I can’t be bothered reading the New York Times’ conservative columnists. I disagree with what they say and get no enlightenment from them. Assuming I am not alone in those opinions, why is it that the NYT hires them and gives them that prime real estate on its pages?

Here’s a thread which discusses that question. Click the link to see all twenty tweets in an easily-read format. Here are the first two:

1. All right, this controversy over conservative columnists in @nytopinion is bugging me. Everyone is dancing around the central point! (The same central point everyone dances around in *numerous* contemporary controversies.) So I’ma lay it out.

2. Here’s the main point: the contemporary right-wing in the US has become, in Lionel Trilling’s immortal words, a bundle of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” It’s just a tangle of resentments & bigotries, driven by the erosion of white privilege.