual context into the discussion is not just wrong, but an act of moral treachery.

Over and over, the article praises Coates specifically for eschewing complexity, refusing to know too much about a conflict, and simplifying it down to a Good-versus-Evil cartoon:

“It’s kind of hard to remember, but even as late as 2014, people were talking about the Civil War as this complicated subject,” Jackson said. “Ta-Nehisi was going to plantations and hanging out at Monticello and looking at all the primary documents and reading a thousand books, and it became clear that the idea of a ‘complicated’ narrative was ridiculous.” The Civil War was, Coates concluded, solely about the South’s desire to perpetuate slavery, and the subsequent attempts over the next century and a half to hide that simple fact betrayed, he believed, a bigger lie

The virtue of Coates' writings about the Civil War, the article explains, is that they boiled down complex history into a simple cartoon narrative of Good versus Evil. It goes on to say Coates' subsequent writings about race in America, and eventually about Israel-Palestine, follow the same template: no, actually, there's nothing complicated, it's just Good Guys versus Bad Guys.

The article not only admits this but praises it:

But, of course, Coates did parachute in, and one could argue that this provides the book’s greatest asset — its sense of revelation, its portrait of the new in all its shameful splendor. The point he is trying to make is that anybody can see the moral injustice of the occupation. “What is the experience that justifies total rule over a group of people since 1967?” he asked me. “My mother knows that’s wrong.”

Injecting any sort of nuance or factual context to the Israeli-Palestine situation is wrong. The fact that Coates "did parachute in" and then produced a cartoon is good.

Perhaps the occupation of the Palestinian Territories is justified by decades of terrorism and legitimate security concerns? Reasonable people may agree or disagree. But it's not even that the answer is no. It's that even asking questions like this is wrong.

Again, the article is very clear and explicit about this:

The book is strongest when its aperture is narrow. There is no mention of the fact that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation. There is no discussion of the intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza

Coates deliberately excludes anything that could complicate his narrative, the article informs us, and this is good.

It's really quite extraordinary. The explicit thesis of this long article, a cover article in a magazine that is ostensibly aimed at the intellectual class in New York, is that knowing things is bad.

Knowing things is bad. And that includes knowing how to fix the very problems you're denouncing. And again, the article is explicit about this:

His job now, as it has always been, is to speak truth to power, not figure out what one might actually do with it. […] Pragmatism, at any rate, has never been his concern. As Stossel told me about working on “The Case for Reparations,” “I was trying to push him in the direction of ‘Well, how would this actually work in practice?’ And he, shrewdly, was like, ‘Well, I’m not going to get into that.’”

Shrewd indeed.

One feels like one is watching an SNL skit circa Fall of 2002 about conversations in the Oval Office: "Um, Mr President, isn't Iraq a very complicated place with all these different ethnic and religious groups that don't really like each other?" (Southern accent) "Shut up, Saddam lover." This is how the Iraq War was sold, right? Saddam Bad, therefore any criticism of the Iraq War was evil, and questions about implementation were beside the point. Another reason we started PolicySphere is because we very much believe that questions about implementation are never, ever beside the point.

Again, the point here is not about Coates who, of course, is perfectly entitled to have any opinion he wants and to write anything he wants about any topic.

The point here is that an ostensibly major intellectual magazine is doubling down on Summer-of-2020 rhetoric. The article includes a very long denunciation of other prestige media outlets insufficiently anti-Israel, with a specific focus on The Atlantic, a disquisition so verbose and tiresome its purpose can only be to send a message to other prestige media, as opposed to inform or entertain the reader.

Powerful editors at New York Magazine want their colleagues to know: the vibe has not shifted. The vibe will not shift. We are doubling down on wokeness. POC are oppressed, white people (or whoever is designated "white") are evil oppressors, and if you dare write something else, if you dare pretend that the world might be just a little bit more complicated, we will come after you.

They also want the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party to know that, at least, some influential members of the Establishment have their back. Expect the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party to be emboldened after November, whoever wins the White House.

Perhaps this message is a cry of anguish, a sign of desperation, evidence that the vibe shift really is ongoing.

Or perhaps it's a sign that the vibe is not shifting at all. A sign that establishment liberals may put on a moderate face until November, but after that, you should get ready for full-on wokeness 2.0. Smart decision-makers beware.