Substack: the last refuge of the ghosted op-ed writer
My Freddie deBoer-like, op-ed petty humiliation
Video summary
And there’s a (yes) bias inherent to a publication being taken over by people with the most sterling meritocrat resumes, an implicit ideology. Such people tend to be ruthless in the pursuit of their personal glory but also born rule-followers, grade-grubbers always ready to appeal to or defer to authority as the moment demands, especially when advancement is on the line.
Freddie deBoer, Freddie deBoer, 18/2/25
I’m interested in anything Substack superstar Freddie deBoer has to say. I especially enjoyed one of his recent columns complaining about his cavalier treatment at the hands of the New York Times (NYT).
In the days following Trump’s re-election, deBoer pitched an op-ed to NYT about potential Democrat candidates for the 2028 election. (You can read the entire account here.) To summarise, the pitch was received enthusiastically. At that point, deBoer wrote the article and then made some requested edits a week later. I’ll let Freddie take it from here:
Since then I’ve heard nothing. Enough time has passed to let me know that it’s a definite no. I can’t try to sell it somewhere else, at this point; the piece is stale, the post-election moment has passed. And no one ever bothered to say “Thanks, but no thanks,” which is all I would have asked for.
Regularly being treated with casual contempt is part of the deal for writers and, I’m guessing, many other contractors/freelancers in hyper-competitive industries.
In this instance, it went beyond mere unthinking rudeness in that, after commissioning the piece, the relevant NYT employee(s) felt no need to even invest a few seconds in emailing DeBoer to alert him the situation had changed. By the time he realised he’d been ghosted, it was too late to place his op-ed elsewhere.
After conceding the NYT commissioning editors are probably “just hanging on, trying to maintain their grasp on one the last good jobs in media”, deBoer concludes by letting rip about the NYT brass:
For a long time, I thought of the leadership at The New York Times as fundamentally negligent but never malicious; I imagined they trundled along casually disrespecting the people who they have not deigned to bless with their condescending form of approval, unaware that they were doing so. After the last half-decade or so, I’ve come to think that they know exactly what they’re doing, and that they enjoy it.
After reading deBoer’s article, my main thought was, ‘I’m so glad that I long ago stopped pitching op-ed ideas and no longer have to endure those kinds of petty humiliations’.
Inevitably, it wasn’t long until I was pitching an op-ed idea and enduring that kind of petty humiliation.
A little background: A while back, a social media connection announced they’d landed a commissioning editor role and were happy to receive pitches. I didn’t think too much about this call-out until I alighted on this article on Monday morning. It’s paywalled, but the title tells you all you need to know: “The war against woke is really a war against empathy”.
The author, Brisbane Times journalist Cameron Atfield, avers there’s nothing noteworthy about recent political developments and that it’s business as usual as far as he’s concerned.
In Atfield’s telling, compassionate progressives are heroically attempting to bring into being utopia while embittered, old and presumably Caucasian right-wingers – “Conservative politicians, their kindred spirits in the media, and that uncle on Facebook you always try to avoid at Christmas”) are selfishly delaying the arrival of a New Jerusalem.
Atfield reassures his readers that wokeness is just about being empathetic, especially to demographics that have had a rough trot, so what could possibly be the problem with that?
In Atfield’s telling, there has been no diversity hiring. Indeed, it’s “ludicrous” to label Kamala the DEI vice president despite Biden publicly declaring only black women would be considered for the role.
The piece is littered with similarly debatable propositions and triumphantly concludes:
“If [woke’s] accepted new definition is embracing, seeking and fighting for empathy and fairness – across race, gender, sexuality and culture – count me in… And if you’re offended by that, you’re not “anti-woke”, you’re just a jerk.”
One last ghosting, for the road
As always, I felt obliged to offer the jerks’ perspective.
As it happened, I had a few hours free. I banged out a riposte, which I sent to the email address posted by my social media connection.
Then… nothing.
No acknowledgement my email had arrived.
No response to my submission.
Just… nothing.
No doubt the person or people who saw my submission are “just hanging on, trying to maintain their grasp on one the last good jobs in media”.
But good manners cost very little. Having done it plenty of times myself, I know it only takes 20 seconds to send a polite rejection email that says, “This isn’t quite the right fit for us, but it’s an interesting read and good luck placing it elsewhere.”
But it seems freelance writers can’t even expect even the most minor of minor courtesies nowadays.
At least we’ve now got Substack.
If you’re interested, dear reader, you can find my unpublished – indeed, entirely unacknowledged – op-ed submission below.
Is there any possibility that the progressives are the bad guys?
A meme has been doing the rounds showing Principal Skinner asking, “Am I out of touch?” before triumphantly answering his own question, “No, it’s the children who are wrong!”
Like many progressives reeling from a string of defeats, most recently the re-election of the Bad Orange Man, Cameron Atfield has asked, “Am I out of touch?” before self-confidently proclaiming, “No, it’s the voters who are wrong!”
In Atfield’s telling, morally pure “empathetic” voters are still supporting all the right causes (multiculturalism, trans, the environment, etc). Inexplicably, the unenlightened and unempathetic majority of voters now care about all the wrong issues (social cohesion, broken property markets, a faltering economy, geopolitical challenges, etc).
To be fair, many of the more self-aware progressives are currently engaging in some long-overdue reflection and attempting to understand how they’ve managed to antagonise so many demographics. Not least the putatively marginalised minorities they’ve long claimed a monopoly on.
However, plenty more progressives are engaging in what the young people call cope. That is, coming up with ego-salving excuses rather than acknowledging reality.
Here's the reality.
Unempathetic, decidedly non-woke governments are already in power in India, Italy, Hungary and, as you may have heard, the US. They may soon be governing, or part of a governing coalition, in Austria, Australia, Canada, France and Germany. Referenda initiated by empathetic progressives – Australia’s Voice, Ireland’s attempt to tweak the constitutional definition of the family, Ecuador’s attempt to green its constitution – have all gone down in a screaming heap in recent years.
On top of that grim litany of political defeats, there’s now the less quantifiable but probably even more consequential ‘vibe shift’. This is essentially a long-brewing backlash against the enthusiastically enforced enthusiasms of the Progressive Left. Think DEI, to take just one of many examples.
Given recent developments, you might assume, like the Nazi officer who asks, “Hans, are we the baddies?” in the Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch, progressives might now be asking, “Is it possible our empathy-driven initiatives have been mistaken or counterproductive?”
Such recalibrations are always unpleasant but not unusual on the Left or Right of politics.
The Right had to reluctantly accept the welfare state in the wake of the Great Depression. More recently, the Left had to begrudgingly accommodate itself to free markets following the failures of Communism.
The Anglosphere appears to be at the start of a societal reconfiguration that will prove as profound as the embrace of Keynesian social democracy almost a century ago or the triumph of neoliberalism half a century ago. Geopolitical developments and technological advances mean the holiday from history Australia and similar nations have enjoyed is drawing to a close.
At times like these, societies desperately need both a healthy Left and healthy Right duking it out. As many from across the political spectrum have observed, the Populist Right is in rude good health. The Progressive Left, not so much.
Those on the Left now face the choice of continuing to show overwhelming empathy to a handful of suitably deserving demographics and very little to the majority of the population. Or finding some sympathy in their capaciously compassionate hearts for the unglamorous normies.
By unglamorous normies, I’m referring to all those twentysomethings who despair of ever getting ahead, no matter how many credentials they acquire and how hard they work. All those thirtysomethings who can’t get into the property market or even start a family. All those older, poorer voters who feel a deep sense of cultural loss as mass migration renders their neighbourhoods unrecognisable. Not so long ago, the Left had some empathy left over for these kinds of people. Nowadays, it defaults to scolding them for being racist, sexist and transphobic.
Of course, progressives are free to persist in their “It’s the voters that are out of touch!” folly indefinitely. They can go on writing and reading articles dismissing any criticism of progressive policies as “some conservative – or regressive – voice intent on maintaining their privileged status in society”.
But that would be a terrible missed opportunity, both for progressives and their societies.
Oddly, the world has become a much more inequitable place at precisely the same time progressives have been making such a song and dance about equity and inclusion. As those on both the Left and Right often note, wealth and income inequality has skyrocketed in recent decades. It’s also worth noting that those interminable COVID lockdowns that progressives were so keen on further enriched large corporations and Silicon Valley billionaires.
It's at least conceivable that Anglosphere nations are sleepwalking into a technofeudalist future. If there was ever a historical moment for progressives to drop the performative virtue signalling around identity politics cause célèbres, re-embrace old-school economic leftism, and go into bat for the little guy (and girl), this is it.