Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are your typical NPR-loving liberals. The husband-and-wife biology professors used to mock Tucker Carlson, founder of The Daily Caller and host of his own eponymous Fox News show.
Yet Carlson was the only media person willing to share Weinstein’s concerns about Evergreen State College as the school shamed white people (like him) into leaving campus for a day and continues to consider a restructuring plan that could subsume all academic considerations to diversity promotion.
The Chronicle of Higher Education goes behind the scenes into Weinstein and Heying’s failed quest to find someone outside the conservative news ecosystem who gave a damn about their story of Evergreen’s slow-motion demise at the altar of unhinged progressivism:
[They] had tried to sound the alarm bells. Mr. Weinstein had made his case in emails to faculty members and administrators that were later printed by the student newspaper. The couple had even made a trip to the governor’s office to warn two staff members that the public college was risking a “tragedy.” Nothing had worked. …
Mr. Weinstein had few allies on the campus. Some people were calling him racist for raising what he thought were reasonable concerns about how Evergreen State was dealing with issues of race and diversity. With their own colleagues seeming unreceptive, Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Heying were surprised to find themselves seriously considering Mr. Carlson’s offer [to appear on his show].
Sure enough, Carlson’s coverage opened the floodgates to mainstream media coverage, with The Wall Street Journal giving Weinstein an op-ed, New York Times liberal columnist Frank Bruni calling for an end to campus “inquisitions” like Evergreen’s and news coverage by The Washington Post:
Their decision had paid off. The national spotlight had fallen on Evergreen State, and Mr. Weinstein’s case could no longer be ignored.
And they don’t regret it:
In the weeks since Mr. Weinstein appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Ms. Heying, who has been monitoring her husband’s email, said he had received “hundreds and hundreds” of warm messages from people whom he and his wife might never have considered allies.
“Before May 26 I had the same knee-jerk reaction to Fox News that all of my liberal colleagues do,” said Ms. Heying. “I don’t feel that way anymore.”
One of Weinstein’s faculty colleagues has the gall to question him for seeking out attention from “people who don’t wish us well and don’t want to see us succeed in any event.”
Perhaps he did it because you ignored and marginalized his reasonable, mainstream concerns for months?
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