NEW YORK, NY March 8 (DPI) – The once-respected New York Times has purged three high-profile staffers for running afoul of woke dogma in the last year, and one of the few left to observe on woke dogma – Bret Stephens – could well get the door as well.

Stephens last week wrote an essay about a 2018 incident at Smith College in which a student claimed racist intent when approached by campus security, setting off an explosion of online hysteria, as well as an irresponsible reaction from the college itself. All this, even after an investigation concluded nothing occurred to justify the student’s claims of racism.

In the last year The Times fired columnist Bari Weiss for tangling with her woke peers in a chatroom, let go of editorial editor James Bennet for allowing the publication of an editorial by a conservative US senator, and then running out veteran science writer Donald G. McNeil Jr. for using the n-word once during a discussion on race relations with high school students on a 2019 trip to Peru.

Stephens’s column generated nearly 1,500 comments, the most popular of which largely agreed with his comments that the woke left is simply manipulating the rest of an American left and intimidating any debate:

…The most interesting aspect of the drama at Smith has less to do with the details and more to do with the location. To wit, why is it that racial tensions keep boiling over at some of the nation’s most emphatically progressive-minded institutions, whether it’s at Smith, Yale, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr or the Dalton School? Why does the embrace of social justice pedagogies seem to have gone hand in hand with deteriorating race relations on campus?
One answer is that if many students are enjoying a diet of courses on critical race theory, and employees are trained on the fine points of microaggressions, they might take to heart what they are taught and notice what they have been trained to see.
Another answer is that if those who report being offended gain sympathy, attention and even celebrity, more accusations may be reported.
The deeper answer, I suspect, is that the Woke left has the liberal left’s number. It’s called guilt.
The telling line in Powell’s story comes from a letter the Black Student Association wrote to McCartney, Smith’s (white) president, saying its members “do not feel heard or understood. We feel betrayed and tokenized.” Tokenized, most certainly: Behind every affirmative action program at every liberal institution is a yearning for moral redemption — admission to its present ranks is granted in exchange for absolution for past sins and acceptance of its ideological assumptions.
The Woke left doesn’t want to be a party to this bargain. Absolution is off the table. And the liberal ideals themselves are up for renegotiation.

NYT readers, most of whom are self-described liberals, generated these most popular comments:

Spot on. There are a lot of lifelong Lefties like me who see that there is something very wrong going on among our Blue Team. Let me add one thing to the list Stephens printed in his second-to-last paragraph. We’ve also replaced the presumption of innocence with the presumption of guilt when accusations go public. All the liberal ideas we cherished are being replaced by illiberal ideas. Free speech is now hate speech if we don’t like it, and critical thinking and the free-flow of ideas are now micro-aggressions and violations of safe spaces. Cancel culture is real and it’s a weapon of the Left. At some point people gotta start seeing this and growing tired of the constant purges of people from our society.

The spectacle of excited youngsters pointing their fingers at and ruining the lives of poorer, older people around them, while those in power stand cowed and frozen with fear, is a New England tradition that goes back to at least the 1690s.

Wait, so a dorm is closed because a children’s camp is using it, and a young woman who knows this decides to eat in the lounge anyway, and the campus employees tasked with reporting such behavior do their jobs… and the transgressing student is the heroic victim? And the employees get hate mail and suffer health problems? I seriously don’t see how any liberal can be ok with this. Let’s not pretend this is ok. It isn’t.

Stephens is not saying that racism doesn’t exist, he’s saying that Woke culture overreach does. Many people seem unable to keep the two concepts in their head simultaneously. And I say this as a democratic socialist who rarely agrees with Bret.