Another Very Heimische Zalman Bernstein TGIF (2): The Bari Weiss/Bret Stephens "Club for the Cancelled" (5/19)
David Shasha
By: Emma Green
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-56022084
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/4FRto3Kgn80/m/L16QgfDxBQAJ
https://sapirjournal.org/authors/pamela-paresky/
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/9sNvRGoAK4E/m/so3wPrbFAwAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/VAJP2Ji2ZA8/m/Y5BKfSmsCAAJ
Every month, more than two hundred people from the media, academia, and other intellectual circles are invited to a private hangout in New York City, which is known as the Gathering of Thought Criminals. There are two rules. The first is that you have to be willing to break bread with people who have been socially ostracized, or, as the attendees would say, “cancelled”—whether they’ve lost a job, lost friends, or simply feel persecuted for holding unpopular opinions. Some people on the guest list are notorious: élite professors who have deviated from campus consensus or who have broken university rules, and journalists who have made a name for themselves amid public backlash (or who have weathered it quietly). Others are relative nobodies, people who for one reason or another have become exasperated with what they see as rampant censorious thinking in our culture.
The second rule of the gatherings is that Pamela has to like you. Pamela is Pamela Paresky, the gathering’s organizer, a fifty-six-year-old psychologist who lives in Chelsea. She has spent her life among the intelligentsia; she attended Andover and Barnard before going to the University of Chicago for her Ph.D., and spent years living near the tony ski town of Aspen, Colorado. In early 2019, while Paresky was visiting New York, a friend forwarded her a dinner invitation from the journalist Bari Weiss. “Dear Thought Criminals,” Weiss’s note began. Paresky found the greeting funny and decided to copy it when, during the first fall of the pandemic, she invited a few people to a dinner of her own. She began holding her gatherings on a monthly basis and eventually moved to the city. Now anywhere from a dozen to sixty people might show up at each event. (Some of the attendees I spoke with refer to themselves as Thought Criminals, embracing Paresky’s tongue-in-cheek nickname. Others find the moniker cringey and avoid using it.)
“In a place like New York, you feel surrounded by people who are so far removed from where you are,” Nick Gillespie, an editor-at-large at the libertarian magazine Reason and a regular at the gatherings, told me. “Every conversation is about how capitalism is evil or how America is the most racist, sexist, homophobic country in the world.” As a result, he said, “There’s a lot of political homelessness.” On average, the group probably leans to the right, at least when compared with the rest of the city. But a few socialists go, along with a contingent of libertarians, such as Gillespie, who come ready for debate. “And you bring drugs,” he added.
Many of the attendees aren’t interested in advertising their participation. Others, including Michael Thad Allen and Samantha Harris, co-owners of a law firm who jokingly refer to themselves as the Lawyers to the Cancelled, are more open. “We’re not at Thought Criminals soliciting business,” Harris told me, although she has sent several clients toward the group—including Joshua Katz, a former Princeton professor who wrote a controversial essay in 2020 calling an anti-racist protest group, the Black Justice League, “a small local terrorist organization.” In 2021, Katz and his wife, Solveig Gold, a former student of his who finished her undergrad at Princeton a few years ago, started commuting into the city to attend Paresky’s gatherings. In 2022, Katz was fired from Princeton after the university said that, among other things, he had not been fully honest and coöperative during an investigation into a consensual sexual relationship that he had with another student in 2006 and 2007. Paresky was texting him and his wife every day to check in on them. “I doubt we’re the only people she’s doing that for,” Gold told me. Katz has taken to calling Paresky the Mother Hen of the Cancelled.
Paresky has intentionally spent most of her life in the background. This wasn’t always her impulse. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a famous actress,” she told me. “And then, as I got a little older, I just wanted to be a successful actress. And then, as I got even older, I wanted to be a successful actress, and I also didn’t want anyone to know who I was.” Her most notable gig was as an extra in “Goodfellas”; Paresky is visible for a brief moment during the famous Copacabana night-club scene, conspiring with a group of important-looking men. “I’ve had some ambivalence about the level of public notoriety that people get when they become successful,” she continued. She worries that significant public attention might make her the target of what she described as “a moral-pollution campaign”—something she believes would make people not want to listen to her ideas. “I think that’s probably held me back some,” she told me, a little sadly.
It’s a commonly held belief on the left that concerns about cancel culture are overblown, if cancel culture even exists at all. Paresky considers it a genuine threat. In our conversations, however, her definition of “cancelled” was somewhat elusive; it encompassed people who suffered professional consequences, sure, but she also referred to instances of social-media pushback as “attempted cancellations.” However she defines it, she’s clearly preoccupied with the idea. Her writing, primarily featured in Psychology Today, focusses in part on the social dynamics of ostracization. She was the lead researcher and an editor for “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s 2018 book about campus safe spaces and trigger warnings. As part of that project, Paresky coined the term “safetyism” to refer to a culture that elevates perceived physical and emotional safety above other practical and moral needs. She worked for four years with Lukianoff at the organization he leads, the advocacy group FIRE, which is primarily known for promoting free speech on college campuses.
Some of the people on Paresky’s guest list are old friends and former colleagues. An attendee named Sarah Rose Siskind described meeting Paresky at a party—the two ended up sitting in front of a fireplace, curled up under a chinchilla blanket. “It was one of those things where you lose sight of everybody else,” Siskind recalled. “She was so knowledgeable about so many different things, and very empathetic. I just wish that I had known her when I was younger.”
In 2012, when she was a junior at Harvard, Siskind, who is white, had written an editorial in the Crimson dismissing race-based affirmative-action programs, arguing that they facilitate college admission for candidates who aren’t qualified. Afterward, she told me, her friends stopped talking to her, people walked out on dates with her, and a Jezebel writer pilloried her as “a snide, rude little baby.” Siskind’s column is part of what prompted Black students on campus to create a hashtag campaign, #itooamharvard, after the Langston Hughes poem “I, Too.” Looking back, she describes herself as having been naïve about the affirmative-action debate, and regrets jotting off a school-newspaper column about such a complex issue. “I didn’t realize quite how much everybody also had impostor syndrome,” she said. “Pushing on that nerve of belonging just caused a lot of hurt.”
Siskind is now thirty-one years old. She’s got a dream job: she’s a standup comic and runs her own science-focussed communications business, writing comedy-filled speeches and Web-site and social-media copy for clients ranging from National Geographic to Neil deGrasse Tyson. But she says that her experience at Harvard has defined the past decade of her life: “I really fucking hated myself.” It took many years of therapy, and a serious foray into therapeutic drug use, for her to arrive at a place of self-forgiveness and acceptance. (“I’ve done enough psychedelics that I could forgive Hitler,” she told me.)
For Siskind, one of the worst parts about her notoriety was the “weird bedfellows and allies” it brought. “A lot of people will be, like, ‘I read your article, and I really thought it was insightful, and the reaction you’re getting is really hard, and, you know, there should be fewer Black people at Harvard,’ ” she said. “And you’re, like, ‘Oh, my God!’ ” She described a spectrum of how people react to backlash. Some people, like her, “utterly believe their detractors”; they see themselves as totally irredeemable. Others double down, defining themselves in opposition to their critics. “There are so many people who trade in cancellation—circles where they wear it like a badge of honor,” she said. “It is good to be brave. But you shouldn’t be an edgelord.”
Siskind has been going to Paresky’s gatherings for several years—usually every other month. She’s still preoccupied with what happens to people when they mess up in a public way. She mostly likes the people she meets at the gatherings, but, she said, “It’s partly a cautionary tale. I’ve met a lot of people who are in the early stages of their processing. There’s some mentorship, and some reminders to me about how to not be a bitter person.”
The Thought Criminals gather all over New York City. They’ve sung show tunes at Marie’s Crisis Cafe, a piano bar in the West Village often frequented by gay men. They took a river cruise on the East River, sponsored by a sympathetic, unnamed nonprofit organization. Once, they ended up in an Upper West Side mansion with a group of financiers and people in the arts who also meet in private to talk about controversial topics. Occasionally, the party goes on the road: Katz and Gold recently hosted a gathering in D.C. at their newly purchased home in Georgetown. The house didn’t have any furniture yet, but the couple bought liquor and a few folding chairs; their guests ended up sitting around singing folk tunes as someone played the guitar.
Most often, the group meets at the Olive Tree Cafe, the restaurant above the Comedy Cellar, in Greenwich Village. The Olive Tree is a bit of a scene for dissidents in the city, even beyond Paresky’s group. Noam Dworman, the owner of both the Comedy Cellar and the restaurant, picks up the tab for the gatherings; he likes that his venues can be used for lively debate. The Cellar is known as a place where controversial entertainers can perform. In 2017, Louis C.K. apologized for abusing his power as a high-profile comic in order to masturbate in front of female comedians, and was subsequently dropped by Netflix, HBO, FX, and his management agency. But less than a year later he was onstage at the Cellar again. (He is now back to touring nationally and internationally.)
Around 6 P.M. on a recent Sunday, I arrived at the Olive Tree for a Thought Criminals gathering. Diners crowded into maroon leather booths, drinking beer and eating wings under dim hanging lights, listening to Queen and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Only a dozen or so people had showed up—fewer than usual, because the group had been told that I would be there reporting on it. The people I saw were mostly white; Paresky said she doesn’t really pay attention to the racial breakdown of the guest list. One of the attendees brought homemade peach habanero hot sauce for everyone, and Paresky ordered rounds of chicken tenders. She seemed to be in her element; as people introduced themselves to me, she frequently interjected, wine in hand, eyeglasses perched on her silver-brown hair. “She’s weirdly hot!” Siskind had observed to me earlier. “She’s like the Intellectual Dark Web’s most eligible bachelorette!” (Paresky does not approve of this description; although she is single, she’s adamant that the Thought Criminals gatherings are purely social and not part of the I.D.W.—an informal network of thinkers and media figures who oppose contemporary social-justice movements.)
I asked the attendees why they felt drawn to the Thought Criminals. “I kind of resent that we have to sit here and explain what this current landscape is like,” a writer named Ben Appel replied. In 2021, he dropped out of his M.F.A. program after publishing a Substack essay accusing the other students, who mostly identified as queer, of looking down on him because he is cisgender, even though he is also gay. “Every motherfucker knows what this landscape is like,” Appel said.
They all had different stories for how they had ended up on the guest list. Rikki Schlott, a twenty-two-year-old journalist who dropped out of New York University during the pandemic, had become friends with Paresky on the chat app Clubhouse; Schlott had been looking for a forum to have conversations beyond her campus, where she felt like she had to hide books by Thomas Sowell, a prominent conservative economist, under her mattress. Occasionally, Paresky recruits a new Thought Criminal by D.M.’ing them on Twitter while they’re facing backlash; that’s how she met Tyler Fischer, an actor and comedian who has found modest social-media fame by posting parody videos, including a crude series mocking Dylan Mulvaney, the social-media star who makes TikToks about her gender transition. Paresky put Fischer in touch with Dworman, who let Fischer audition for a set at the Cellar as a courtesy. Fischer performed well, and now he does about fifteen shows a week at the venue. In between sets on the evening I was there, he swung by the Thought Criminals table upstairs.
Fischer claims he had a hard time getting a talent manager because he’s a white man, and instead has sought out alternative media ecosystems. He recently acted in a movie called “Terror on the Prairie,” a Western about a pioneer family that gets attacked by outlaws, co-produced by the conservative media company the Daily Wire. One of the stars was Gina Carano, the actress and former mixed martial artist who lost her role in the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” because of her social-media posts, including one implying that being Jewish in Nazi Germany was similar to being conservative in America today.
Fischer told me that the criticism he’s received for his comedy has escalated his desire to tell edgy jokes, resulting in “this cornered-rat feeling, where I end up saying things I would have never said.” His fans at the Cellar aren’t scandalized by his provocative lines. They’re “starving,” Fischer said. Like several of the Thought Criminals I spoke with, Fischer is someone whose career seems to have thrived from the aura of cancellation, helping him define his brand among a certain audience. As one Reddit user put it, “Canceling this guy doesn’t seem to be working. He’s blowing up.”
At this particular gathering, gender was a focus of the conversation. A couple of attendees had detransitioned after identifying as transgender and pursuing gender-related medical procedures in their twenties. “I’ve become very cagey and defensive,” one of them, who asked not to be identified by name, told me. She added that, even though she has come to her current beliefs “through great personal suffering and lived experience,” she is still a target for resentment. “People are, like, ‘You are a disgusting villain to me now.’ ”
Sitting next to her was a woman named Kim Jones, whose daughter is a Yale swimmer who lost to the transgender athlete Lia Thomas in competition last year. Jones co-founded an organization called ICONS, the Independent Council on Women’s Sports, which advocates for what Jones sees as the rights of female athletes—including the principle that transgender women, whom she calls “male athletes,” should not be eligible to compete in women’s sports. Jones doesn’t consider herself cancelled; she believes that “ninety-nine per cent of people agree with almost everything I say.” Paresky jumped in: “But how many people are willing to be vocal about it?” Jones replied, “This is why I love coming to the Thought Criminals.” Elsewhere, she said, “People who are frightened to read up on something or to dig into a controversy will be, like, ‘Oh, I agree with you, but I just don’t know how to articulate it, or what if I lose my job?’ ”
By the end of the evening, a few stragglers had gathered on one side of the table, where Jones was leading a conversation about differences in sex development—an intense choice of topic for a casual late-night bar hangout. Paresky listened closely as Jones described what she saw as the edge cases for who should be able to compete in women’s sports, going into elaborate detail about congenital medical conditions that affect people’s sex chromosomes or anatomy. I couldn’t help wondering how the conversation might sound to someone who is intersex or transgender—to hear people debating about their bodies and their lives over drinks and appetizers.
When I asked Paresky about this, she said, of Jones, “she takes a very hard line, which I can understand, because it’s very principled. It’s hard to know how far to take a principle, where it impacts people.” Paresky told me about introducing Jones to a friend of hers, Corinna Cohn, who identifies as transsexual, warning Cohn in advance that Jones only uses “sex-based pronouns.” Cohn said the interaction felt “completely ordinary,” and thinks that “mature adults” in the trans community shouldn’t necessarily assume that their critics are “trying to oppress or threaten” them. (Cohn is no stranger to these kinds of encounters, as the co-host of a podcast with the artist Nina Paley, who has identified as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or TERF.)
Jones had driven an hour and a half into the city from Connecticut to come to Paresky’s gathering, and she had a long drive home ahead of her. Starting her organization, finding the Thought Criminals—nothing has made her less angry about what she sees as the unfair circumstances of daughter’s competitions. “I’m not in a place of peace at all,” she told me. “But at least I feel like I know where I stand and I know what I’m fighting for. I know what reality is.”
There’s a reason why we have a social contract. Whisper networks, social shaming, excommunication—these are all tools that can be abused, but they’re also tools that communities have used for centuries to enforce norms and protect themselves from bad actors. Once you start questioning society’s boundaries, a tricky question quickly arises: Where should the line really be?
Paresky told me that, say, Harvey Weinstein wouldn’t be welcome at her gatherings. Examples that fall short of that level of criminality are murky, though, and Paresky doesn’t seem to have established clear parameters. The rest of the group tends not to question her judgment: when someone new shows up to the Thought Criminals, everyone assumes Paresky knows their story. “Basically, she gives you the Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” Katz said. “It’s not that you don’t inquire into the bad things” that other attendees may have done, “but the assumption is that we’re not looking to magnify the worst in people, because Pamela vouches for you.”
Early in the pandemic, a writer named Stephen Elliott was living by himself in New Orleans. After interacting with Paresky on Twitter, he invited her to a Zoom dance party he was hosting. She came, and they started talking. Eventually, she added him to the guest list for the Thought Criminals meetups.
“He’s the edge case,” Paresky told me—the person who tests the limits of what kind of behavior even the most good-willed and open-minded people might be willing to tolerate. In media circles, many people would be able to tell you why: Elliott, the founder of the influential literary Web site The Rumpus, was included on the “Shitty Media Men” list that circulated among women in the industry, in 2017. On the spreadsheet, where they made anonymous accusations against men in the field, Elliott was accused of rape. He later sued the spreadsheet’s creator, Moira Donegan, for defamation, prompting condemnation from his publisher, Graywolf Press, along with friends and colleagues. Donegan agreed to settle this winter, and Elliott received a six-figure sum.
But there have been public accusations of inappropriate behavior against Elliott, too. The novelist Claire Vaye Watkins had previously written an essay recounting an incident in which she was hosting Elliott in her home and he persistently asked to sleep in her bed. Marisa Siegel, who worked for Elliott at The Rumpus, described a night when the two were travelling to a literary event and he showed up at her hotel room unexpectedly, and didn’t leave when she wanted him to. (Elliott denies being “persistent” with Watkins, saying he “took no for an answer.” He also denied any wrongdoing with Siegel; “anything that happened,” he said, “happened in her head.”)
The stream of allegations effectively ended Elliott’s literary career. He remembers the first time he showed up to a Thought Criminals gathering, at the Olive Tree. “When all your friends turn on you, you become suspicious of other people,” he said. “But then, with Pamela, it was, like, These are all people who have decided they’re not going to join the mob.” The group became a lifeline, he said. “For about a year, I barely went outside. If Pamela had a thing, I might just fly to New York.”
Elliott is unusual, even among the Thought Criminals. “One interesting thing that I’ve realized is that the people who have been cancelled for MeToo allegations are kind of like the black sheep of the whole cancel-culture debate,” Elliott told me. There’s a clear reason why: harboring an unpopular opinion is fundamentally different from allegedly committing assault. If the former is just a thought crime, the other is an actual crime. Since he began his lawsuit, Elliott has received endless messages from other people who have been accused of sexual misconduct, who are often desperate to convince him that they’re innocent.
Paresky and Elliott aren’t naturally compatible. She’s a dispositional centrist, whereas Elliott describes his politics as having been “extremely far left,” until recently. She’s straitlaced, whereas he made a literary career off of describing his drug addiction and penchant for submissive sexual relationships. (This was part of his argument against the rape accusation—he says he doesn’t have penetrative sex with women.) But, despite their differences, the two of them get along. “He has such a tragic life story,” she said—an allegedly abusive father, the drug problems. “Not that it would excuse bad behavior, if he engaged in it,” she went on. “But, when you know someone as a human being, and you know their suffering, it’s hard for me not to want to take care of that person.” When I asked Paresky about the wrongdoing that Elliott had been accused of, she admitted that she never systematically went through the allegations, but “it’s clear that he’s been unfairly maligned,” she told me. “I don’t have any evidence that Stephen has done anything bad. And I don’t have any contact with anybody who claims that he did.”
A few days after the Olive Tree evening, Paresky texted me. “No one who comes to our gatherings is an actual criminal,” she said. But don’t “even criminals deserve to be loved by someone?”
From The New Yorker, May 17, 2023