NYT’s Bret Stephens Wants Apologies for Woke 1.0. He Can Start With His Own Paper.

    New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is calling for accountability. His recent piece is called “Yes, Woke 1.0 Was Crazy. Now Where’s the Accountability?” Stephens wants the berserkers who destroyed lives during the wokeness mania of the last ten years to admit their mistakes:

Wokeness, as it commonly came to be known at the start of this decade, wasn’t just an Orwellian linguistic fad or a tedious set of corporate training sessions in cultural sensitivity or wacky policy ideas about addressing racial and socioeconomic inequities. As it was experienced by those on the wrong end of it, it was a system of enforced ideological conformity, policed by social bullying and institutional coercion (or cravenness), which damaged and sometimes even ended reputations, careers and at least one man’s life.

Restitution, if only in the form of honest contrition and perhaps even a public apology, is in order.

    Stephens even calls out his own paper: “Restitution, yes, for James Bennet, a former editor of The Times’s Opinion section, who was forced from his job after the publication of a controversial guest essay by Tom Cotton, a Republican senator.”

    If Stephens wants to really clean house, he can include himself and some other colleagues in his contrition. The absolute apex of the Woke 1.0 and the #MeToo nightmare was the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh nightmare. At the time, Stephens wrote this:

I have absolutely no idea what, if anything, happened between Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford at a party in Maryland in the early 1980s.

Unless you were at the party, I believe that you don’t, either.

I believe that statements on the controversy that begin, “I believe Blasey,” or “I believe Kavanaugh” — because they jibe with personal experience or align with a partisan motive — are empirically worthless and intellectually dishonest. I believe the defect could be corrected by saying, “I want to believe” Blasey or Kavanaugh.

I believe that when Kirsten Gillibrand says, “I believe Dr. Blasey Ford because she’s telling the truth,” the senator from New York is either deceiving herself or deceiving you.

I believe that the actions of which Blasey accuses Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge are grave. I believe locking a young woman in a room, groping her aggressively against her will, and turning the music loud so her cries can’t be heard, isn’t harmless teenage horseplay.

    As the Mark Judge Stephens names, I don’t think it’s harmless teenage horseplay either, which is what I told Fox News. I also know that the Blasey Ford operation was an oppo hit, and that if Brett Stephens is truly concerned about the evil of Woke 1.0 and the trauma it caused, including male suicide, he will walk through the offices of the New York Times and demand apologies from certain colleges. In fact, it may include the entire paper.

    Stephens can also hit my tip jar. I too have suffered from suicidal ideation and joblessness. Since 2018. I also wouldn’t mind working in a nice store on a beach somewhere if you have any leads.

    In his piece on Woke 1.0, Stephens recalls Richard Bilkszto, a 24-year veteran of Toronto public schools who took his own life as a result of Wokeness gone mad. “In his moment of need, no one defended Richard,” a friend told the Free Press.

    I understand that in the last several years I have written a lot about my experience in 2018. My response always consists of two parts. The first is that, as David Enrich shows (see below), it’s worth the effort to make the demos responsible for what happened to us come clean. The second is that the left still evokes McCarthyism. Kavanaugh was McCarthyism 2.0 during Woke 1.0. We should not tire of calling them out. It’s about more than me. This kind of evil should never be allowed to happen again. If we aren’t vigilant, it will.

    One person Stephens may know has already sorta come clean. In February 2025, David Enrich, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, expressed regret for his role in the smearing of Brett Kavanaugh. As was first reported in Chronicles and then picked up by Fox News, Enrich was responding to a question I had sent him about his newspaper’s 2018 Kavanaugh nomination. 

    Enrich responded this way: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage, and I would be happy to talk to you about it at some point. For now, I will just say that I have learned some lessons and would probably do certain things differently next time.”

    I asked Enrich to elaborate: What were the lessons learned? What would he do differently? “This is a subject for a longer conversation that I’m not going to have over the holidays,” he wrote. “Sorry.” Then he added this: “I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go thru that.”

    Since then, Enrich has not responded to multiple requests I’ve made for further comment. 

    Hey Bret, walk across the hall to your colleague and ask him why.    

    Here’s the last text Enrich sent me after I had published multiple pieces calling him out:

I can’t/wont argue with most of what you wrote. The one thing that really irks me, though, is your insinuation that my “regrets” are related to my forthcoming book. The truth is that I have been grappling with this and talking with colleagues about it for years now. The only reason I even brought this up with you is that you reached out to me, requested a review copy of the book, and then asked me about nyt’s kavanaugh coverage. I answered your question as candidly as I could (and probably much more candidly than the nyt folks would have wanted me to). But you are leaving your readers with the impression that I am trying to increase my book sales with that statement. Which is just not true (and frankly doesn’t make much sense in the first place).

    Enrich got halfway to a true confession, which is more than I can say for the Washington Post, Hollywood — or Washingtonian magazine. “What’s Next for Mark Judge? Experts Say: Not Much.” That was the headline Washingtonian posted on October 5, 2018. While I’m putting on an Anti-Communist Film Festival, Brittany Shepard, the author of “What’s Next for Mark Judge?”, is unemployed. It’s a start.

Editor’s Note: We now have the room to run outside commentary by some of our favorite and most provocative thinkers on the Right. That only happens because of the support of our readers, who ensure that we have the resources to keep providing an independent platform and independent voices in a sea of Protection Racket Media domination.

Help us maintain that fight! Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.